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To Your Good Health
By Paul G. Donohue, M.D.
No-Salt Diet Is
an Impossible Goal
DEAR DR. DONOHUE:
My son, at 40, was found to have dangerously high
blood pressure. My husband died at age 41 of a
heart attack. He also had very high blood
pressure. It is a family condition. My son was
told to cut out all salt. Is it possible? His
doctor says no salt is allowed. How many
milligrams is it reasonable to eat in a day?
There’s almost no food without some salt in
it. -- J.B.
ANSWER: A low-salt
diet is difficult for most people. A no-salt diet
is impossible. I’m sure your son’s
doctor wants him on a low-salt diet with no salt
added to his food. Salt is necessary for life.
The salt issue is confusing, because sometimes
doctors talk about sodium, sometimes sodium
chloride and sometimes salt. Salt and sodium
chloride are the same. Sodium is only 40 percent
of salt. I’ll give my numbers as sodium
chloride (salt) and put the sodium value in
parentheses.
The recommended
daily allowance for salt has been 6,000 mg -- 6
grams -- (2,400 mg sodium, or 2.4 grams). New
recommendations have lowered it to 3,750 mg salt
(1,500 mg sodium). That’s a pretty low-salt
diet, one that can aid in decreasing blood
pressure. One teaspoon of salt is 6,000 mg. You
should eat only half a teaspoon. That’s the
total salt intake -- including the hidden salt in
foods like bacon, sausage, ham, potato chips,
pretzels, pickles, olives, sauerkraut, frozen
dinners, canned soups, bakery products and on and
on. Don’t add salt in cooking or at the
table.
People’s
taste gradually comes around to enjoying food
without salt. If your son doesn’t reach that
point ever, he can use salt substitutes. His
daily diet should include seven servings of whole
grains, five servings of vegetables, five fruit
servings, a reduction in meat intake and
consumption of low-fat or fat-free dairy
products.
LETTERS from
a SELF-MADE
MERCHANT
to his SON.
by George Horace
Lorimer
First published October,
1902
Being the Letters
written by John Graham, Head of the House of
Graham & Company, Pork-Packers in Chicago,
familiarly known on ‘Change as "Old
Gorgon Graham," to his Son, Pierrepont,
facetiously known to his intimates as
"Piggy."
No.13
FROM John Graham,
at the Union Stock Yards in Chicago, to his son,
Pierrepont, care of The Hoosier Grocery Co.,
Indianapolis, Indiana. Mr. Pierrepont’s
orders have been looking up, so the old man gives
him a pat on the back--but not too hard a one.
XIII
CHICAGO, May 10,
189-
Dear Pierrepont:_
That order for a carload of Spotless Snow Leaf
from old Shorter is the kind of back talk I like.
We can stand a little more of the same sort of
sassing. I have told the cashier that you will
draw thirty a week after this, and I want you to
have a nice suit of clothes made and send the
bill to the old man. Get something that
won’t keep people guessing whether you
follow the horses or do buck and wing dancing for
a living. Your taste in clothes seems to be
lasting longer than the rest of your college
education. You looked like a young widow who had
raised the second crop of daisies over the
deceased when you were in here last week.
Of course, clothes
don’t make the man, but they make all of him
except his hands and face during business hours,
and that’s a pretty considerable area of the
human animal. A dirty shirt may hide a pure
heart, but it seldom covers a clean skin. If you
look as if you had slept in your clothes, most
men will jump to the conclusion that you have,
and you will never get to know them well enough
to explain that your head is so full of noble
thoughts that you haven’t time to bother
with the dandruff on your shoulders. And if you
wear blue and white striped pants and a red
necktie, you will find it difficult to get close
enough to a deacon to be invited to say grace at
his table, even if you never play for anything
except coffee or beans.
Appearances are
deceitful, I know, but so long as they are,
there’s nothing like having them deceive for
us instead of against us. I’ve seen a
ten-cent shave and a five-cent shine get a
thousand-dollar job, and a cigarette and a pint
of champagne knock the bottom out of a
million-dollar pork corner. Four or five years
ago little Jim Jackson had the bears in the
provision pit hibernating and living on their own
fat till one morning, the day after he had run
the price of mess pork up to twenty dollars and
nailed it there, some one saw him drinking a
small bottle just before he went on ‘Change,
and told it round among the brokers on the floor.
The bears thought Jim must have had bad news, to
be bracing up at that time in the morning, so
they perked up and everlastingly sold the mess
pork market down through the bottom of the pit to
solid earth. There wasn’t even a grease spot
left of that corner when they got through. As it
happened, Jim hadn’t had any bad news; he
just took the drink because he felt pretty good,
and things were coming his way.
But it isn’t
enough to be all right in this world; you’ve
got to look all right as well, because two-thirds
of success is making people think you are all
right. So you have to be governed by general
rules, even though you may be an exception.
People have seen four and four make eight, and
the young man and the small bottle make a damned
fool so often that they are hard to convince that
the combination can work out any other way. The
Lord only allows so much fun for every man that
He makes. Some get it going fishing most of the
time and making money the rest; some get it
making money most of the time and going fishing
the rest. You can take your choice, but the two
lines of business don’t gee. The more money,
the less fish. The farther you go, the straighter
you’ve got to walk.
I used to get a
heap of solid comfort out of chewing tobacco.
Picked up the habit in Missouri, and took to it
like a Yankee to pie. At that time pretty much
every one in those parts chewed, except the Elder
and the women, and most of them snuffed. Seemed a
nice, sociable habit, and I never thought
anything special about it till I came North and
your Ma began to tell me it was a vile relic of
barbarism, meaning Missouri, I suppose. Then I
confined operations to my office and took to fine
cut instead of plug, as being tonier.
Well, one day,
about ten years ago, when I was walking through
the office, I noticed one of the boys on the
mailing-desk, a mighty likely-looking youngster,
sort of working his jaws as he wrote. I
didn’t stop to think, but somehow I was mad
in a minute. Still, I didn’t say a
word--just stood and looked at him while he
speeded up the way the boys will when they think
the old man is nosing around to see whose salary
he can raise next.
I stood over him
for a matter of five minutes, and all the time he
was pretending not to see me at all. I will say
that he was a pretty game boy, for he never
weakened for a second. But at last, seeing he was
about to choke to death, I said, sharp and
sudden--"Spit."
Well, sir, I
thought it was a cloudburst. You can bet I was
pretty hot, and I started in to curl up that
young fellow to a crisp. But before I got out a
word, something hit me all of a sudden, and I
just went up to the boy and put my hand on his
shoulder and said, "Let’s swear off,
son."
Naturally, he
swore off--he was so blamed scared that he would
have quit breathing if I had asked him to, I
reckon. And I had to take my stock of fine cut
and send it to the heathen.
I simply mention
this little incident in passing as an example of
the fact that a man can’t do what he pleases
in this world, because the higher he climbs the
plainer people can see him. Naturally, as the old
man’s son, you have a lot of fellows
watching you and betting that you are no good. If
you succeed they will say it was an accident; and
if you fail they will say it was a cinch.
There are two
unpardonable sins in this world--success and
failure. Those who succeed can’t forgive a
fellow for being a failure, and those who fail
can’t forgive him for being a success. If
you do succeed, though, you will be too busy to
bother very much about what the failures think.
I dwell a little
on this matter of appearances because so few men
are really thinking animals. Where one fellow
reads a stranger’s character in his face, a
hundred read it in his get-up. We have shown a
dozen breeds of dukes and droves of college
presidents and doctors of divinity through the
packing-house, and the workmen never noticed them
except to throw livers at them when they got in
their way. But when John L. Sullivan went through
the stock yards it just simply shut down the
plant. The men quit the benches with a yell and
lined up to cheer him. You see, John looked his
job, and you didn’t have to explain to the
men that he was the real thing in prize-fighters.
Of course, when a fellow gets to the point where
he is something in particular, he doesn’t
have to care because he doesn’t look like
anything special; but while a young fellow
isn’t anything in particular, it is a mighty
valuable asset if he looks like something
special.
Just here I want
to say that while it’s all right for the
other fellow to be influenced by appearances,
it’s all wrong for you to go on them. Back
up good looks by good character yourself, and
make sure that the other fellow does the same. A
suspicious man makes trouble for himself, but a
cautious one saves it. Because there ain’t
any rotten apples in the top layer, it ain’t
always safe to bet that the whole barrel is
sound.
A man doesn’t
snap up a horse just because he looks all right.
As a usual thing that only makes him wonder what
really is the matter that the other fellow wants
to sell. So he leads the nag out into the middle
of a ten-acre lot, where the light will strike
him good and strong, and examines every hair of
his hide, as if he expected to find it near-seal,
or some other base imitation; and he squints
under each hoof for the grand hailing sign of
distress; and he peeks down his throat for dark
secrets. If the horse passes this degree the
buyer drives him twenty or thirty miles,
expecting him to turn out a roarer, or to find
that he balks, or shies, or goes lame, or
develops some other horse nonsense. If after all
that there are no bad symptoms, he offers fifty
less than the price asked, on general principles,
and for fear he has missed something.
Take men and
horses, by and large, and they run pretty much
the same. There’s nothing like trying a man
in harness a while before you bind yourself to
travel very far with him.
I remember giving
a nice-looking, clean-shaven fellow a job on the
billing-desk, just on his looks, but he turned
out such a poor hand at figures that I had to
fire him at the end of a week. It seemed that the
morning he struck me for the place he had pawned
his razor for fifteen cents in order to get a
shave. Naturally, if I had known that in the
first place I wouldn’t have hired him as a
human arithmetic.
Another time I had
a collector that I set a heap of store by. Always
handled himself just right when he talked to you
and kept himself looking right up to the mark.
His salary wasn’t very big, but he had such
a persuasive way that he seemed to get a dollar
and a half’s worth of value out of every
dollar that he earned. Never crowded the fashions
and never gave ‘em any slack. If sashes were
the thing with summer shirts, why Charlie had a
sash, you bet, and when tight trousers were the
nobby trick in pants, Charlie wore his double
reefed. Take him fore and aft, Charlie looked all
right and talked all right--always careful,
always considerate, always polite.
One noon, after he
had been with me for a year or two, I met him
coming in from his route looking glum; so I
handed him fifty dollars as a little sweetener. I
never saw a fifty cheer a man up like that one
did Charlie, and he thanked me just
right--didn’t stutter and didn’t slop
over. I earmarked Charlie for a raise and a
better job right there.
Just after that I
got mixed up with some work in my private office
and I didn’t look around again till on
toward closing time. Then, right outside my door
I met the office manager, and he looked mighty
glum, too.
"I was just
going to knock on your door," said he.
"Well?"
I asked.
"Charlie
Chasenberry is eight hundred dollars short in his
collections."
"Um--m,"
I said, without blinking, but I had a gone
feeling just the same.
"I had a
plain-clothes man here to arrest him this
evening, but he didn’t come in."
"Looks as if
he’d skipped, eh?" I asked.
"I’m
afraid so, but I don’t know how. He
didn’t have a dollar this morning, because
he tried to overdraw his salary account and I
wouldn’t let him, and he didn’t collect
any bills to-day because he had already collected
everything that was due this week and lost it
bucking the tiger."
I didn’t say
anything, but I suspected that there was a sucker
somewhere in the office. The next day I was sure
of it, for I got a telegram from the always
polite and thoughtful Charlie, dated at Montreal:
"Many, many
thanks, dear Mr. Graham, for your timely
assistance."
Careful as usual,
you see, about the little things, for there were
just ten words in the message. But that
"Many, many thanks, dear Mr. Graham,"
was the closest to slopping over I had ever known
him to come.
I consider the
little lesson that Charlie gave me as cheap at
eight hundred and fifty dollars, and I pass it
along to you because it may save you a thousand
or two on your experience account.
Your affectionate
father,
JOHN GRAHAM.
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