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They serve great cocktails
and canapés, nibbles call them whatever. Yes
they are great, and funnily enough the
consumption of these just makes you want to
consume more and drink even more (alcohol,
soft drinks whatever) and do you know why?
Yes, you’ve got it, it’s because they are
virtually made out of salt – slight
exaggeration here for effect, but a major
ingredient that makes these snacks so
delicious certainly is the salt.
The recommended total daily intake of salt
for adults is 5 grams or less. This best
viewed as a slightly heaped teaspoonful. The
other factor to beware of in all of this is
to take into consideration the “hidden” salt
that lies within the rest of the food that
we eat in processed or packaged foods. These
hidden amounts alone leave very little room
for the addition of salt at our table or
within the processes of cooking. If we are
not very careful we could find ourselves
consuming between 200 and 400 percent more
salt as we need without trying.
The addition of salt to our food at the
table is in a great many cases almost an
involuntary habit and cutting this out is
not easy to start but once the process of
elimination is embarked upon most people
find it hard to believe how salty the food
that we consume actually is.
Leave salt off the table as a condiment and
cut down by 50 percent the amount used in
cooking as a start and take it from there.
The most obvious offenders in the salt
intake sakes are Fast Foods such as
Hamburgers, cooked meats; savoury snacks etc
but Bread, tinned soups, micro waved foods
contain more salt than you think.
The one positive side effect of all of this
is the fact that more and more people are
starting to become more aware of the amount
of Sodium found in foods and are now
starting to consume more and more lower
Sodium alternatives. These foods are
beginning to make more of an appearance on
Supermarket shelves in greater numbers than
ever before and slowly the message is
getting through
However, and this is a BIG however, be
careful of the excess use of salt
substitutes – these contain potassium
chloride (conventional table salt is Sodium
Chloride). Potassium supplements are not
suitable for people with impaired Kidney
function, or people receiving ACE inhibitor
drugs or certain types of diuretics (water
pills).
There can be no doubt that the reduction of
Salt has a beneficial effect on the blood
pressure of people with Hypertension and the
impact is greater in Adults over the age of
45 and in people of African and Caribbean
origin, who in general are more “salt
sensitive”.
Evidence for the effect of salt on our Blood
Pressure came from the Intersalt study and
the DASH-II (Dietary Approaches to Stop
Hypertension) trial in the USA.
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