In today's world - healthy eating often mean expensive eating. Due to my husband's illness AND the Provida diet I am trying hard to stick with - sodium is restricted, in his case, to 2,000 mg per day. I had never limited sodium before, so imagine my surprise when I started to read the labels of common grocery store items. Even the lowered sodium preprepared products have 600mg or more of sodium per can, and given the way we were eating, we were probably getting up to 10k mg per day or more. Excess sodium has been found to cause anything from calcium deficiencies to high blood pressure to water retention, so it is really surprising our FDA allows this to continue!
Soy sauce and all the oriental sauces, all preprepared soups and meals, pickles or anything pickled, prewrapped and sliced cheeses, bacon, all sausage products, pizza, and/or beef broths all will take a healthy chunk out of your daily sodium budget so they have to be consumed sparingly.
Ways we have found to restrict sodium include:
1) Making homemade soups with diluted, low sodium chicken broth and fresh veggies (canned ones are full of sodium).
2) Using Mrs Dashes salt-free seasonings
3) Using low sodium soy sauce sparingly, mixed with other ingredients for flavor for a nice, veggie-ful stirfry.
4) Getting rid of Alka-Seltzer and using calcium based antacids
5) Using low sodium baking powder instead of baking soda
6) Either baking our own bread, or finding low sodium bread - it is amazing how much sodium there is in off the shelf breads!
7) Making our own seasoning mixes
8) Either using salad dressings that are 100 mg sodium or less per serving (hard to find), or making our own. Salad dressings are another huge source of hidden sodium.
It pays to watch your sodium intake, and you may even find yourself losing weight while you are at it!
[Photo Credit: www.bestrank.com]
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