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Should You Salt Your Food?

 

Should You Salt Your Food?

Recently a paper was published asking that Americans cut way back on salt in order to save lives, in all hundreds of thousands of lives a year. Salt or sodium can increase blood pressure which leads to more heart disease and strokes.

The study also tries to compare the benefits of reducing salt to cigarette smoking, blood pressure medicine and the cholesterol medicine called statins.  Reducing salt intake looks to be more effective than each of these other changes.  The effect is most dramatic for people that make the biggest reductions in salt intake.
 
Not everyone has problems with salt. Plenty of people eat salt and have normal blood pressures.  The reality is  that as people age very few people can avoid blood pressure problems. The estimate is about 90% of adults will eventually have problems with blood pressure.  American adults and even children are eating 2 to 3 times the amount of salt they should be eating.  This is about one to two teaspoons more per day than they should be eating. 
 
Now and then I check my blood pressure, it has been mildly elevated.  So I decided it was a time to take a hard look at the salt in my diet.  When I cook, salt it isn't a problem.  Growing up we rarely used salt, so I don't crave it. Lately I have been eating more frozen and ready to eat products at my house, because my family likes these foods and they certainly make dinner time easy.  Its time to cut back.
 
Aim for less than 2300mg (one teaspoon) of salt or sodium in your day.  Children should have even less.  The human body only needs less than 500mg of salt or sodium a day to meet its basic needs, so you can eat less.

Tips to Find the Salt or Sodium for your total  daily 1 teaspoon of table salt


Food ServingSodium Content
¼ teaspoon table salt575 mg
1 teaspoon table salt2,300 mg
1 hot dog460 mg
1 regular fast-food hamburger600 mg
2 ounces processed cheese600 mg
1 tablespoon soy sauce900 mg
1 serving frozen pizza with meat and vegetables982 mg
2 oz Ranch Salad dressing
530 mg
French Fries Medium270mg
One Ketchup Pack 110mg


To this doctor that has never been strongly swayed by the salt reduction evidence before, this is an article that will change my advice to people.
Everyone needs to cut back on the salt.  


New England Journal of Medicine 2010; 362:590-9 Projected Effect of Dietary Salt Reduction on Future Cardiovascular Disease

familydoctor.org
 

Most restaurant food is loaded with salt.  Many restaurants put their nutrition labels for their menus online.  Nearly all food that is ready to eat in the grocery store has lots of salt.
When you cook at home you can read labels and control the amount of salt.  Read the labels, measure out one serving to know who much salt you are really getting.

 

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