Salt Awareness Week – Drop the Salt!

So here I am, raising your awareness of your salt intake. Many of you probably aren’t overly fussed with salt, except if a restaurant has some fancy pink sea salt you might ooooh and ahhh over it, or am I the only one who does that?....

Anyway, before I studied nutrition I really didn’t pay much attention to it either, but since seeing the light, a.k.a seeing the damage salt can do to our bodies. I have developed an almost pathological avoidance of it. But sometimes I wonder..... am I being overly dramatic about salt or is my concern real?

Our body needs salt to function; we need it in the form of electrolytes. When we are dehydrated, our cells also use salt to regulate themselves and pass on nerve messages, but it appears in the last couple of decades we have been meeting our salt needs a little to enthusiastically.

The Australia Dietary guidelines suggest an upper limit or maximum intake of 2300mg or 6grams of salt per day, with 460-920mg or 1.15 – 2.3grams being the amount our body needs to function. However studies show we are consuming on average a whopping 9grams per day.

Ok, so those figures alone probably don’t mean much to you but when you put that in context, we are consuming almost 4 times the amount of salt the body actually needs on a daily basis year after year, placing a huge strain on our bodies. The evidence is clear, with the increased number of stroke cases, increased number of people with high blood pressure which leads to all sorts of nasties like kidney failure, artery wall damage (increasing your chance of a heart attack) and dementia. Salt also likes to leach the calcium from your bones putting you at greater risk of osteoporosis.

The issue with salt is that it’s a silent attacker; we won’t see the damage till 15- 20 years later when it’s too late. So I ask myself again (after hours of reading about salt and watching a few Youtube clips), am I being overly dramatic or are my salty concerns real?

Yup, they are real!!!

If you care about your future health you should act now, make a conscious choice to lower you salt intake. I don’t mean you have to ban salt from your kitchen cold turkey but a gradual lowering of salt added at the table or in cooking will increase your palates’ sensitivity over time and as your taste buds adjust, you will begin to discover the real taste of food, not just the salty flavours.

Here are some tips to reduce your salt intake

• Use fresh veggies instead of canned, if you are using canned, rinse well before use to wash off as much salt as possible

• Look for low sodium or no added salt products, ideally you want a product that has less than 120mg sodium per 100g

• Remove as much processed food as possible from your diet, try buying fresh whenever you can

• Snack on fruit, dried fruit or unsalted nuts

• Make your own salad dressing with olive oil and balsamic vinegar

• Reduce take away or fast foods (if I can limit myself to 2 south Melbourne dim sims once a month, I’m sure you can too!)

• Avoid adding salt when you are cooking, instead use garlic, lemon juice or herbs to boost flavour (bonus: herbs are packed full of nutrients and are considered a ‘superfood’

• Limit salty snacks (those Samboy salt and vinegar chips....ONCE A MONTH!)

• When buying or using salt, iodised salt actually has more health benefits than sea salt, over half the population of Australians are iodine deficient, so if you are having salt you may as well make the most of it!

Oh and P.S. 75% of our excess salt intake is from industry products (prepacked meals, bread, spreads, pasta sauces, canned veggies) show your support for low salt products with your dollar, not only will your body benefit but you will be sending manufactures a strong messages, that you don’t want to eat their craaap anymore!