How in the world??

Sjenny5891

How do you eat 2,000 calories a day and stay under your Sodium? I had no problem when I was eating 1300, but now I just can't seem to get it..... I know I have to cut the processed food, but what are your suggestions?

Sample Diary entries would be appreciated.

bcattoes

Fat.

You eat nuts, avocado, seeds, peanut butter. Cook your food with a little fat, dress your veggies and salads with olive oil based vinaigrettes. Fat has more than twice the calories of protein or carbohydrates and makes everything taste good.

jolt28

No frozen, prepared meals (Lean Cuisine or WW entrees etc.) , no fast food, buy either fresh veggies and beans you make yourself or only the no-salt added kinds. Watch the sodium on raw chicken breasts - some of those are pumped up and have more sodium than other brands. I struggled at the beginning but read labels and changed what I purchased and it's not that hard now.

Keiras_Mom

If you have no medical reason to avoid sodium, why worry about it? I don't know what your personal situation is, but there's been a lot of discussion lately about how sodium isn't as bad for us as we have been told. I don't worry about it at all, and I have a salt addiction. I put salt on everything, and I have low blood pressure and no problems with edema or other sodium related issues.

bcattoes

If you have no medical reason to avoid sodium, why worry about it? I don't know what your personal situation is, but there's been a lot of discussion lately about how sodium isn't as bad for us as we have been told. I don't worry about it at all, and I have a salt addiction. I put salt on everything, and I have low blood pressure and no problems with edema or other sodium related issues.

There is a lot of "sodium isn't bad discussion on MFP" but in other circles the opposite belief is held.

http://www.hsph.harvard.edu/nutritionsource/lower-sodium-and-salt/

Many experts, including those in the Department of Nutrition at the Harvard School of Public Health, the American Heart Association, and the Center for Science in the Public Interest, believe that cutting back on salt—aiming for a target of 1,500 milligrams of sodium per person per day—would improve health, save lives, and avoid billions of dollars each year in medical costs. (6, 7) Skeptics say that an across-the-board reduction in salt intake would disrupt the food industry but have little impact on public health. Fifteen years ago, there was more room for debate about the benefits of large-scale cutbacks on salt. (Read more about the feud over salt.) During the past decade, however, extensive research on the health effects of excess salt clearly points to evidence of harm.

Keiras_Mom

There are always going to be contradictory reports, so I choose to take them (excuse the pun) with a grain of salt. Here's the article I read recently (It was linked on another board I belong to).

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/06/03/opinion/sunday/we-only-think-we-know-the-truth-about-salt.html?_r=0

The below is an excerpt.

Those trials have been followed by a slew of studies suggesting that reducing sodium to anything like what government policy refers to as a “safe upper limit” is likely to do more harm than good. These covered some 100,000 people in more than 30 countries and showed that salt consumption is remarkably stable among populations over time. In the United States, for instance, it has remained constant for the last 50 years, despite 40 years of the eat-less-salt message. The average salt intake in these populations — what could be called the normal salt intake — was one and a half teaspoons a day, almost 50 percent above what federal agencies consider a safe upper limit for healthy Americans under 50, and more than double what the policy advises for those who aren’t so young or healthy. This consistency, between populations and over time, suggests that how much salt we eat is determined by physiological demands, not diet choices.

One could still argue that all these people should reduce their salt intake to prevent hypertension, except for the fact that four of these studies — involving Type 1 diabetics, Type 2 diabetics, healthy Europeans and patients with chronic heart failure — reported that the people eating salt at the lower limit of normal were more likely to have heart disease than those eating smack in the middle of the normal range. Effectively what the 1972 paper would have predicted.

Proponents of the eat-less-salt campaign tend to deal with this contradictory evidence by implying that anyone raising it is a shill for the food industry and doesn’t care about saving lives. An N.I.H. administrator told me back in 1998 that to publicly question the science on salt was to play into the hands of the industry. “As long as there are things in the media that say the salt controversy continues,” he said, “they win.”

When several agencies, including the Department of Agriculture and the Food and Drug Administration, held a hearing last November to discuss how to go about getting Americans to eat less salt (as opposed to whether or not we should eat less salt), these proponents argued that the latest reports suggesting damage from lower-salt diets should simply be ignored. Lawrence Appel, an epidemiologist and a co-author of the DASH-Sodium trial, said “there is nothing really new.” According to the cardiologist Graham MacGregor, who has been promoting low-salt diets since the 1980s, the studies were no more than “a minor irritation that causes us a bit of aggravation.”


For me, it seems to be a matter of listening to my body. When I crave salt, I use it. That's pretty regularly. There are also periods where I don't crave it, and use much less. YMMV.

bcattoes

There are always going to be contradictory reports, so I choose to take them (excuse the pun) with a grain of salt. Here's the article I read recently (It was linked on another board I belong to).

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/06/03/opinion/sunday/we-only-think-we-know-the-truth-about-salt.html?_r=0

The below is an excerpt.

Those trials have been followed by a slew of studies suggesting that reducing sodium to anything like what government policy refers to as a “safe upper limit” is likely to do more harm than good. These covered some 100,000 people in more than 30 countries and showed that salt consumption is remarkably stable among populations over time. In the United States, for instance, it has remained constant for the last 50 years, despite 40 years of the eat-less-salt message. The average salt intake in these populations — what could be called the normal salt intake — was one and a half teaspoons a day, almost 50 percent above what federal agencies consider a safe upper limit for healthy Americans under 50, and more than double what the policy advises for those who aren’t so young or healthy. This consistency, between populations and over time, suggests that how much salt we eat is determined by physiological demands, not diet choices.

One could still argue that all these people should reduce their salt intake to prevent hypertension, except for the fact that four of these studies — involving Type 1 diabetics, Type 2 diabetics, healthy Europeans and patients with chronic heart failure — reported that the people eating salt at the lower limit of normal were more likely to have heart disease than those eating smack in the middle of the normal range. Effectively what the 1972 paper would have predicted.

Proponents of the eat-less-salt campaign tend to deal with this contradictory evidence by implying that anyone raising it is a shill for the food industry and doesn’t care about saving lives. An N.I.H. administrator told me back in 1998 that to publicly question the science on salt was to play into the hands of the industry. “As long as there are things in the media that say the salt controversy continues,” he said, “they win.”

When several agencies, including the Department of Agriculture and the Food and Drug Administration, held a hearing last November to discuss how to go about getting Americans to eat less salt (as opposed to whether or not we should eat less salt), these proponents argued that the latest reports suggesting damage from lower-salt diets should simply be ignored. Lawrence Appel, an epidemiologist and a co-author of the DASH-Sodium trial, said “there is nothing really new.” According to the cardiologist Graham MacGregor, who has been promoting low-salt diets since the 1980s, the studies were no more than “a minor irritation that causes us a bit of aggravation.”


For me, it seems to be a matter of listening to my body. When I crave salt, I use it. That's pretty regularly. There are also periods where I don't crave it, and use much less. YMMV.

Certainly everyone must do what they feel is right. But taking a mainstream media article as fact over scientific and medical research organizations doens't seem all that logical to me.