How to reduce sodium in your diet without sacrificing taste

Maybe your doctor told you to cut back on your salt intake. Or, perhaps you’ve heard about the ill effects of excessive sodium intake – which includes hypertension and sensitivity to stress – and you simply want to reduce the amount of salt you eat.

Well, you’re up against a literal salt wave if you eat a typical diet in the developed world. By some calculations, the foods and beverages we consume provide us with ten times more salt than our bodies require; this stems from the fact that sodium is a plentiful, inexpensive and versatile ingredient in food processing and preparation. Used in excess in the humblest of fast food stands, salt is also a key ingredient of fine cuisine. Small wonder then that more than 60 million Americans have high blood pressure and consequently are at risk for kidney disease, heart attack and stroke.

Know the enemy

To reduce salt consumption, first you must know where it comes from. The most common source is processed foods, i.e., things that come in boxes, bags and cans, as well as the majority of items served in most restaurants. If you’re thinking, “that’s just about everything I eat,” you’re not alone. It’s a fact of modern life. Consider these common sources of dietary sodium:

• Savory snacks: chips, pretzels and snacking crackers of all kinds.
• Fermented foods: anything pickled, including pickles, olives, sauerkraut and many prepared condiments such as soy sauce.
• Processed meats and dairy products: Sodium naturally occurs in animal products, but cured and processed meats and almost all cheeses contain significant amounts of salt (note that salt naturally preserves meats and other foods, which was important historically to help ensure food availability during winters and long distance traveling).
• Canned foods, especially soups and baked beans.

Note that even non-salty tasting foods can have high sodium content. Breads, cereals, carbonated sodas and even gelatins and puddings contain amounts of salt that exceed recommended daily intake levels for some people.

All of these contain high amounts of sodium even before you get out the saltshaker. Is this beginning to sound like an impossible task?

Salt reduction is not impossible – you just need to rethink some things

The short answer on how to reduce intake of sodium is to cook more of your own food. Of course, that constitutes a major life change for most people, given that we spend approximately half our food dollars on meals prepared outside the home. So let’s subdivide the task into two parts: Foods we make at home, and foods prepared outside of the home.

Foods we make at home

We’ll base this part of the discussion on a few assumptions. Your kitchen skills include knowing how to boil water, work a microwave and heat a few things in a skillet. You may not be a gourmet cook, but have a few dishes (at least) that you make routinely. Follow these rules of thumb:

Start with unprocessed main ingredients. That would be meats that are not salted already, such as lean cuts of beef (look for the word “loin” in them, as that connotes lower-fat cuts), or poultry or fish that is not breaded or in a prepared sauce. “Smoked” meats are almost always high in sodium content.

Read food ingredient labels. Because almost any food preparation in the home still requires some prepared components, the federally mandated Nutrition Facts label provides useful informationon salt content. Sodium content as a percent of daily recommended intake is clearly stated, but look also in the ingredient list for sodium compounds: monosodium glutamate (MSG), baking soda (sodium bicarbonate), disodium phosphate, sodium alginate, sodium benzoate, sodium hydroxide, sodium nitrite, sodium propionate and sodium sulfite. These are all salts with the same negative physiological effects.

Lose the packing juice. If you cook with canned goods such as beans or vegetables, rinse the food in a colander before incorporating them in a dish. Much of the salt in is the juice.

Use lots of fruits and vegetables. These not only have very low naturally occurring sodium levels, the fiber and antioxidants in produce have additional nutritional value. Note that frozen vegetables and fruit retain nutrients to a greater degree than most of what we consider to be fresh – due to time spent shipping and storing fresh produce, versus frozen which is picked and frozen in a single day. This was identified in research done at the University of Illinois (Barbara Klein, Ph.D., Department of Food Science and Nutrition, October 1997). So it’s easy to have nutritious produce on hand even if you don’t often get to a grocery store.

Now, rethink the flavors. If a recipe calls for salt, consider your alternatives in the world of herbs and spices (and we’re not talking about pre-mixed spices, most of which include prodigious amounts of salts). According to the seminal book on flavors, “The Elements of Taste” (Gray Kunz and Peter Kaminsky, Little, Brown and Co., 2001), a good dish has a “push” taste, of which “salt is the king.” But the authors stress balance in these push tastes, therefore they encourage the use of sweeteners (sugar, fruit juices) and picante (peppery heat) along with “pull” tastes such as tangy (citrus, as in lemon and lime juice), vinted (cooking wines), bulby (onions, garlic), floral herbals (green leafy herbs such as oregano, thyme, rosemary, cilantro) and spiced aromatics (cinnamon, cloves, allspice, coriander seed, cumin, saffron).

Of course, rethinking the flavors implies experimentation, which can lead to both good and bad outcomes. Both fall under the category of surprises. Shouldn’t that be part of the adventure of cooking?

Keep in mind too that what you like may not go over so well with others at the table. That phenomenon is not simply a matter of entrenched taste preferences. People really do have wide variation in how they taste food, according to Linda Bartoshuk, Ph.D. a professor at Yale University Medical School who studies taste buds. She notes that people fall into one of three general categories: supertasters, medium-tasters and non-tasters. The supertasters are most sensitive to flavors and tend to limit how much flavoring (salt, spices, etc.) they include in their foods; two-thirds of supertasters are female. Men skew toward the non-taster end of the spectrum, and consequently tend to add more flavorings to their foods – as evidences by guys’ preference for Tabasco in their cooking.

Foods prepared outside of the home

If ever there is an argument to go both low-processed carb and vegetarian, sodium reduction is it. A perusal of nutrition fact sheets from the major quick service restaurant chains (McDonald’s, Wendy’s, Subway Sandwich, Panera Bread and others) tells us that breads and buns, either wrapped around a sandwich or in the breading on any number of products, raise the salt content considerably. Chicken sandwiches, surprisingly, seem to contain more salt than basic hamburgers, but neither are low-salt winners.

The same largely goes for higher-price fine dining. Salty seasoning occurs almost universally, up and down the menu. Even when you order a salad, the dressing could well be high in salt content.

So does that mean avoiding restaurant food altogether? No. Just go about it carefully. Here are some strategies for mitigating the damage:

• Ask the chef to use salt substitutes. Several are on the market and more restaurants are adapting with these.
• Lean on lemon juices, peppers and other flavorings in place of salting your food.
• Veer toward plant foods, as well entrees that are not breaded. An oil-vinegar dressing will likely be the lowest-sodium option.
• Cut back on full restaurant meals. If you’re hungry but know you can make a healthier meal in a few hours, grab a snack at a convenience store or quick service restaurant. A simple hamburger contains far fewer milligrams of salt than a chicken sandwich. When you get home, prepare the foods you know are lower in salt.

You can do it

In 2002, Unilever, the Netherlands-based company responsible for brands including Bertolli, Country Crock, Hellmann’s and Wish Bone, led a consortium of major food manufacturers in Europe to gradually and collectively reduce salt content in their European products by 10 percent over three years time. The company publicly explained that this could be done gradually so that the taste differences would go largely unnoticed.

This underscores how a taste preference for salt can be adapted, gradually, with the goal of improving health. So if you’re motivated and know what you’re doing, sodium reduction is not only possible, it can broaden your dining experience and health profile overall.

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Russ Klettke is an ACE (American Council on Exercise) certified fitness trainer and also the author of “A Guy’s Gotta Eat, the regular guy’s guide to eating smart” (Marlow & Co., 2004, with Deanna Conte, MS RD LD), available at Amazon.com, BarnesandNoble.com and more than 70 public library systems in the U.S., Canada and Europe. Prior to becoming a published writer, speaker and fitness trainer, he worked in marketing and public relations for several large food companies based in the Chicago area, where he lives. He began competing (term loosely defined) in triathlons in 1987 and has continued in the sport non-stop ever since.