Salt secrets
You probably eat a lot more salt than you realize, and that could be bad for your health
What you seeThe salt that you sprinkle onto food is easy to measure. Unfortunately, it may be just a fraction of the total salt in your daily diet.evemilla / iStockphotoWhen you look at your food, some ingredients are easy to see. For example, there is obviously milk in your cereal, cheese on your pizza and peanut butter on your toast.
But your meals are also filled with ingredients you can’t see. And you might be surprised to learn just how much those hidden items affect your health.
Salt is a perfect example of an ingredient that you might not notice, even when you eat a lot of it.
Sometimes, salt is obvious. You can see it on pretzels. You can taste it on french fries. And you can sprinkle it on green beans, straight from the shaker.
But it’s the salt we can’t see that concerns scientists most. For decades, doctors have warned patients that too much salt can be bad for their hearts. Still, most Americans continue to eat way too much salt, even when they try to avoid the salt shaker.
That’s because more than 75 percent of the salt we eat is hidden in restaurant meals, fast food and processed foods, such as spaghetti sauce from a jar, canned soup and frozen pizza. Often, you can’t even taste that the salt is there.
Heart trouble has long been considered a grown-up problem, and parents haven’t worried too much about the salt their kids eat. But new research suggests that salt is starting to affect kids — in their hearts, kidneys and waistlines.
Loading up on salt-filled potato chips, hot dogs and canned tuna today could also set young people up for even more health problems down the road.
“Most national heads of policy-making bodies in the United States and Canada and Great Britain are reaching the same conclusion,” says Lawrence Appel, professor of medicine at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine in Baltimore. “Reduce your salt intake.”
Straight to the heart
Salt is made up of two elements, or basic components: sodium and chlorine. When put in food or liquid, salt, also called sodium chloride, or NaCl, breaks into its two elements.
The chlorine part of salt isn’t that important. It’s the sodium that can stir up trouble.
Want salt with that?Some foods just cry out for extra salt, like these fries. That can make them a bad meal choice.Burke/TrioloWe need a small amount of sodium to keep our muscles working and our nerves sending messages throughout the body. But the amount of sodium we actually need is really tiny: about 500 milligrams, or less than a quarter teaspoon of salt. A little bit goes a long way.
Dietary guidelines in the United States and elsewhere recommend that healthy adults consume no more than 2,300 milligrams of sodium a day. That’s about a teaspoonful of salt.
Kids ages 9 to 13 should eat no more than 1,500 to 2,200 mg of sodium a day. Younger kids should get even less.
But the average American eats about twice the recommended daily amount. This worries doctors because too much sodium can cause the body to produce more blood. To pump the extra blood, the heart has to work extra hard. This leads to a rise in blood pressure — a measurement of how stressed out the heart is. High blood pressure, also known as hypertension, often leads to heart disease. Heart disease is the leading cause of death in the United States and can lead to ailments like heart attacks.
“Ninety percent of adult Americans develop hypertension in their lifetimes,” Appel says. It’s a big problem.
You are what you eat
Salt isn’t the only cause of hypertension. Eating lots of junk food, weighing too much and exercising too little also contribute to high blood pressure. But a large number of studies suggest that salt is a major player.
Some of the most powerful strikes against salt come from a pair of studies that took place in the 1990s. The goal of the research was to figure out if what we eat affects blood pressure, and if so, how much.
As part of the studies, hundreds of adults ate exactly what researchers told them to. Called DASH, these studies lasted for months at a time.
The results showed a sizeable drop in blood pressure in people who ate extra fruits and vegetables, lots of whole grains, low-fat dairy products and only small amounts of red meat, sweet treats and fatty foods like fast food and donuts. Eating well, the researchers concluded, is good for your heart.
But blood pressure levels dropped even more when participants who followed the diet described above also lessened their salt intake. In the first DASH study, participants ate a relatively high level of salt — 3,300 mg a day. In the second DASH study, participants’ salt intake dropped to as low as 1,500 mg a day. The low-salt, healthy eating program became known as the DASH diet, and doctors now recommend it to both adults and kids.
“The DASH diet reduces blood pressure in the whole population,” says Eva Obarzanek, a registered dietician and research nutritionist with the National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute in Bethesda, Md. Better yet, she says, the diet works “as much as any [blood-pressure] drug would.”
Well dressed?Although most salad offerings, with the exception of olives and other pickled foods, tend to be low in salt, salad dressings can have plenty. Check out the sodium content on the label before splashing plenty on your veggies.Burke/TrioloWhat’s more, studies from around the world show that hypertension and heart disease rates are lowest in places where people eat the least amount of salt. (In fact, the Yanomami Indians of South America eat very little sodium and have lower blood pressure readings than American 10-year-olds.)