Anyone else notice the new FDA sodium recommendations? The nice people with the gov't have reset the number down from 2400mg to 1500mg.
Guess they are serious about getting us to eat unprocessed grains, fruits, veggies, and such because a cursory look at getting in the other recommendations for food every day makes it darn hard to stay below 1500mg.
Let's start with breakfast: Want to try and get in a couple of grain servings right off the bat? You'd better be eating shredded wheat if you like cold cereal--most of the others, including stuff you wouldn't expect, like Cheerios, crank in with about 300 mg of sodium for a "2 grain serving" (think 70 cal of grain-based substance as a serving). Add a cup of milk at 120mg, and you're suddenly at close to 1/3 of the sodium for the day, and you haven't even added something like toast (about 120-190/slice of bread) or an egg (65 mg for the egg, about 100mg for equivalent egg substiute).
You have more options with hot cereals, as long as you don't make them with salt. But once you start adding flavourings or go to the instant versions, the sodium levels go right up.
Lunch? That old dieter's staple, cottage cheese and fruit, is cranking in at 450mg for a half cup of cottage cheese. You *know* that lunch meats are a sodium party--3 oz of ham comes in at 1000 mg of sodium. Tuna has 300 mg for 3 oz, less if you rinse it--guess it's okay to have it with the bread, then. Commercial soups are salt water with interesting bits in them--they crank anywhere from 500-1000mg a serving.
Interestingly enough, the tiny pack (the one that used to be a single serving?) of potato chips has 150mg sodium. Go deal.
Dinner? Okay, pasta. As long as you don't salt the water, you're good. The sauce is a problem, though--a half cup of tomato spaghetti sauce has from 350-500 mg of sodium. You're not going to add an Italian sausage to *that*, much less an ounce of shredded cheese.
Soy sauce is essentially dark brown salt water, no matter how tasty it is. The ketchup or steak sauce for your meat has 150-300mg/ serving.
Frozen dinners? Unless you're specifically going for lower sodium, Healthy Choice is the only one I know who can be reliably counted on to have guideline sodium values. Let's face it--if you're cutting out the fat in the food, the flavour has to come from *somewhere*, and salt's cheap.
Don't get me started on fast food....
You get the idea, though--unless the gov't expects us all to become low-sodium Alice Waters, making everything fresh, so we know what goes into it, the chance of being able to adhere to the new sodium levels (and ladies, it gets even better--after age 50, they lower it to 1300mg!) is at best, an uphill battle, and for most of is, darned close to impossible.
Posted by lsefton at August 1, 2004 06:03 PMI've been battling borderline high blood pressure all year. Reading the labels for sodium has been an eye-opening experience. It's astounding how much salt and fat food manufacturers add. It *is* almost impossible to eat an healthy diet without turning into Alice Waters.
Posted by: stephanie at September 1, 2004 09:03 AM