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By Mike Leidemann
Advertiser Staff Writer

I'm off the sauce. Soy sauce, that is.

Kim chee and potato chips, too. No popcorn at the movies. No french fries, either. In fact, just about everything that goes into a football tailgate party or a Super Bowl bash has been banished from my diet. For a guy who pretty much existed on chips, barbecue and beer his whole life, this is both easier and harder than anything I've done in a long time.

The order came down from my doctor a couple of months ago. I might have scoffed, as I've done for decades about such warnings, except he was tossing around terms like high blood pressure, heart attack and stroke, which can scare the life out of a guy my age.

"Your salt or your life!" That's the easy part.

Another easy part is finding out where all that salt in the system has been coming from all those years — it's everywhere.

It's in every piece of pepperoni pizza you've ever eaten. It's in every can of Campbell's chicken soup (37 percent of your daily sodium requirements in every serving!) that you've consumed in the interest of better health. It's the best part of every salad dressing, marinade or sauce you've ever bought or created. It's the stuff men are made of.

No wonder. Salt was man's first preservative. It's the ingredient that made domesticity (and by extension marriage and the National Football League) possible, thousands of years before refrigeration was invented.

"Let your speech be always with grace, seasoned with salt," the Bible tells us. "A man must eat a peck of salt with his friend, before he knows him," Cervantes said.

"What am I, Life? A thing of watery salt held in cohesion by unresting cells," the poet John Masefield writes in one of his sonnets.

Now the doctor is saying I have to go cold turkey (without brining or gravy, no less).

Even that's not the hardest part. No, the really hard thing is watching my wife suffer along with me. My wife (bless her strong heart and unclogged arteries) has no issues with salt. She's been my partner in sodium crimes for years, without the least effect on her blood pressure. It's the genes.

For decades, we shared a tub of popcorn at every bad matinee movie we've ever seen — and we've seen them all. For as long as I can remember, we've been putting extra salt on our rice, in one form or another. She takes hers straight from the shaker; mine comes out of the Kikkoman bottle.

Now, in my hour of forced abstinence, she's there by my side. Without a word from me, she's curtailed her own salt intake, too. I tell her to go ahead and order the small popcorn for herself at the movie, but she declines. I suggest we go half pepperoni/half veggie on the pizza, but she refuses.

She doesn't have to do it; no doctor has said her life is at stake, too. She just does it to be nice, to be supportive, to do what lifelong mates do, stand by one another through better or worse, health and potential sickness.

I'll drink to that. Thankfully, beer is less than 2 percent sodium, or I might already be dead by now.

Reach Mike Leidemann at mleidemann@honoluluadvertiser.com.