You can’t read the news anymore these days without coming across new health guidelines. They seem to change all the time. The weather changes and new health reports are released. One thing remains the same however, and that is, that high blood pressure, or hypertension, is on the rise.
Although older folks fall prey to high blood pressure more often than the young, hypertension runs across many age groups. The rising rate of high blood pressure among younger people, in the last decade, is staggering and many don’t realize that they have it until other matters bring them to a doctor.
Did you know that dropping the amount of salt we ingest every day by just 3g would greatly reduce our risk for heart attack and stroke? On average, Americans consume almost double the amount of sodium that our bodies need, up to 10g daily. This is far more than the recommended daily amount. To be fair to the cooks out there, ¾ of that salt comes from eating processed foods and not the salt shaker.
Salt is an agitator as well as a major cause of high blood pressure. So we look for ways to cut salt from the diet and that means we read labels. Some of the labels I have read are simply ridiculous. I could barely pronounce half the ingredients. I know enough to recognize that sodium is often labeled as something other than merely salt, such as sodium this and sodium that. The list is quite extensive of different sodium names. By breaking the salt content into smaller categories using sodium names, they can easily get around having salt listed as a main ingredient.
The new salt, that is making news as a healthy salt, is sea salt. Sea salt is better for you with less sodium chloride in it. But it also has is a myriad of other minerals in it as well. Refined salt has iodine added back in. Sea salt has the iodine plus.
We expect our chips to taste salty, but to actually see on the label that some soups contain more salt than potato chips is quite surprising. Many food manufacturers are now replacing salt and many of those sodium names with sea salt. This is good news for those with high blood pressure. Other products offer reduced salt foods although many people don’t care for the altered flavor of reduced salt foods. Salt is used to enhance flavor so is you remove some of the salt, you remove flavor. Some low sodium products have increased the amount of fat in the product to keep flavor levels high. Not sure how that helps anyone though.
Reducing the amount of an added ingredient seems to cost more too. I am sure it is all in the processing and manufacturing of the product but it does strike as odd that having less salt costs quite a bit more than the original product with a full measure of salt. Somehow you’d think it should cost less, especially since there is ‘less’ flavor. Given that many of our seniors need these reduced salt foods, this added cost is questionable.
High blood pressure runs in families, so if your parents and grandparents have or had it, chances are that you will too. Salty diets are not genetic but they also tend to run along family lines. Understanding the link between salt and high blood pressure can save your heart.
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