The American Heart Association just shared some interesting news on how to help our hearts be healthier with very minimal effort on our part:
"For every gram of salt Americans cut from their diet, there would be 250,000 fewer new cases of heart disease and more than 200,000 fewer heart-related deaths in the next 10 years."
This very slight decrease in the amount of salt, said to be "hardly detectable in the taste of food" can have dramatic health benefits for the U.S.
"Currently, Americans eat 9-12 grams of salt per day" (or 3600-4800 mg of sodium), which outweighs the current recommendation of 5-6 grams of salt, or 2000-2300 mg sodium per day.
Where is all of this salt coming from in our diets? "Americans consume up to 75 percent of their sodium from processed foods like tomato sauce, soups, condiments, canned foods and prepared mixes."
One trick of the trade:
A excellent gauge when you are buying pre-packaged foods is to make sure the sodium content on the Nutrition Label is less than 5% DV (daily value). If the product contains more than 20% DV of sodium...try to find another alternative!
Do you have any other ideas how we can protect our heart with reducing our sodium intake?
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Alison, thanks for the great SHARE! It's always inspiring to me to read when one small change will accomplish so much.
One of the things I've started doing as a matter of course is just to always buy the lower-sodium product (even though I'm not particularly focused on cutting sodium intake). I feel that to do this encourages the marketplace to develop more and more lower-sodium products, besides being good for me!
Another easy thing to do is to not add salt to recipes while they are cooking, but to allow people to add what they'd individually like when they eat it. Note: This is very very hard to do! Our family's spaghetti sauce recipe calls for salt along with pepper, herbs and spices. It's hard to leave the salt out at that stage, because if you're used to it, it just doesn't taste right. But you can always a little at the table, and over time I think you use less than if it's cooked into the sauce.
March 19, 2009 - 9:18amThis Comment