Posted without comment, because I really can't think of what to say about this video.

I'm really quite fond of this book, as it has a lot of interesting recipes for very fresh produce that aren't too difficult to make. One of them is a vegetarian variant on cold sesame noodles, turning them bright green by using a bag of baby spinach in the sauce.

But as with most recipes for sesame noodles, the recipe calls for soy sauce. The full Cook's Illustrated recipe for Cold Sesame Noodles with Chicken (probably requires subscription) is incredibly yummy, but it uses 5 tablespoons of soy sauce in the dressing. The former winner of the Cook's soy sauce taste test, which is what I used to use, is the Eden Select Shoyu sauce, and it's also yummy.

And has 1100mg of sodium per tablespoon. For the casual reader who is not obsessed with me (and God bless you for that), the heart failure means I'm supposed to ingest no more than 2000mg of sodium per day, to avoid retaining fluids that make my heart work too hard. One recipe of the Cook's version has, by the time you add chicken and a slight amount of sodium in the noodles, about 6000mg of sodium. Even 1/3 of it is a full day's sodium allotment.

I've tried a couple of homemade substitutions for soy sauce, but they're not very tasty, so I've resolved to use lower-sodium soy sauce. Cook's tasting says that the low-sodium ones actually work well in applications like this where you can taste the soy cold, but that the lack of salt affects the balance of cooked dishes. The sauce for these noodles is not cooked, so I can use the only low-sodium soy sauce available around here: Kikkoman Soy Sauce with Less Sodium, at "just" 575mg of sodium per tablespoon.

The book above is not a Cook's book, but author Jack Bishop is one of the founding editors of the current Cook's era (he's the one who does the taste testing with Chris Kimball on America's Test Kitchen), and it has a lot of the same sensibilities. The recipe I wanted is quick and simple and full of nutrition, but it also called for three tablespoons of soy sauce—1725mg, or nearly a full day's allotment. I hemmed and hawed about going for this for a couple of days in case I was hungry and ate it all, as sometimes happens, but I finally convinced myself that it was no more than a standard Taco Bell meal for those few times I go and eat fast food. It's a lot, but on some days I get busy and don't eat much more, so it tends to work out OK.

So I made the recipe, and it was very good, and I ate just about all of it. And then I came to enter it into my food software to track the sodium, finding that I hadn't made it since last year so I didn't have it already entered. And then I hit the problem.

"Fresh asian noodles" are usually not available here often, so per Bishop's advice, I buy them when I see them and keep them in the freezer, where they work just as well as if they were from the fridge. I'd done a few reduced-sodium recipes with them, and I was expecting them to come in at about 100mg for a pound of noodles. That's about what dried spaghetti is.

As it turns out, Melissa's Fresh Asian Noodles, which I'd been using before, are 35mg of sodium for a two-ounce serving, so a full pound is 280mg of sodium. That's more than I remembered, but still well within boundaries because I chickened out on the soy sauce, literally—I dropped it to two tablespoons and added a tablespoon of low-sodium chicken stock I had in the fridge instead. So my mental calculation was that the whole recipe, including natural (no-salt) peanut butter, was somewhere around 1300mg of sodium.

But I didn't use Melissa's Fresh Asian Noodles. I grabbed the slightly thicker, more readily available Nasoyu Fresh Chinese-Style Noodles that were in the front of the freezer. They come in in 9 oz packages, so recipes for "one pound" of noodles use two of those packages. I was just sure I'd used them since last September, so I didn't pay much attention except to getting them separated in the boiling water so they'd cook right. (If you don't stir them constantly when using them out of the freezer, they stay in a big block and the noodles in the center don't cook right.)

Upon entering the nutritional data, I found that the Nasoyu noodles have 400mg of sodium per serving, with 3.5 servings per package, and two packages per recipe.

Yup—I had been worried about the 575mg of sodium in a tablespoon of soy sauce when the noodles themselves, instead of having 280mg of sodium, had 2800mg of sodium—140% of my day's allotment, before you even add the soy sauce or anything else.

The reduced amount of reduced-sodium soy sauce added another 1150mg, and everything else in the recipe added another 274mg, for a grand total of 4224mg of sodium in one meal - 211% of my daily allotment.

Damn, I hate it when I do that. Every now and then you eat out, or you eat with friends or family and even though you try, something has more sodium than you think it does, but I don't think I've missed by this much in the 9.5 months I've been tracking this crap. Now I have to be really careful about what I eat and how much liquid I drink for the following 36 hours to make sure I don't overdo anything.

The salt industry is still on the attack against CSPI and others who regularly try to point out how much salt we eat above the recommended daily maximum (2400mg for healthy adults under 50, 1500mg for adults over 50) and how bad it is for us, and it's mostly working. We have a taste receptor for salt, and both restaurants and cookbooks throw the stuff into food like there's no tomorrow. 2400mg of sodium is what you find in one level teaspoon of table salt, and about half the recipes I've ever seen add at least that much salt to one dish, even to those using ingredients like bread crumbs, peanut butter, cheese, or stock that already has a fair amount of salt in it.

The people who keep throwing more salt into everything pooh-pooh this as the workings of the "food police" and say the salt in their food isn't enough to hurt anyone, but what did we see here?

1. Nasoya says "one serving" of noodles is two and a half ounces. No recipe for asian noodles I've ever seen uses less than a pound of noodles, nor does it feed more than six people (this recipe and the Cook's one both say "4-6 servings," but 1/4 of a recipe is about right for a main course if you have side dishes). The recipes say a pound of noodles serves at most 6 people. By the nutrition information, the noodle companies say it normally serves seven or eight. Ha.

2. Salt is not a "free" ingredient—it has health consequences not only for people like me but for others with danger of heart disease or high blood pressure. When you add salt and salt-filled ingredients one after another, everything winds up with a day's worth of sodium in every serving, even if you make it yourself.

3. Differences between brands are both extreme and unpredictable. I thought I had pre-flighted the Nasoyu noodles and wound up eating 2800mg of sodium in them instead of the 280mg I was expecting, a tenfold increase that makes a real difference in my health for the next few days. I've found that sour cream has the same problems. The "Daisy" brand of sour cream (and it makes little difference among full-fat, reduced-fat, or fat-free) has about 15mg of sodium per tablespoon. The Wal-Mart house brand, which sells for about the same price, has 280mg of sodium per tablespoon.

   That's nearly twenty times as much sodium for a condiment that basically tastes the same in either version. I can have 2-3 tablespoons of sour cream on baked potatoes if I use Daisy brand. If it's the Wal-Mart brand, 2-3 tablespoons of sour cream is half of my day's allotment. I can't eat sour cream at restaurants because I have no idea which kind they're using. Many ingredients are the same across brands, like oils or vegetables or spices. Some, like sour cream, noodles, vinegar, salad dressing, and breads can have 2000% variances between brands for the same amount of the "same" food.

4. You not only have to read labels, you have to keep reading them, because America's food producers are absolutely in love with salt and want to use more of it all the time. I found last year that I could snack on Quaker's Chewy Chocolate Chip granola bars, for they had only 60mg of sodium per bar. (The "peanut butter" ones were anywhere from 3X to 4X higher because most peanut butter is fairly heavily salted.) I then found that the "25% less sugar" variety dropped that to 50mg of sodium while reducing the sugar as well. A win-win!

   Until last week, when I ran out and bought some more. I checked the label, somewhat reflexively, and found the sodium figure had gone up to 70mg per bar on both the regular and "less sugar" varieties. The package was not marked "new improved taste," or "now with more salt!" or anything like that. Quaker just quietly changed the formula to add 40% more sodium without telling anyone. I can still eat and snack on them, but before, four of them would cost me 200mg of sodium—less than the glass of milk I'd have with them. Now four bars set me back 280mg, about as much as the milk. (Yes, that's right—a regular glass of milk and 3.2oz of "reduced sugar" granola amounts to nearly 600mg of sodium, as much as an entire Healthy Choice frozen dinner, and about 1/3 of my daily allowance. Welcome to your world.)

I should be OK - I'm monitoring my liquid intake and drinking more tea, which acts as a diuretic and helps me shed liquid the sodium would normally make me want to retain, but this sucks and I don't know why you shouldn't have to put up with me ranting about it if I have to put up with living with it. That's what you get for reading blogs, you slacker, you.