Salt, Sodium and a Sidetrack on Sugar

Another reason to cut back on (or out) highly processed foods... Another reason to read labels... Another reason to be a conscious eater...

image from Garitzko on wikimedia commons

NPR's new food blog, The Salt, has an article on Why Skipping Salt is So Hard to Do. It mentions how most people know that too much sodium in your diet is a bad thing, (Do they? I hope so. It's most commonly associated with high blood pressure.) but that salt is pretty much inherent in fast foods and processed foods. It's used to flavor and preserve and the chances that that will change are low because 1) people don't like when you change the flavor of something they're used to and 2) it's a cheaper way of producing.

Something important to note (although the article notes it as a "Geek note") is that sodium is technically a component of table salt so they aren't the exact same thing even though people usually use the terms interchangeably when they talk about diet. (Because, you know, this whole keeping an eye out for yourself and knowing what's what isn't complicated enough... when you pour salt on something, 40% of what you pour is really what you should be keeping track of not having too much of...)

The article states sodium "accounts for about 40 percent of the salt we consume. We need a minimum of 1,500mg of sodium a day, but most Americans get about three times that amount." (They're getting that info from Colorado State University.) That's right. It's something that you're supposed to not get too little of or too much of. You need it to maintain the water balance in your cells. It's also used by muscles and nerves.

The food blog article suggests cutting sodium out of your diet and they gradually adding it back in to reduce your overall intake, giving the example that consumers who cut it out for three weeks don't want to go back to the regular salty foods. But wait, your body needs sodium, right? Right. And sodium is already naturally in many foods. So you're not really going cold turkey from all sodium - just products that have added sodium. (The article should probably explain that a bit better.)

But this idea that you can retain your palate has merit. I've found that cutting sugar out of my diet for a couple weeks (full disclosure: the first few days were not easy) and then slowly letting it back in did retrain my palate in terms of sugar. When I start eating something that has a large sugar component, I can taste it immediately without knowing the ingredients or reading a label... and it's sort of gross. I used to think too sugary was an imaginary concept - not any more. Now I easily eat less sugar on a regular basis and feel like I have more energy - definitely not missing it.

Back to the salt and sodium... if you get back to eating those foods with the added sodium it's still easy to get confused while reading labels, even with the aforementioned knowledge. The food blog article cites an example where a soup company advertised a line of soup with 25% less sodium, but it turned out it had the same amount as their other lines. Another way you could get turned around is reading a ingredients list. Salt is not the only ingredient that can up the sodium content of a processed food.

For that, I recommend going over the Colorado State fact sheet I linked to earlier. They discuss sodium labeling - giving a heads up for a couple other ingredients that will add sodium and breaking down what some marketing-type terms usually mean for sodium content (ex: "Sodium free" = less than 5 mg per serving) "Sodium free" does not equal "No sodium".  On top of this cornucopia of info, they have suggestions on what you can season foods with other than salt, dependent on the food. I've seen people salt their food without even tasting it first - even when their meal includes foods that came from a can (aka already a bunch of sodium).

A little less than halfway through the page they also have a nice chart that compares sodium amounts in related foods/food products. For instance, an apple has a little naturally-occurring sodium. Applesauce usually has around 3 times as much, but it's still a low amount. A frozen apple pie has over 100 times as much sodium as an apple and a fast food apple pie has a high amount of sodium - around 200 times as much as that apple. They also have a corn example I think is important to note. Frozen corn has more sodium than fresh, but canned has a lot more than both. (So cut back on your cans when you can. :p )

©2011 Memo To My Health. Please do not republish our content without notifying us and getting permission.