Yes it is possible to change (salt) habits

by François Schneider

There is an strong evidence that level of salt (NaCl) consumption are too high. For example, many people die of heart strokes because of too high level of salt, there are many other health issues. It is also a problem with reduction of soil fertility when we compost salty urines and use it in our lands in dry countries affected by building up of salt level in soil. The only way to prevent these problems is to reduce the salt intake.

However we are used to high salt intake, because salt was used in our cultures to preserve food, as other techniques like sterilization, drying, lactofermentation (which is different from salt preservation) were not well mastered, also because people wanted to preserve things hard to preserve like meat and cheese.

Touching to a habit is like touching to our liberty : « this is not possible » : we simply need to develop a technical system to deal with the problem : a medicinal system to deal with our heart strokes, a water treatment system to deal with our urines… But that is exactly what we try to challenge in Can Decreix, we can avoid these problems more simply, preventively, with degrowth, by changing habits, we do not need this systemic growth. We have to move habits, transform habits, at the local level and at the political level, many types of interlinked  habits for our healths, for our environments, for justice, for conviviality etc. !

So this salt story is a good symbol, will you be capable of lowering your level of salt ? Can Decreix is for this : it is about experiential living, in a different low-tech system, one of the aspects is to try a little time to live without your drugs, be it the car, salt, sugar, cigarette, meat, coffee, internet… you are still yourself, you are not  « salt », even if you eat your pizza less salty, it is still pizza… it is just a matter of getting used to it;) AND no worry you can come back to old habits later.

But let us be clear, we still need salt but at much lower level, it is not about suppressing it totally from our diet:)