You already worry about the calories in fast food. Now the New York City Department of Health and Mental Hygiene is giving us something else to agonize over -- the salt content of those calorie-laden fast-food meals.
The department sent interviewers to 300 restaurants throughout the city's five boroughs and asked lunchtime patrons to show them their receipts. They got 6,580 receipts for meals that included at least one entree.
How salty were those meals? The average lunch contained 1,750 mg of sodium, and 20 percent topped the 2,300 mg (about a teaspoon) that the federal government recommends for an entire day, the researchers reported in the Archives of Internal Medicine.
The American Heart Association says a better limit is 1,500 mg per day.
The saltiest meals were bought at Kentucky Fried Chicken and Popeye's. Fifty-five percent of the chicken-chain lunches exceeded 2,300 mg of salt. The average chicken lunch had 66 more calories than the average burger-chain lunch (999 vs. 933) and contained 900 mg of additional salt.
LOS ANGELES TIMES
Not too young to need a trail guide Canadian writer Hilary Smith has written a book about bipolar disorder targeted at teens or twenty-somethings who are experiencing mental illness for the first time. Smith, 24, wrote "Welcome to the Jungle" (Conari Press, $14.95) because it's the sort of book she said she needed after receiving a diagnosis of bipolar disorder in her junior year of college.
The book doesn't have much in the way of scientific content or statistics -- in fact, she leaves them out on purpose "because the whole point of this book is to make you feel less like a human scorecard and more like a human."
