......Sodi-yum

I am an addict. For years I've avoided facing my problem, but I can no longer deny my dependence. I used to try to convince myself that I have some sort of taste bud disorder which makes everything taste bland, but I need to come out and admit my enslavement to salt. I put salt on everything. Love it. That practical joke where you loosen the top on the salt shaker and a ton of salt comes pouring out all over someone's meal? Wouldn't work on me. It would just save me a few extra shakes of the wrist.

I never really thought I was overdoing it. Everybody uses salt, right? There's a salt shaker on every dinner table in America, right? Everybody sucks the salt off pretzels and spits them out... right?

My husband has always given me a hard time about my salt intake. He likes to tease me about it - jokes that he's going to buy me a saltlick for Christmas, asks me if I'd prefer my engagement ring to have a giant salt rock rather than a diamond. "Could've saved a lot of money!" He makes this joke at least once a month.

One evening he hid the salt shaker and watched me rifle furiously through cupboards and drawers, tearing apart the kitchen as my dinner got cold. I didn't suspect him, as it's not uncommon for me to lose it myself (I often carry it around the house, double-fisting it with a granola bar, my delicious alkaline security blanket).

He only gave it back to me once he realized that I actually wasn't going to give up and eat my dinner without it. The look on his face as I snatched it back from him with my sweaty little hand was my first clue that I need to cut back.

"That stuff's gonna kill you," he said sincerely, as he buttered his corn, potatoes and both sides of his bread, "You'll shrivel up like a slug." He and his brothers spent a great deal of their childhood killing various bugs and, apparently, mollusks.

The next day, as I cheerfully salted my salad, the double-take from the waiter got me thinking. I hadn't even tasted it yet. How did I know it needed salt? I tried to remember the last time I ate a meal and didn't add salt to it. I couldn't.

I slept terribly that night. I dreamt of Lot's wife, her glorious crystallized skin sparkling in the sun, screaming, "You'll shrivel up like a slug! A SLUG!" You'd think in such a nightmare that she'd be chasing me, but it was the other way around. I woke up salivating just before I could take a huge bite of her arm.

The next day I decided to find out just how dangerous salt is. I thought it would make me feel better to read something like, "Excessive consumption of salt could maybe cause a teensy bit of hypertension when you're, like, 100 years old." I should have known better. A paranoid person like me knows: if you really want to freak yourself out, Google it. Whatever it is, there is an article somewhere on the web just waiting to "inform" you of the catastrophic results of whatever you just did/ate/touched.

So as it turns out, health professionals recommend no more than 4 grams of salt per day. I was encouraged at first, because 4 grams sounds like a lot to someone who doesn't remember a single measurement conversion from elementary school. Another search put me in my place. One tablespoon of salt has 18.25 grams of salt.

Holy. Shit.

Sure, a whole tablespoon of salt (over 100 shakes, per my experiment) is a lot, more than even I use in a day. But still, it became very clear exactly how far over the recommended intake I am. To make myself feel better, I quickly Googled the lethal dose - about 1 gram of salt per kilogram of body weight, consumed within a "short period of time." Once again, that sounded like a lot to a metric-stupid American. More Googling. One kilogram is a little over 2 lbs. So if each tablespoon of table salt contains 18.25 grams of salt.....

I panicked....was Wikipedia seriously telling me that eating 3 or 4 tablespoons of salt in a short period of time could KILL an average sized person?!? My tiny mother, who weighs less than 90 pounds, could be killed by 2 1/2 tablespoons of salt?!?

What the FUCK?!!!????!

I mean, yeah, that's a lot of salt. But at the same time...that's NOT a lot of salt!! It almost seems like you could accidentally eat that much salt! Say my tiny mother was making a pie, which called for half a cup of salt (yeah, I know, that's a ridiculous amount of salt and no pie in the world calls for 1/2 cup of salt, not even a salt pie.....mmmm.....salt pie....). That's 8 tablespoons, thus a lethal dose for even a 300 pound person. Say she keeps her salt in a high cupboard, so she gets up on her step ladder to get it. Say she measures it while standing on one foot on the step ladder. Say she slips and the measuring cup goes flying into the air and she opens her mouth to scream...you can just imagine! I'd better not wait too much longer before warning her about this.

And while I'm freaking out, let's bring my daughter into the mix. My five month old daughter weighs about 14 pounds. Less than half a tablespoon could kill her! My precious little girl! I'm surprised my breast milk hasn't killed her!

The news was pretty sobering. It occurred to me - what if I'd never even picked up a salt shaker in the first place? If only I'd known this information sooner. Surely I'd be smarter, prettier and taller, and I wouldn't have had Dorito breath when Nick Masarrachia finally kissed me in the 9th grade. I wouldn't even have been EATING Doritos, because I would have been turned off by the sodium content.

At the end of the day, I don't really intend to quit salt. The best I can do is cut back, and even that's going to require a little rehab (I need to look into salt gum,or maybe a salt patch). One thing I have absolutely given up forever is Googling. Do you really want to know how many calories are in your Starbucks danish?... I mean, really, that shit is just upsetting. Why do you need to know the long term effects of "new carpet smell" on babies? Don't you know that according to Google, EVERYTHING causes Autism? Googling is way more dangerous than a sodium overload, at least for me. Because once you realize you've been eating more than five times the daily recommended allowance of salt every day for years upon years, every surprise is a potential heart attack.