Salt, Salt Everywhere

Well like most people my age, I’ve been diagnosed with high blood pressure. This actually came about twelve years ago and they gave me a pill and everything was fine. I was back down to 120/70 like I was as a kid. Then a few weeks ago something happened. It popped back up again. I couldn’t figure it out until I visited my doctor recently.

While there are many things that can cause your blood pressure to go up one of the main things they tell you about when you do have high blood pressure is to limit your salt intake. Since we don’t have a lot of money at the moment, we’ve been having to purchase more packaged foods which suddenly after looking more closely I’ve notice have high amounts of sodium in them. While we all know that salt is bad we’ve been keeping a look at it and I’m getting a little over two grams a day of salt. What I haven’t been getting is enough potassium. We in California seem to think that we are the top of the top for healthy eating, but we sometimes run into problems with that. If you look at some of the people who live in the rural parts of California where fast food is what they call breakfast, lunch and dinner because they’re too lazy to cook, you’re gonna see quite a few obese people out there.

Studies have shown that while our caveman ancestors didn’t have access to salt and being hunter/gatherers lived on diets high in fruits and vegetables with a little meat that this was a good way to get potassium which flushes sodium from your system. I realized I hadn’t been eating as many potassium rich foods as I used to and that is probably where the problem is.

I started with the number one great source of potassium, a banana. I have one every day with breakfast and get 448mg of potassium with that. Potatoes are an even better source so we have potatoes a couple of times a week. A good sized potato will give you 1.6gm’s of potassium. Still not enough since the average human needs around 3.7gms a day of potassium. This lead me to a bag of potato chips to have a look.

First off a serving [depending on brand] has about 115mg’s of sodium, but around 480mg’s of potassium. My doctor always told me to stay away from them because of all the saturated fat and cholesterol, but oddly enough a serving only has .5gm saturated fat and 0 cholesterol, so if you’re going for a junk food, potato chips are that bad. We’ll be going for the  low salt chips now for snacking. I seriously think that many doctor’s should take a look at the labels of foods before they speak out against them. Yes, potato chips are probably not very healthy, but when you compare a handful of potato chips to a granola bar you might be surprised. Granola bars or more accurately, power bars are really just a souped up candy bar with oats. Some have over 7 gm’s of saturated fat and loads of high fructose corn syrup not to mention electrolytes which oddly enough favor sodium over potassium or magnesium. Because of this, a small power bar can be upwards of 200 calories, while a serving of chips will hit you with about 150 while giving you 3.75 times as much potassium to help flush the salt from your system which aggravates high blood pressure. While I haven’t had time to try them there is a brand of unsalted chips that has only 5mg per serving giving you 88 times the potassium to salt ratio.

So how am I faring with the higher in potassium diet? Middle of last week my blood pressure was at 158/99, after adding in potatoes and bananas and english peas [great source of protein and good amount of potassium] I’m down to 130/83. Not perfect, but much better and I don’t have to take any supplements, this is all from natural foods.

Now, don’t expect me to start giving up meat and becoming a total vegan, but I am going to start eating better and maybe once a month I’ll splurge on a burger, hopefully I can get some sliced avocado on it [which has three times the potassium of a banana and tons of more nutrients as well as high in the healthy mono-unsaturated fats that build your good cholesterol and fight your bad cholesterol]. I don’t want to be like the Who and hope I die before I get old. I’m already kind of pushing towards the old they were talking about way back when, but I want to look fabulous when I’m in my 90’s and not like a shaking, withered up prune.

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Darla’s Burgers Is Gone

Friday was sad for me. I was watching a TV show and my phone buzzed at me. Not unusual with all the crap I’ve got installed on my phone. Then I looked down. One of my friends on Twitter just sent the message NOOOOO! Darla’s is out of business.

WHAT! Darla’s while not being an old San Francisco tradition kind of a place has been around long enough to have developed a loyal following. I think she opened up 9 1/2 years ago and my wife and I used to go there a lot back in the day. The burger’s and fries where always juicy and the service was quick. Darla herself could usually be found being the waitress and it was always kind of funny to me watch this Asian woman speaking Spanish to her cooks.

I have a fond memory of one day after eating a burger that she would always make for me [a bacon cheese burger with sliced avocado] I walked up to her and politely whispered into her ear, That was the best motherf*cking burger I’ve ever had. To which she turned around and said, Why thank you! in a rather sugary sweet tone.

Darla Kubala was a smart cookie. She even had an iPhone app called Diner Dash that was based upon her. If you got to see her work you’d see how the game idea came about. She would take all the orders, deliver the food and be the bus boy all the while checking on the customer’s needs. Somedays she had her off days, but the majority of the time she was always on it. The thing that you always remembered was how she ended your meal. You got your check with a brownie for every one at your table. I liked that because after a lunch or dinner there you really didn’t have enough room for desert, but the little brownie was intense and did the job.

Darla was also good with faces. It had been over a year since we had gone in there and she came over to our table and the first words out of her mouth were, you cut your hair?!?!? Then she sat down and talked with my wife about whether or not she like me with short hair or not. She even thanked me once for always bringing my friends in. She had a lot more than just burgers and I tried a few other things she offered, but I always came back to the burgers. Those were her signature along with the fries topped with season-all. When she let that one slip to me I can’t eat fries without them anymore. Now I’m sad that I don’t have Darla’s Burgers to take my friends to for the best motherf*cking burger anymore. I tried to give them a call today to make sure and yep, the number is disconnected. I suppose it was the economy that put her out, but she always seemed to have customers in there. Hopefully she’ll resurface again. I miss her already.

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