a salt with a deadly ramen

There I was, enjoying a piping-hot mid-week bowl of lunchtime noodles as I am occasionally to be found doing, only to have my wife come into the kitchen and say, hahaha, the internet says those will probably kill you. This was unexpected and slightly unwelcome news to me, as I'd been scrupulously careful, as I always am, to avoid the risk of accidentally shooting myself in the nuts with multiple rockets during the noodle-preparation process. 

As always, once I'd gone and checked out the article Hazel had seen on the internet it turns out the reality is slightly less exciting than the headlines suggest, the shock revelation being that primarily noodle-based meals are quite high in carbohydrates (I mean, no shit) but are also extremely high in salt. This latter observation is undoubtedly true, as the 3.6 grams of salt that a standard packet of the Nong Shim ramen noodles contains constitutes around 60% of an adult's recommended daily intake. 

Yeah, you'll be saying, I see that, but that's surely only a problem if you're eating these things every day. And you are right, of course, but the whole variety and moderation thing doesn't generate those sweet sweet clicks that food websites crave even more than another delicious bowl of spicy noodles. So, for that reason, someone went and did the diligence and ate nothing but a variety of packets of ramen noodles for a week, and arrived at the shock revelation that it's probably not a great idea. This is its very own sub-genre of internet food "journalism", as you can see, some of the stunts probably being more toxic and inadvisable than others. I'm not sure when this all started but I think Morgan Spurlock may be at least partly to blame.

I was moved to wonder what the current rates of noodle consumption are here at Halibut Towers - this is more difficult to calculate over the last few years than it was back when I was tracking it in a serious way, because Wing Yip have closed their online store and I spent a couple of years trawling the far reaches of the internet for noodle bargains before returning to Amazon in the last couple of years. In any case, the numbers from back in, say, 2014 are meaningless in comparison with today's numbers, since we're now up to three enthusiastic noodle-consumers in the house. Nia and Huwie are on a couple of bowls a week on average, and if I have a couple as well that's very nearly a bowl a day between us on aggregate. Alys, contrarian as always, does not relish them.

That finger-in-the-air estimate is borne out by my recent Amazon order history, which shows that we collectively consumed 440 packets in 584 days between January 2024 and August 2025. I have no data on our collective sodium levels or blood pressure, and that's probably just as well.

My only hope here is that the mild scepticism about a perhaps-too-simplistic link between salt intake and blood pressure expressed in the excellent book The Man Who Ate Everything turns out to be true. Even if it isn't, this is a hugely entertaining read which I recommend highly.

I don't have a lot of food-related book recommendations but I would also suggest you read Eric Schlosser's Fast Food Nation, a bit more of a downer but fascinating and well worth a go.