Salt and Healthier Diet Habits

[Cali Panthers Fan]

Avoid processed/prepackaged foods and your sodium intake will plummet. If you're cooking fresh ingredients, feel free to add a pinch of salt for seasoning, but season to taste, meaning just season enough so that the food taste like what it's supposed to taste like, not until it tastes salty.

We have natural hormones and mechanisms in our body to assess our salt levels (and corresponding blood pressure) and expel excess salt. However, if you're constantly eating it, it becomes hard to get rid of it quickly enough, and your blood pressure stays consistently high.

Again, remove processed foods from your diet and most of the problem goes away.

[DoubleF]

I'm far more concerned about sugar than salt as others have mentioned. I feel like it's much easier to flush excess salt out of the body by drinking more water than it is to get rid of excess sugar in a diet.

It's kinda easy to slowly scale back salt intake and get used to food that isn't as salty. It's also quite easy to cook food with barely any salt and then add salt to the food when consuming it "to taste" as part of this scaling back. Lastly, I think it's worth mentioning that the total salt you add to a recipe isn't the total salt you're consuming. Either you're not consuming the entire dish or the salt drips off into the sauce that goes down the drain. Unless you licked your cooking container and plate clean, you didn't consume all the salt. It's seemingly easy to over estimate the salt you added to your food and underestimate the salt from other things you consumed.

[RedHot25]

Originally Posted by activeStick

You don't season your steaks with salt? Or cook pasta in water with salt added?

Correct.

Originally Posted by activeStick

Appreciate all the responses. Excited that I don't have to eat bland, tasteless food for fear of dying!

Taste is subjective, but we don't add salt...and I find the food is the opposite of this. I.e. it's tasty, not bland.

Originally Posted by activeStick

That's perhaps the difference between us. I rarely cook with anything processed and almost exclusively, will use fresh ingredients.

Same with us...

[troutman]

I thought people added salt to water to make the water boil faster. I just learned salt actually increases the boiling point of water.


https://www.thoughtco.com/adding-sal...g-water-607427

You add salt to water in order to boil the water to cook rice or pasta. Adding salt to water adds flavor to the water, which is absorbed by the food. Salt enhances the ability of chemoreceptors in the tongue to detect molecules that are perceived through the sense of taste. This is really the only valid reason, as you'll see.

Another reason salt is added to water is because it increases the boiling point of the water, meaning your water will have a higher temperature when you add the pasta, so it will cook better.

That's how it works in theory. In reality, you would need to add 230 grams of table salt to a liter of water just to raise the boiling point by 2° C. That is 58 grams per half degree Celsius for each liter or kilogram of water. That is much more salt than anyone would care to have in their food. We're talking saltier than the ocean levels of salt.

Although adding salt to water raises its boiling point, it's worth noting the salted water actually boils more quickly. That seems counter-intuitive, but you can easily test it yourself.

[kermitology]

I'm sort of appalled at the people who aren't using salt in their cooking.. it's part of the fundamentals of the culinary process.

[rotten42]

Originally Posted by Canadianman

Lowering your salt intake isn't healthier, unless you consume large amounts a day (over 5g).

In the short term, it might lower your blood pressure. But there is no strong evidence to show that it will lower your risk of heart attacks or stroke.

Agreed.
You would be better off concentrating on limiting sugar intake over salt.