Salty reactions

After our last week’s column on how excessive salt intake could harm our health, I received a number of negative reactions, with most saying that making everyone adhere to a low-salt diet is easier said than done. I can see where most people are coming from thinking that cutting down on salt means putting up with bland and tasteless food.

This thinking is not really correct because we’re not recommending cutting down on salt completely except if one has heart failure. In such a case, a strict salt restriction is really needed to prevent fluid retention, which imposes too much fluid load on the failing heart. Otherwise, a moderate salt restriction should do.

One can still use salt when cooking just to give the food some taste and make it more palatable. As we have emphasized previously,  the salt used in cooking and on the table consists of only around 20 percent of the salt we take in. Up to 80 percent of the salt comes from packaged food and those we eat in restaurants and other food outlets.

Mainly the culprit

Sodium is mainly the culprit in salt and it comprises around 40 percent of salt. The ideal salt intake is 4,000 milligrams (4 grams) of salt per day. This contains 1,600 milligrams (1.6 grams) of sodium. One can increase daily intake of salt to 6 grams or 2,400 milligrams of sodium and that is still considered  safe. And, definitely, one’s taste buds would no longer feel sore and deprived with this amount of sodium in the diet. It’s just a matter of convincing oneself that  it’s good for one’s health and, after a while, one’s taste buds adapt and will no longer seek salty food to derive gustatory satisfaction.

We had a patient in his early 50s whom we were treating for uncontrolled high blood pressure. When his salt intake was measured by the amount of sodium he was excreting in the urine, his salt intake was estimated to be more than 20 grams per day. It was very difficult to convince him to cut down on his salt intake. He developed a stroke a few years ago that nearly killed him. From then on, he realized it’s better to eat healthy than die suddenly. Now you can’t make him eat anything salty and when he gets to eat a dish which is a little bit salty, he doesn’t enjoy it anymore. One should not wait until a potentially life-threatening complication of excessive salt intake develops before one decides to cut down on one’s salt intake.

It’s true that the chances of failure and sliding back to one’s high level of salt intake is high if one cuts down one’s salt intake abruptly. We would recommend doing it gradually over a six-month period. If one’s salt intake is 12 grams or more per day, the goal is to gradually cut it by 10 percent monthly until one is able to reduce one’s salt intake by 50 percent. This will already have tremendous health benefits.

Short of measuring one’s urinary excretion of sodium to estimate one’s average daily salt intake, one can simply keep tab on the sum of the sodium content of the food one regularly eats daily, mainly from packaged food products. One can just Google for a listing of the sodium contained in most food preparations. One can still eat small portions of salt-rich food occasionally but the trick is not to eat more than one rich source of sodium daily.

Additional list

Here’s an additional list of sodium-rich food and the approximate amount of sodium they contain for every 100-gram serving: anchovies (4,000 mg), olives (2,200 mg), bacon (2,000 mg), salami (1,800 mg), smoked salmon (1,800 mg), boiled prawns (1,600 mg), fried  rice (1,400 mg), pudding (1,200 mg), smoked fish (1,200 mg), most processed food and canned products  (1,000-1,600 mg), processed meats (1,000 mg) cheese products (1,000 mg), most pastries (600 mg).

Other rich sources of sodium are products like soy sauce, powdered soups, gravy, mustard, seasoning cubes and pickled products; we should eat them sparingly.

Natural food products including fruits and vegetables also contain sodium but these are very low sources of sodium.

Practically all processed food products are high in sodium due to the addition of salt as a preservative. If food manufacturers could not be convinced to  reduce the sodium in their products, perhaps the government, by way of legislation, can make them do it.

True, the body also needs salt to function, and that makes salt  a good thing. But, just like most things in life, too much of a good thing is also bad.