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Comment by thih9 | Hacker News Reader

> Processed meats contain a LOT of salt. Salt doesn't cause diabetes, but it does cause water retention and high blood pressure, so is bad for people with diabetes.

Why is salt / bad influence for people with diabetes relevant in this context? Weren’t we interested in meat in relation to the rising global incidence of diabetes? Cottage cheese, shrimp, canned tuna and more also are high in sodium.

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Processed meats often also contain a lot of sugar. Breakfast sausage, bacon, etc. frequently have added sugar.

Even beef jerky has ridiculous amounts of sugar, it's hard to find a brand that doesn't have more sugar calories than protein calories. I tend to cook nearly all my own food anyway, but it would be nice to be able to pay somebody to make ready to eat foods that didn't include ridiculously needless additions.

It’s hard to produce tasty food at a reasonable price point that doesn’t involve lots of sugar, salt, etc.

Worse, when you aim for that market customers start to want local, organic, grass fed, etc which drastically increases ingredient costs.

You can buy sugar-free beef jerky. It tastes terrible.

I make sugar free jerky, and it is better or about the same as store bought jerky. It's about 20 minutes of total work for roughly two pounds, spread out over 8-12 hours of marinating and drying.

So the question is why it's hard to get even moderately low amounts of sugar, say <20% of calories from added sugar.

Not a doctor but it's because when you are diabetic the angiotensin system gets out of whack. Angiotensin is what is part of what regulates sodium and potassium in your kidneys which is what controls blood pressure.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Renin%E2%80%93angiotensin_sy...

I think the salt consumption is a bit of a red herring and it's better to fix the metabolic syndrome.

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