Excuse the salty language

I am what doctors call prehypertensive. I took a bunch of Latin and I think the Romans would be appalled at the double prefix. What it means in real life is that I almost, but not quite, have high blood pressure. This runs in my family somewhat. There are a few ways to lower your blood pressure . You can lose weight and exercise, both of which I am trying to do at the moment, you can eliminate alcoholic beverages, which I am not trying to do at the moment, and you can reduce the amount of sodium in your diet. The maximum amount of sodium you should consume on a daily basis is 2000 mg, AKA 2 g.

Your diet does not normally contain a lot of pure sodium because this is what happens if pure sodium comes in contact with water:


So most of your sodium comes from salt. So let's say you decide you're not going to use the salt shaker at all. You should be fine, right? Well, for example, say I have a fairly normal adult breakfast of a bowl of Kellogg's Raisin Bran (we'll talk about fiber some other time), a snack of plain, nonfat yogurt, and lunch of a turkey sandwich with a typical serving of 3 oz. Dietz and Watson (or Empire if you prefer) turkey breast on whole wheat bread with lettuce, tomato and a bit of mustard with 1 oz of potato chips. How much sodium do you think you've consumed?

Well, raisin bran has 280 mg, 4 oz of milk has 50 mg, a yogurt 120 mg, 2 pieces of bread 350 mg, 3 oz turkey 600 mg, 1 teaspoon of mustard 100 mg, and 150 mg for the chips. That's 1650 mg and it's now about 1 PM. Gonna keep it under 350 total the rest of the day? Good luck!

Switching to the reduced sodium turkey and chips would save you 350 mg, but you're still at 1300 well before dinner. And substituting one of those "Healthy Choice" frozen lunches will give you anywhere from 600-1000mg. And having a reduced sodium canned soup would add another 450 mg. Peanut butter and jelly on whole wheat? 650 mg. So basically, if you're looking for the prepared food people to take care of this for you, you're screwed.

You would think there would be enough people trying to reduce sodium that there would be people making things to cater to them. And you can find salt-free things in the supermarket. What's I find strange is that there are very few genuinely low sodium items. Soup is the perfect example. Look in the supermarket and there are probably 200 different kinds of soup on the shelf (again, why one needs that is another story). Maybe 1/3 of them are reduced sodium, but they're reduced from such a ridiculously high level that they're still loaded with the stuff. Amy's has their "light in sodium" line, which typically has 300-400mg, better than the turkey sandwich, but aside from that I dare you to find something in the frozen entree aisle with less than 600 mg.

So I have now entered that strange world of people who have to prepare all their own food from scratch. Before processed foods helped people decide they were too busy to prepare their own, this was not nearly so much of a problem, though if you do a nutritional profile on most recipes you will see they are also very high in sodium. It's just that you can somewhat control how much salt you add. You can buy cookbooks to help you, but is anybody really going to buy a cookbook published by the American Heart Association? Think flavorful is tops on those people's minds? There is not a single low sodium cookbook by a professional chef or cookbook writer.

So I'll keep you posted on my progress. Today, I had oatmeal for breakfast and pan-fried no-salt-seasoned chicken breast on a thin sandwich bun for lunch. So I'm at abut 300 mg. Good, because an ounce of Doritos and 4 tablespoons of salsa is another 650 mg. And pizza? Don't get me started.