A Low Sodium Diet may be Tough. But it could

A Low Sodium Diet may be Tough. But it could mean better Health

You might hear a lot about how the use of too much salt in your food is bad for you because it gives you high blood pressure and makes your body retain fluid; but just try going the other way and depriving your body of salt altogether. Salt is essential to health. It's just an excess of the stuff that's bad. If you have been battling hypertension or any of the other health problems that come from an excess of sodium in the system, you could find yourself looking at the business-end of a doctor-mandated low-sodium diet pretty soon.

It's not easy to go on a low-sodium diet, of course. If you have hypertension or fluid retention, often, the doctor will ask you to use no more than 4 g of salt a day. That's like just a teaspoonful of the stuff. How on earth could anyone live on that level?

Well, as hard as it may be, you'll see definite health improvements if you knuckle under. You need to go about the way you use your salt the way weight watchers tend to watch every calorie. It certainly is an attainable thing to try to restrict the amount of sodium that goes into your food. But there is work to put in.

Processed foods of the kind you buy at the supermarket will usually list the sodium content of the package on the label. They'll usually express this in milligrams a milligram being the 1000th part of a gram. If you're allowed 4 g of sodium a day, that's 4000 mg. You'll need to add them all up looking at the label on every bag of chips and every box of cereal that you buy.

But not all of the sodium in our diet comes from table salt. The baking soda that they use in baked goods contains sodium, for instance. Luckily, they list all of this under Sodium label on nutrition labels. Of course, certain medicines contain sodium too; if you find that you have been cutting down on the salt everywhere but you aren't seeing the kind of results you hoped for, consider the possibility that the bottled water you drink could have sodium, and so could certain medications cough syrups and so on.

The greatest area of risk of course, lies in eating outside. It's very hard to get to know what goes into the food that you eat at a restaurant. If you're really serious about your low-sodium diet, staying away from restaurant food would be the smart choice to make.

Of course it's easy to strike everything off your ingredients list and to declare yourself sodium-free. How exactly do you live when you don't have salt to resort to, to add taste your food with? Well, there are lots of low-sodium recipe websites that you could refer to that try the help you substitute for the absence of taste with other and ratings garlic, lemon, pepper, vinegar and so on. Salt substitutes like potassium-based salt can work too if your doctor allows them.

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