An Answer to the Salt Problem

New research has suggested that people who load their food up with salt might not have weak taste buds. In fact, the exact opposite could be true -- that people who love salt might be so called "supertasters," people who experience tastes more intensely than other people do. That's right, people -- my taste buds are strong. Too strong.

Like many of you, I load up my food with heaping piles of salt. Of course, every time someone sees me turn a salt shaker upside down and go after it like I'm using a Shake Weight, they give me the obligatory, "You know you shouldn't be eating that much salt, right?"

Yes, I know that too much salt greatly increases the risk of many health problems, high blood pressure to name a big one. But the problem here is that there's really no immediate harm that's gonna come to me from eating too much salt -- it'll be when I'm 50 years old and on all sorts of blood pressure medications to make up for the first several decades of my life.

As I've mentioned before, when I was younger, I was fat. After a while, I decided I didn't want to be fat anymore, not because of any health problems I was having, but because I looked like a tub. I stopped eating cookies by the handful and I started exercising, all because I wanted to look better.

The problem with salt is that there are no real immediate and visible consequences of over-consuming it. If you eat too much fatty food, then you'll get fat. If you eat too much salty food, your internal organs might scream at you, but on the outside, nothing will really change. If the government is serious about cutting Americans' salt consumption, then it needs to do more than just educate us about its dangers. I'm educated about what will happen to me -- I just don't give a shit.

No, what the government needs to do is put something in salt that will have some sort of immediate negative effect on our bodies. What if eating too much salt gave you hairy eyelids? Or caused you to grow fingers on the back of your legs? I think if either of these were a consequence of eating too much salt, people would be much more reluctant to load up their food with massive amounts of it.

Scientists, you've got your mission. It's time to save America, one hairy eyelid at a time.