CDC says 88% of Americans consume too much sodium.


Center for Dispensing Condiments?

All you have to do is look at the nutrition label on pretty much any prepared food item, they're all full of salt. If I recall correctly a can of Chunky soup has like 35% RDA for sodium AND there are supposedly 2 servings in a can. That doesn't stop me from putting saltines in, but I digress.

I'm from Lancaster, PA. Eating salt is a way of life.

/and by that I mean pretzels
//Hammonds ftw!

I mostly cook from scratch, so any sodium in my food is usually something I put there. And I put a damn lot of it. I cook fatty, salty foods. It's delicious.

But even dumping a teaspoon of salt into nearly every meal (okay, not really that much), I'm still getting less salt than if I were eating pre-processed, shelf-packaged foods.

That also means 88% of Americans consume too much chlorine.

LewDux: rejected.jpg



and we're done here.

Salt tastes good and (if I remember correctly) works on the brain as though it were a drug. Do we really need 1,000 milligrams of sodium in a farking can of chickpeas?

Have we already forgot the lessons learned during the Horror At Party Beach?

As someone who is on a sodium restricted diet, this became readily apparent when I started having to count my sodiums.

diaf packaged food industry.

I thought the whole salt-is-bad thing had been acknowledged as overplayed. Not necessarily wrong, but exaggerated.

JohnAnnArbor: I thought the whole salt-is-bad thing had been acknowledged as overplayed. Not necessarily wrong, but exaggerated.

I don't think it is a 'salt is bad' thing, but more of a 'salt is okay until you get to a certain point' and most of us are way past that point.

Mr. Anon: As someone who is on a sodium restricted diet, this became readily apparent when I started having to count my sodiums.

diaf packaged food industry.

I started watching my sodium intake before I was told to by my doctor and yes it's hard to avoid. Anything canned is ridiculously high. Christ some things like Dinty Moore chicken and noodle have 1288mg of salt in a 7.5 oz can. That's insane! So then I looked at reduced sodium, yeah well even if they had one with only 50% the sodium that's still 650mg. That's when I decided to give it up and make my own meals.

I like salt, and eat far more than the RDA to offset my low blood pressure- I'm about 75% over the recommended on any given day, and I'm still at 110/70.

/I also work out, and play team sports
//needs to be at practice in 26 minutes

As someone who's had ramen the past couple nights, I'm getting a kick...

There is a reason that most of these pre-packaged foods tend to be "smoking full" of salt. It has a fair bit to do with fat consumption and stupid people. Early in the Eighties, some might recall the fat scare that was going around. Fat consumption was linked to heart disease and the country went on a campaign of cutting fat from foods. Of course, we all should know that it is not dietary fat that is the problems, it's fat itself - as in the state of being fat.

Anyway, so product manufacturers started to remove fat from their products. Only one problem with that, though. Food without fat .... well, it sucks. Ever eat very low fat cheese singles? They are like soft cardboard - there's no flavor left. So what do you do to get the taste back in? Why, you add sugar, of course. A mix of sugar and the flavor sensation starts right back up. However, another problem came up. The food was too sweet. Jeez, out of one fire into another. So they had to made the food less sweet, but they needed to retain the flavor. Answer - add more salt. Balances out the sweetness, acts as a preservative, and it's dirt cheap! Problem solved!

That is, until they find that salt intake, decades later, has risen to the state of causing heart problems. It's like mother nature is just laughing her poisoned butt off at us.

Eh, Na. Cl early a dubious study.

The amount of sodium in anything you buy off the shelf or get in a restaurant is SHOCKING.

Marine1: Eh, Na. Cl early a dubious study.

I remember reading a study somewhere that, as long as you have two fully functioning kidneys, excess salt will not raise your blood pressure.
However, I'm too lazy to look it up, and I don't care anyway. Food tastes horrible without salt.

Last I checked (a few years ago) there were no clinical studies to show that sodium affects blood pressure, but cardiologists were speculating that for about 15% of the population, sodium will raise blood pressure. There were a few clinical studies that implied that chloride might inpact blood pressure. Does anyone have an update on this info?

Quantum Apostrophe: That also means 88% of Americans consume too much chlorine.

Nah, they just like eating reactive metals.

On a more serious note, you can partially cancel out problems from too much salt by increasing your intake of potassium, in other words, eat more fruits and eggs and you won't have to worry about it as much.

I realized I had HBP about 3 months ago (I'm 38) and I've made a conscious effort to avoid high sodium foods since then. Yeeesh, it's amazing how much sodium is in ANY prefab food, and not just potato chips and raman noodles.

Cheese, salad dressing, cereal, spaghetti sauce, soups...all loaded.

You can go low sodium and still eat "normally", it just takes a little thinking ahead.

CSB:
Some old man in a cowboy hat tried to lecture my wife when she was buying soup at Costco because "that has a lot of salt in it. Better watch out."
/csb

DubyaHater: I remember reading a study somewhere that, as long as you have two fully functioning kidneys, excess salt will not raise your blood pressure.
However, I'm too lazy to look it up, and I don't care anyway. Food tastes horrible without salt.

Not exactly. Your kidneys maintain a balance between sodium and potassium to keep your BP stable, but if you go wildly overboard at a meal it's like anything else. Your kidneys are overwhelmed and your blood pressure goes up. It can shoot up dangerously high for a short period of time after a very salty meal and if you do that frequently over a sustained timeframe it can ruin your kidneys, heart, blood vessels, etc.

If you eat too much sodium OR too much potassium and you have advanced kidney disease it can fark you up pretty badly in a matter of a day or two.

I have early stage kidney disease from drinking too heavily when I was young so I have to watch my sodium. It's actually not a big deal to lose the salt from your diet because you get used to it over time. I actually can't eat some foods I used to love (KFC, for example) because they're just overwhelmingly, grossly salty to me now.

Actually, it's not even that hard to do if you don't have to go all crazy and be on a low salt diet for medical reason. Keeping your sodium at least under 3 grams a day is pretty much a matter of doing three things:

1. Cut back on or eliminate processed foods. Boxed shiat with dried seasonings, anything in a can, and a lot of foods with sauces are really nasty. Some of them, like seasoned rice, can take you to half the RDA in a cup of food or less.
2. Eat out infrequently and try to avoid everything on your plate being salty
3. Pay attention to portion/serving sizes

Going low (like 1500mg and under low) has got to be a huge PITA though.

danfrank: Cheese, salad dressing, cereal, spaghetti sauce, soups...all loaded.

I've fallen in love with Frosted Mini Wheats. They taste good, they're high in fiber and they have no sodium in them other than what's in the milk you add to the bowl. If I know I'll be eating out that day, that's my go-to breakfast.

Sodium and Heart Disease is like Cellphones and Cancer. You need to look at the phase of the moon and the most recent lottery numbers to see what today's consensus as to the link between them is.

DubyaHater: I remember reading a study somewhere that, as long as you have two fully functioning kidneys, excess salt will not raise your blood pressure.

That's got to be B.S.

Mr. Titanium: Last I checked (a few years ago) there were no clinical studies to show that sodium affects blood pressure, but cardiologists were speculating that for about 15% of the population, sodium will raise blood pressure.

There's was a recent study released that said ingesting sodium doesn't raise blood pressure. I am here to state that is absolutely bull shiat. If I increase my sodium I can watch my bp rise. I now keep it around 1000mg/day which as people have mentioned, is annoyingly hard due to farking salt in everything processed. It certainly moved me back to cooking my own food again.

It all comes down to genetics. Some people are just predisposition to certain health problems. There are fat people who are completely healthy, strong hearts low cholesterol, and perfect bp.

danfrank: I realized I had HBP about 3 months ago (I'm 38) and I've made a conscious effort to avoid high sodium foods since then. Yeeesh, it's amazing how much sodium is in ANY prefab food, and not just potato chips and raman noodles.

Cheese, salad dressing, cereal, spaghetti sauce, soups...all loaded.

You can go low sodium and still eat "normally", it just takes a little thinking ahead.

Wal-Mart sells Banquet brand individual frozen dinners for 88 cents, which seemed like a pretty good deal to me at first. Then I started being treated for hypertension and looked a little closer at the labels... not too many calories, but *every* one of them has 40 to 50 % US RDA of sodium!

It's the cooked-in salt that gets you. If you make your own meals, try not adding salt at all in the cooking stage. Generally you can add salt to taste when served and wind up with a lot less overall. The surface salt tends to have more flavor "kick" than what's cooked in.

With things like ramen (which I do enjoy), I usually use only half the packet of seasoning and less water so the flavor is amped up. Heck, you can get away with draining pretty much all of the water and just mix in about 1/3 of a packet of seasoning.

Quantum Apostrophe : That also means 88% of Americans consume too much chlorine.

Na

I really enjoyed the headline more than I think I should have.

Thanks for the laugh, subby.

lordargent: Quantum Apostrophe : That also means 88% of Americans consume too much chlorine.

Na

K

/I do use KCl instead for some things, but it tends to carry an oddly metallic flavor

kevinatilusa: Sodium and Heart Disease is like Cellphones and Cancer. You need to look at the phase of the moon and the most recent lottery numbers to see what today's consensus as to the link between them is.

Nnnno. Only stupid people ever believed in the cancer-cellphone thing to begin with, and it's pretty clear that excessive sodium promotes hypertension. Raising your blood pressure is sodium's primary purpose in your body. That's why we need it. Without sufficient sodium intake your blood pressure would drop dangerously low, you'd go into hypotensive shock, pass out and die.

On the flip side, it should hardly be shocking to find out that excessive sodium intake then causes exactly the opposite problem. If you consume too much sodium too quickly and your kidneys can't filter it fast enough, it promotes excess fluid retention, your BP rises to dangerously high levels and you are at risk for all the problems that go along with hypertension. This isn't really something we don't understand, it's pretty clear that this is what happens. It's exactly what's supposed to happen.

The only real "debate" is over how much is too much, and it's only really a "debate" in that certain food industry groups want a higher level than medical professionals do so they can keep selling crap processed junk food without scaring people away.

Regardless, 500mg is about what you actually need daily and about what you'd get in the pre-modern diet consisting primarily of fresh fruits and vegetables, grains, and unprocessed meat that our ancestors' kidneys were designed to handle for the preceding 195,000 years of our existence as a species. So the finding that eating more than five times that amount regularly could be dangerous should hardly be a shock.

I wise man once said, "A lot of things in life can kill you, salt is not one of them. So add salt to your meat."

/I think that was Bobby Flay?

I eat lots of salt. I love it. My blood pressure is usually in the range of 117/75. I don't eat processed food, nor do I eat out very much. I drink plenty of water and get regular exercise. I don't know if those factors are the reason why I don't have high blood pressure, but my sodium intake doesn't seem to negatively affect me.

engrishmajor: I eat lots of salt. I love it. My blood pressure is usually in the range of 117/75. I don't eat processed food, nor do I eat out very much. I drink plenty of water and get regular exercise. I don't know if those factors are the reason why I don't have high blood pressure, but my sodium intake doesn't seem to negatively affect me.

The bold - that's why. It's nearly impossible to cook your own food and hit the sodium levels of processed / canned foods - you'd feel ridiculous pouring the salt in long before you'd actually add enough.

There are people that actually do need to very carefully watch their salt intake that carefully, but for the vast vast majority of people, the issue isn't "oh my god how could you put salt on the potatoes!", it's the fact that with processed foods you have no real concept of how much salt/sugar is actually going into them. It's the same exact issue as sugar in sodas/drinks - they have an absurdly high amount in order to entice you to buy them, but since you aren't making it yourself you have no real concept of what's going into them.

t3knomanser: I mostly cook from scratch, so any sodium in my food is usually something I put there. And I put a damn lot of it. I cook fatty, salty foods. It's delicious.

But even dumping a teaspoon of salt into nearly every meal (okay, not really that much), I'm still getting less salt than if I were eating pre-processed, shelf-packaged foods.

That's why I always cook too. We went out to eat the other day and both of us couldn't finish because the food was sooooo salty. We realized that we had gotten used to my cooking. You have to put a little salt in your food to bring out other flavors but lord not that much.

I guess it's our Lot in wife uh. . life.

t3knomanser: I mostly cook from scratch, so any sodium in my food is usually something I put there. And I put a damn lot of it. I cook fatty, salty foods. It's delicious.

But even dumping a teaspoon of salt into nearly every meal (okay, not really that much), I'm still getting less salt than if I were eating pre-processed, shelf-packaged foods.

This is so true. Goes for fat and sometimes sugar too. Those foods are so bland they have to be extra bad to taste decent.

There is sodium in things besides NaCl.

Looks like it's potassium chloride for you!