Q: I hate the taste of food without salt. Why and how can I cut back?

A: Substituting salt with herbs and spices could be a lifesaver. New research from the Harvard Medical School has indicated that cutting your salt intake to 7g a day will reduce your risk of developing heart disease by 25 per cent. Currently guidelines on daily amounts of salt are 6g – about a teaspoon – which may not sound like much but any more than that is known to contribute to health problems such as hypertension or high blood pressure, kidney damage and strokes.

You also need to bear in mind that one slice of pizza contains around 1 g and even a serving of plain yogurt may contain 0.5 g so it is easy to exceed the recommended amount.

On food labels, you may find salt listed as sodium and to work out the salt content you need to multiply this by 2.5. You do need to stop adding it to your food so get rid of your salt shaker and try using fresh or dried herbs, spices, lemon juice or balsamic vinegar instead.

If you are used to the salty taste give yourself time to adjust by cutting down so you gradually lose your taste for it. If you’ve given up sugar in your drink you’ll understand how this works; your taste buds adjust after a few weeks and when they have adjusted you just don’t want to go back to a cup of tea with sugar as it would taste too sweet. It’s the same with salt. Once you starting cutting down you’ll wonder how on earth you enjoyed eating food that tasted so salty.

This entry was posted on Saturday, September 1st, 2007 at 1:30 pm and is filed under Ask Marilyn. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.