While I don’t want to be pedantic, sodium nitrite and sodium nitrate are two different things. I imagine spell checker might be causing complications. Ingesting either is a quite bad idea.
Thank you for pointing that out, and I'm not being sarcastic. They're entirely different chemicals.
Remember "Eleven Blue Men" by Berton Roueche? It was a case history of a group of accidental sodium nitrite poisonings that happened in New York in 1944. The piece was collected in The Medical Detectives, and the TV show "House" used quite a few cases from that book in its first two seasons.
(Contrary to what the lawyer in the article said, sodium cyanide (NaCN) is about twenty times more toxic than sodium nitrite, so 400x more toxic than sodium nitrate)
Sodium nitrate is "saltpeter," used in black powder recipes. It also has a reputation as a violent laxative if ingested.
(I'm a former organic chemist turned computer geek.)