It will be a complete salt evening at Arte. It will seem natural to everyone that this is also about water.
Salt is inorganic, indispensable for the metabolism and therefore not only for human life. No wonder salt used to be a source of wealth. It was mined and promoted in an energy-intensive way, and it was widely traded. All over Europe there is historical evidence of it, salt roads and place names and cities with crumbling buildings and sinking areas under which salt deposits were once mined. In France there is even the royal saltworks in Arc-et-Senans, an impressive, architecturally striking World Heritage Site from the 18th century. Would also be worth a nice Arte show. However, Hallstatt in the Austrian Salzkammergut (!), Namesake for an epoch during the Iron Age, is also worthy of a prime-time documentary. So then the salt.
But salt is unhealthy, isn’t it? Increases blood pressure and all. Anyway, had bad press for many years. Humans eat too much salt; it is contained in industrially produced convenience foods, in snacks and salted nuts. So first of all with nutritionists, doctors, cooks and a health advice document on the topic.
Documentary “Salt – The Less, the Better?” On Arte: When does it get unhealthy?
We learn important things about the absolutely fundamental importance of salt as a spice, but we also learn that actually nobody can say exactly how much salt is good for the human organism and where the unhealthy or even deadly zone begins.
This is because different human organisms react differently to salt. Some need more, others take less. In some countries a high average daily consumption is registered, in others a much lower one, with no impact on general health conditions.
Why it is like that? Ultimately, nutritional science, and with it medical research, has to admit that no one really knows. A lot of research has been done, but little that is certain has been found. People store sodium somewhere in the body when needed – but where? And why? On the basis of which physiological signals? Why does a lot of salt in food make you hungry rather than thirsty?
“Salt – the less the better?”, Arte, July 24th, 9:05 pm . On the net: Arte +7
“Salt – the less the better?” (Arte): Considerable entertainment value, little practical income
The culinary side of salt is also dealt with: different crystal forms and their consequences, different colors and different crackling of the salt and so on. Cooks talk, people eat, animations babble by, analyze and illustrate various processes.
At the end of the day, the entertainment value of the documentation was considerable, but the practical income was manageable. Salt is indispensable, one could summarize, our body can deal with it very independently within certain limits. After all, we somehow descend from creatures that arose in the sea, and that’s salty. In the long run, however, we shouldn’t put too much or too little salt on our body.
But what would be too little and where the excess begins is still being researched.
Then Arte will talk about water and phosphates. Indispensable, absolutely vital. (Hans-Jürgen Linke)
