Daily Health News Blog

Are pickles junk food? Do they count toward your daily vegetable intake? Pickling means steeping a food in a preservative, usually brine or vinegar. Typically the food is a cucumber, which is not a dynamo of nutrition to begin with. But nearly anything can be pickled, including green tomatoes, green beans, cauliflower, peppers, beets, onions and carrots. Before the advent of refrigeration and canning, pickled vegetables were a necessity of life. Among the pickle fanciers of history were Julius Caesar, Queen Elizabeth I, Napoleon and Jefferson. Any processing destroys some vitamins, particularly water-soluble ones like C and the B vitamins. But the real trouble with pickles, of course, is that the sour or dill varieties are very high in sodium. A 3 1/2-ounce sour pickle has only 11 calories but 1,200 milligrams of sodium—nearly the entire daily maximum for most people. There are low-salt versions, but they don’t taste like pickles. Sweet pickles are lower in sodium, with 450 m

The nonprofit Center for Science in the Public Interest (CSPI) has released its "X-treme Eating Awards," which highlight the unhealthiest chain restaurant meals in America. Here are some of the "winners." To put the numbers into perspective, most people should eat about 2,000 calories a day and no more than 20 grams of saturated fat and 1,500 milligrams of sodium. The Cheesecake Factory Farmhouse Cheeseburger:  1,530 calories, 36 grams saturated fat and 3,210 m Applebee’s Provolone-Stuffed Meatballs with Fettuccine : 1,520 calories, 43 grams saturated fat and 3,700 milligrams sodium. Denny’s Fried Cheese Melt  (four fried mozzarella sticks with melted American cheese in a sandwich, plus fries on the side): 1,260 calories, 21 grams saturated fat and 3,010 milligrams sodium. IHOP Monster Bacon ’N Beef Cheeseburger:  1,250 calories, 42 grams saturated fat and 1,590 milligrams sodium. Sweets are hardly off the hook. A Cold Stone Creamery PB&C Shake

Q. You have often written about the benefits of potassium, yet you advise against potassium supplements. Why? A.  While there’s no doubt that a diet rich in potassium provides cardiovascular benefits (notably for blood pressure control and stroke prevention), that may not be true of supplements—which can actually be dangerous for many people. High-potassium foods—vegetables and fruits, along with beans, dairy products, fish, and nuts—contain many nutrients and other compounds that help account for the health benefits. Another plus for blood pressure is the fact that these foods also tend to be low in sodium. So it’s hard to say how much the benefits come from the potassium itself. In large part, the mineral may simply be a marker for a healthy diet. That may be why studies testing the effect of potassium supplements on blood pressure, for instance, have had inconsistent or unclear results. Blood levels of potassium are tightly regulated by the body, mostly by the kidneys. B