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Nurse Deanna Carlson
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VIDEO: Deanna Carlson Explains Heart Health Tips That Can Help Decrease Salt Intake

Find out what you can do to help decrease your salt intake.

Visit Deanna Carlson, R.N., BSN, on the web at St. Joseph Hospital Women’s Heart Center in Orange, CA

Deanna Carlson: The first thing you want to do is read the labels of course. So let’s go back to that box of rice, the tasty rice. Instead using the whole package of that seasoning just use half of it, so that’s a tip.

Also, lets say nuts. They are heart-healthy items but instead of buying the ones with salt, buy the ones without. Some other things, please don’t salt your food or do it very sparingly, remove the salt, take the shaker from the table.

My other point that I was going to make is that there is salt in everything that we eat because it is a preservative and that’s part of the problem that’s going on in society. And why we have such an obesity rate as well, is because people are buying pre-packaged items already.

A lot of your frozen dinners are very high in sodium. The reason is that because they have to preserve what they are putting in there, so they add more salt to it. So we need to be very conscientious about those kind of things and we really should be driven to fresh items and many of our grocery stores have pre-packaged washed items already to make it more convenient in our household so we should try to gear our lifestyle towards that instead of the frozen prepared stuff already.

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