Why Low Sodium? The Importance of Limiting Your Sodium Intake Regardless of the diet style you adopt, whether it be the typical American diet, a vegetarian diet, the paleo-diet, or Atkins diet, limiting the amount salt (sodium chloride) in your diet is extremely important. A good goal is to limit salt intake to 1000-1500 mg per day. The average American consumes about 4,000-6,000 mg per day. Interestingly, only about 500-1000 mg or about 10% of that comes from the salt shaker. Nearly all of the salt consumed in your diet has been added to your food before you bought it. Over 70% comes from processed food. If your food comes in a can, bag, sack, bottle, or box, you can bet that someone has added salt to it. Salt is added to foods to make you eat more of them, to make the contents of a package weigh more, and to get you to consume food that would otherwise be a tasteless mass of over-processed junk. I challenge you to calculate the amount of sodium you consume in a day. If you cannot tell me exactly how many milligrams of salt you had in your diet yesterday, then you probably had between 4,000 to 6,000 mg. Excess salt intake is strongly related to death from stroke and heart attacks. It doesn't matter whether the salt causes you to have hypertension; this effect is seen in people with "normal" blood pressure as well. A hidden benefit of reducing the sodium consumption in your diet is that it forces you to eat less refined and more natural foods, which also encourage weight loss and general good health. Adding a small amount of salt from a salt shaker to healthy unprocessed foods can make a diet more enjoyable. Studies suggest that when people prepare their meals with food containing no added salt, and then salt their food at the dinner table, they tend to only add about 500-1000 mg per day. Humans only require about 300-500 mg per day of salt. This is about how much salt that the indigenous peoples of the Brazilian rain-forest get from their foods they collect in the forest. And even with the incredible heat felt year-round in the rain-forest and copious amount of sweating they do, this is more than sufficient. It's common sense. If humans needed more salt than is provided in foods naturally, then salt shakers would hang from trees. When humans grow up on diets high in minimally processed plant foods and with salt intakes of less than 1000 mg per day, there is no increase in blood pressure with age. The elderly have blood pressures that are nearly identical to children. On the western diet, 50% of our elderly will have elevated blood pressure. Salt is naturally in most foods. A diet of purely natural foods will provide about 300-700 mg per day. So get the hidden added salt out of your food, and you can then add back a smaller amount at the dinner table. Start today. Look at the labels on the side of the boxes, cans, and bottles in your kitchen. Then look for low or no salt alternatives at the grocery store. Watch out when you eat out! Limit how many times a week you eat out. Restaurants use tons of salt to entice you to overeat and to cover up otherwise bland and unappealing dishes. You might be surprised to find that one cup of marinara pasta sauce may contain over 1,000 mg of salt (while a no added salt variety may have 50 mg), a cup of canned kidney beans may have 700 mg (a no added salt brand could have 30 mg), two slices of store bought bread could have 300 mg of added salt (while a no salt added brand could have nearly 0 mg). Some restaurant meals will deliver 3,000 to 4,000 mg of salt. Wow, that's enough salt for almost a week! Studies have shown that when people reduce the amount of salt in their diet, their taste buds adapt to the lower levels of salt intake after just 8-12 weeks. If they then try to eat the high salt foods they previously enjoyed, they will say it is way too salty. Return to Moving Toward a Plant-Based Diet or Continue with the Next Topic: What is Caloric Density? The End of Portion Control.

Why Low Sodium?

The Importance of Limiting Your Sodium Intake

Regardless of the diet style you adopt, whether it be the typical American diet, a vegetarian diet, the paleo-diet, or Atkins diet, limiting the amount salt (sodium chloride) in your diet is extremely important. A good goal is to limit salt intake to 1000-1500 mg per day. The average American consumes about 4,000-6,000 mg per day. Interestingly, only about 500-1000 mg or about 10% of that comes from the salt shaker. Nearly all of the salt consumed in your diet has been added to your food before you bought it. Over 70% comes from processed food. If your food comes in a can, bag, sack, bottle, or box, you can bet that someone has added salt to it. Salt is added to foods to make you eat more of them, to make the contents of a package weigh more, and to get you to consume food that would otherwise be a tasteless mass of over-processed junk. I challenge you to calculate the amount of sodium you consume in a day. If you cannot tell me exactly how many milligrams of salt you had in your diet yesterday, then you probably had between 4,000 to 6,000 mg.

Excess salt intake is strongly related to death from stroke and heart attacks. It doesn't matter whether the salt causes you to have hypertension; this effect is seen in people with "normal" blood pressure as well.

A hidden benefit of reducing the sodium consumption in your diet is that it forces you to eat less refined and more natural foods, which also encourage weight loss and general good health.

Adding a small amount of salt from a salt shaker to healthy unprocessed foods can make a diet more enjoyable. Studies suggest that when people prepare their meals with food containing no added salt, and then salt their food at the dinner table, they tend to only add about 500-1000 mg per day.

Humans only require about 300-500 mg per day of salt. This is about how much salt that the indigenous peoples of the Brazilian rain-forest get from their foods they collect in the forest. And even with the incredible heat felt year-round in the rain-forest and copious amount of sweating they do, this is more than sufficient. It's common sense. If humans needed more salt than is provided in foods naturally, then salt shakers would hang from trees.

When humans grow up on diets high in minimally processed plant foods and with salt intakes of less than 1000 mg per day, there is no increase in blood pressure with age. The elderly have blood pressures that are nearly identical to children. On the western diet, 50% of our elderly will have elevated blood pressure.

Salt is naturally in most foods. A diet of purely natural foods will provide about 300-700 mg per day. So get the hidden added salt out of your food, and you can then add back a smaller amount at the dinner table.

Start today. Look at the labels on the side of the boxes, cans, and bottles in your kitchen. Then look for low or no salt alternatives at the grocery store. Watch out when you eat out! Limit how many times a week you eat out. Restaurants use tons of salt to entice you to overeat and to cover up otherwise bland and unappealing dishes.

You might be surprised to find that one cup of marinara pasta sauce may contain over 1,000 mg of salt (while a no added salt variety may have 50 mg), a cup of canned kidney beans may have 700 mg (a no added salt brand could have 30 mg), two slices of store bought bread could have 300 mg of added salt (while a no salt added brand could have nearly 0 mg). Some restaurant meals will deliver 3,000 to 4,000 mg of salt. Wow, that's enough salt for almost a week!

Studies have shown that when people reduce the amount of salt in their diet, their taste buds adapt to the lower levels of salt intake after just 8-12 weeks. If they then try to eat the high salt foods they previously enjoyed, they will say it is way too salty.

Return to Moving Toward a Plant-Based Diet

or Continue with the Next Topic: What is Caloric Density? The End of Portion Control.