West Berkshire & North Hampshire
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Healthier Salt Substitutes
The two most prominent dietary risks for death and disability in the world are not eating enough fruit and eating too much salt, as I discuss inmy video Shaking the Salt Habit. Eating too little fruit kills nearly five million people every year, and eating too much salt kills four million.
Instead of salt, flavour your meals with lots of herbs and spices.
There are three things we can do to lower our salt intake. First, don’t add salt at the table. Many of us add salt to our food before even tasting it! Second, stop adding salt while you’re cooking.
At first, the food may taste bland, but within two to four weeks (believe it or not) you may actually prefer the taste of food with less salt. Instead of salt, flavour your meals with lots of herbs and spices. But even if you add salt while cooking, it’s probably better than eating out; most restaurants tend to pile it on. And, finally, avoid processed foods with salt added.
If you do buy processed foods, there are two tricks you can use.
First, try to only buy foods with fewer milligrams of sodium listed on the label than there are grams in the serving size. So, if it’s a 100-gram serving size, it should have less than 100 mg of sodium. Or, second, shoot for fewer milligrams of sodium than there are calories. For example, if the sodium is listed as 720 and calories are 260, since 720 is greater than 260, the product has too much sodium.
That’s a trick I learned from Jeff Novick, one of my favorite dieticians of all time. The reason it works is that most people get about 2,200 caloriesa day. So, if everything you ate had more calories than sodium, you’d at least get under 2,300 milligrams of sodium, which is the upper limit for healthy people under age 50. Of course, the healthiest foods have no labels at all. You should try to buy as much fresh food as possible because it is almost impossible to come up with a diet consisting of unprocessed natural foodstuffs that exceeds the strict American Heart Association guidelines for sodium reduction.