Low sodium

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Replies

  • ythannah
    ythannah Posts: 4,371 Member
    glassyo wrote: »
    Not to hijack the hijacked but I've always wondered..,

    I don't cook or bake but what happens if a recipe calls for salt and you just...don't...put...it...in? Like in cake or something! :)

    I do add it to some baking (bread comes to mind) because I am always afraid that it's an essential chemical element for some magical process in the bake and I don't want to screw up the final product. I just use way less than the recipe calls for.
  • glassyo
    glassyo Posts: 7,736 Member
    When I was on Weight Watchers, every day was a salt bomb. I mostly lived off frozen dinners and fast food (LOTS of salt in a 6" subway sandwich and a bowl of soup) and, once I hit a plateau, too much sodium was one of things I looked at. (I didn't have mfp then and OF COURSE that wasn't why I plateaued :)). But I've tried to stay lower sodium ever since and silly things like that cross my mind so thanks! :)
  • AnnPT77
    AnnPT77 Posts: 34,168 Member
    glassyo wrote: »
    Not to hijack the hijacked but I've always wondered..,

    I don't cook or bake but what happens if a recipe calls for salt and you just...don't...put...it...in? Like in cake or something! :)

    Varies. If you're interested in questions like that, look for a food-science oriented cooking book. I like Shirley Corriher's "Cookwise: The Hows & Whys of Successful Cooking" which goes into things like that, plus has a bunch of amazing recipes. (The buttermilk biscuit alone is worth the price of the book, IMO.) It's an applied food science book, not just theory. Maybe your library has it, or something similar.

    Here's the index entry for salt, to give you a hint of what salt does:

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    Here's part of the entry about salt in bread, p 88, just to give you a feel:

    ya7aza9wj51e.jpg

    Yes, I am a nerd/geek. ;)

    Apologies for the digression, OP.

  • lynn_glenmont
    lynn_glenmont Posts: 10,091 Member
    glassyo wrote: »
    Not to hijack the hijacked but I've always wondered..,

    I don't cook or bake but what happens if a recipe calls for salt and you just...don't...put...it...in? Like in cake or something! :)

    Depends on what you're cooking. In some recipes, it's mostly there for flavor. In baking with yeast (i.e., mostly bread), it helps control the yeast so it doesn't cause too much raising too fast. I think in cakes it's mostly about flavor. Even though it doesn't salty, it won't taste quite right without it. It brings out some flavors and balances others.
  • njitaliana
    njitaliana Posts: 814 Member
    This was written in 2013. Dietitians and cardiologists in 2022 recommend eating between 1500-2000 mg of sodium for heart failure patients and people with high blood pressure. Your information is outdated and wrong. People should get sodium advice from dietitians and physicians, not from some person on MFP.
    neanderthin wrote: »
    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."

  • neanderthin
    neanderthin Posts: 10,207 Member
    njitaliana wrote: »
    This was written in 2013. Dietitians and cardiologists in 2022 recommend eating between 1500-2000 mg of sodium for heart failure patients and people with high blood pressure. Your information is outdated and wrong. People should get sodium advice from dietitians and physicians, not from some person on MFP.
    neanderthin wrote: »
    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."
    njitaliana wrote: »
    This was written in 2013. Dietitians and cardiologists in 2022 recommend eating between 1500-2000 mg of sodium for heart failure patients and people with high blood pressure. Your information is outdated and wrong. People should get sodium advice from dietitians and physicians, not from some person on MFP.
    neanderthin wrote: »
    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."

    The moral of this story is, read, before you put your foot into it and what's the saying, remove all doubt. Btw I have about as much faith in the average dietitian or physician to actually research before I blindly do something they may recommend, which I strongly advise anyone to do and it's exactly how this study got linked into this discussion, because removing all salt from ones diet just might not be the healthiest thing someone might do. cheers

    The American Heart Association recently strongly recommended a dietary sodium intake of <1500 mg/d for all Americans to achieve “Ideal Cardiovascular Health” by 2020. However, low sodium diets have not been shown to reduce cardiovascular events in normotensive individuals or in individuals with pre-hypertension or hypertension. Moreover, there is evidence that a low sodium diet may lead to a worse cardiovascular prognosis in patients with cardiometabolic risk and established cardiovascular disease

  • CrawfordBayNicola
    CrawfordBayNicola Posts: 8 Member
    Once you lower your salt intake for a little while, your taste adapts and will detect smaller amounts just fine.

    Always check because many foods are packed with salt - it's astonishing.
    Many recipes are also packed with sodium, so check and adjust. Most things you make really can do with reduced sodium, and still taste great.

    There are low-salt Ritz and Triscit crackers, a newer discovery for me.

    Breads tend to be high in salt. I make my own no-knead bread (it's easy) and after experimenting, use about a quarter of what commercial breads have. Removing salt from the recipe proved to be unpalatable.

    There are low-sodium groups on social media, too, that can help answer questions you have, or put you on to new foods that become available.

  • CrawfordBayNicola
    CrawfordBayNicola Posts: 8 Member
    As mentioned before, how much sodium you're aiming for in your diet depends on your health. Those without heart conditions could stand to check in with their diet to ensure they are not consuming enormous amounts of sodium daily, but needn't go overboard when reducing. Those with heart failure, like my husband, need to be more careful. He swells up within hours if his sodium intake is above 2000, which makes it hard for him to breath. For most though, moderation is more than sufficient.

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