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Living in a small town that houses one of the largest salt mines in the world, I thought of it as my duty to tell you about salt. We spread it on our roads and our sidewalks. It melts ice, leaves your shoes and pant-bottoms soiled and dried-out, and we rely on it to keep us from slipping and falling as we step foot through our door on an icy and snowy morning. But shaken in excess on chips and heaped into our favorite recipes - are we really doing our bodies a favor?

We find salt in almost anything we eat - we use it to heighten flavors, and commercial food chains abuse it in their preserved and processed foods. With all this sodium, it is human nature to crave such salty things, as this is one of the most sensitive taste sensations we have on our tongues - along with sweet, sour, and bitter. But you can ask anybody - ingesting such large quantities of salt just isn't good for our bodies.

What are the consequences of a salt-heavy lifestyle? Well, in the long term you risk things like high blood pressure, Edema, ulcers, asthma, Osteoporosis, and many other health-related problems. In addition to the long term effects, excess salt can leave you feeling hyper, dehydrated, or it can give you a bad case of heartburn.

Just ask my partner, he's lived a life of fast and processed foods, and his doctor has suggested him to lower his intake of such salty foods. I know that when I see him popping his daily blood pressure pills that he is well aware of his "salt addiction", as well. Noted many times, he just finds his chips and snacks to be so appealing, "almost like a cigarette addiction", he says, as he takes a drag off his smoke.

Asking my manager, Sandy, on the matter, "I just can't get through a day without popping over to the convenience store and buying myself a bag of those salted peanuts!". When hearing her say this, I am reminded of the time she accidentally bought herself a bag of the unsalted peanuts, had a few, and the bag sat on the bar for the remainder of the day - even the customers didn't want to touch them. "They aren't salted!", they would say. "There just isn't any flavor!"

As a professional cook, I cannot tell you how many times I have had a recipe ridiculed in the culinary school classroom. As my Chef instructor takes a bite, I am bitten by those two little words - something that not me or any of my classmates can ever get down just right. "More salt!" he says, "It needs more salt!". I often wonder if excessive salt has burned out the tastebuds on his

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