Low sodium

spiriteagle99 wrote: »

Avoid processed foods. Frozen, canned, packaged foods usually contain a lot of sodium because salt adds flavor. Restaurant meals are also high in salt. Fresh fruits and veggies are good. IIRC, some meats contain more sodium (i.e. ground beef).

Good list but ground beef is not high in sodium and actually has very little. Cheers

spiriteagle99 wrote: »

Avoid processed foods. Frozen, canned, packaged foods usually contain a lot of sodium because salt adds flavor. Restaurant meals are also high in salt. Fresh fruits and veggies are good. IIRC, some meats contain more sodium (i.e. ground beef).

And plain frozen vegetables generally don't have added sodium either.

sollyn23l2 wrote: »

missysippy930 wrote: »

Use fresh food and prepare your own food as much as possible. Use herbs and spices with no salt for flavoring. There are many sites on the internet with low sodium recipes.

I would argue use a little bit of salt rather than no salt. Most people will find food nearly inedible with no salt. Plus, we do actually need salt to live, it's part of our basic bodily functions.

I was raised on low-salt food because of my dad's hypertension and, trust me, you can retrain your tastebuds to enjoy food without salt. I find heavily salted food inedible now and I prefer the flavour of the actual food itself. Which is a good thing considering I inherited the hypertension and should be limiting my sodium too.

We don't need much salt to live, and certainly not as much as gets dumped into most processed foods like soups and sauces. Cheese is another high source. Looking at my diary, I got 280 mg from a single cheese slice the other day. The average North American diet will get plenty of salt "to live", I struggle to stay below 1500 mg and that's using a LOT of fresh food.

Look at the labels of low sodium canned (or other) goods. Lower sodium does not always mean low. The levels can still be high (just lower than typical).

sollyn23l2 wrote: »

missysippy930 wrote: »

Use fresh food and prepare your own food as much as possible. Use herbs and spices with no salt for flavoring. There are many sites on the internet with low sodium recipes.

I would argue use a little bit of salt rather than no salt. Most people will find food nearly inedible with no salt. Plus, we do actually need salt to live, it's part of our basic bodily functions.

There’s sodium in many unprocessed foods, which occurs naturally. Meats, dairy, eggs, vegetables for instance. Not very likely that anyone would be able to totally avoid sodium. I disagree that not adding salt makes food inedible. Quite the contrary. I cook without adding salt, using herbs and spices. Average Americans eat about 3400 mg daily, 2300 mg is the recommended amount of sodium.

Just thought I'd leave this here because posters recommending people to forgo salt is misguided and dangerous.

https://amjmed.com/article/S0002-9343(13)00594-9/fulltext

“There is no conclusive evidence that a low sodium diet reduces cardiovascular events in normotensive and pre-hypertensive or hypertensive individuals. On the contrary, there is sound evidence that a low sodium diet leads to a worse cardiovascular prognosis in patients with systolic congestive heart failure or type 2 diabetes mellitus…Advising low sodium diets seems misguided and potentially dangerous and illustrates the problem of guidelines based on flawed studies using surrogate measures."

MaggieGirl135 wrote: »

I find that very interesting @neanderthin I recall my parents being told to reduce their salt intake maybe 10 years ago due to heart reasons. I think that many people in the US have a high salt intake that reducing it is still beneficial, although perhaps not at the level noted in the article. Another thing to consider, however, is reducing sodium for kidney reasons. I pretty much don’t use salt when I cook, although I do if I’m making food for other people or, of course, baking, since my husband has the beginning of chronic kidney disease. Even when you try to cut it out you still get sodium in your diet.

Hypertension is not a good thing and because hypertension is so multifaceted and requires a full analogy of a person overall health (body and mind) to begin to understand the many underlying risk factors that manifest into hypertension that most PCP will simply advise people to reduce salt because salt for some people will exacerbate blood volume increasing blood pressure and in people that are sensitive, which turns out to be in the 25% range will help, but overall it's a quick and from the hip advice that leaves both the patient and physician with a feeling of accomplishment without actually getting into the real weeds, otherwise known as the root causes.

As far as the kidney is concerned, again, it depends on the status of one's kidneys. If someone has kidney disease, then yes, a reduced salt diet will put less stress on the kidney but if someone's kidneys are functioning properly then salt is not a problem for the vast majority of people.

I'm not saying that salt isn't something we shouldn't be aware of but it's a minor player when a persons whole diet is taken into account where highly processed foods are generally the reason for high levels of salt and better health outcomes could easily be addressed by reducing those ultra proessed foods and where salt is an automatic victim and gets reduced and our overall health improves and is better than just telling a patient to lower salt, most don't know what that means and to many it just means using less with the shaker. Cheers

missysippy930 wrote: »

sollyn23l2 wrote: »

missysippy930 wrote: »

Use fresh food and prepare your own food as much as possible. Use herbs and spices with no salt for flavoring. There are many sites on the internet with low sodium recipes.

I would argue use a little bit of salt rather than no salt. Most people will find food nearly inedible with no salt. Plus, we do actually need salt to live, it's part of our basic bodily functions.

There’s sodium in many unprocessed foods, which occurs naturally. Meats, dairy, eggs, vegetables for instance. Not very likely that anyone would be able to totally avoid sodium. I disagree that not adding salt makes food inedible. Quite the contrary. I cook without adding salt, using herbs and spices. Average Americans eat about 3400 mg daily, 2300 mg is the recommended amount of sodium.

This is pretty subjective though and recommendations don't really take into account lifestyle. I'm hypertensive and the first thing my Dr. told me was lower my sodium which I did and kept it around 1800-2000 Mg. It did absolutely nothing for my hypertension as I was a non-responder to that and not sodium sensitive...I'm recreationally active and at the time was also doing a lot of training for endurance cycling and had major cramping issues all of the time, not only while training, but also waking up in the middle of the night to charlie horses in my calves and the like.

Problem was I wasn't taking in enough sodium to replace what I was losing when I workout. Even without deliberate training, I'm pretty active recreationally and live in the desert where it's over 100* in the summer and I sweat a lot. Just going for a walk my shirt will be soaked with sweat and when it dries it's caked white with salt.

I'm very much an advocate for whole foods and that's primarily what I eat, but I do need to really make sure that I'm getting enough sodium, especially in the summer months, which I largely "supplement" with pickles and pickle juice.

My hypertension doesn't really respond to how much sodium I'm taking in...I normalized my hypertension just with losing weight and maintaining a healthy weight and regular exercise.

Besides fresh/frozen fruits and vegetables, snack foods you can just buy:

Triscuits - Hint of Sea Salt - only have about 50 mg sodium per serving.
Swiss cheese - an ounce usually has about 45 mg.
Air popped or microwave popcorn - you control the salt, or use a different flavoring.
Unsalted nuts in moderation (because of the fat, mostly, which raises calories).
Skinny pop (original) is pretty low in sodium.
Just-peanuts peanut butter if it has no added salt or sugar. Small quantities because it's high calorie, but great on apples, celery, or spoons.