Living Low-Sodium: A guide for understanding our relationship with sodium and how to be successful in adhering to a low-sodium diet

Synopsis

There’s no avoiding the fact that we consume too much sodium.  Despite knowing the health benefits inherent to a lower sodium intake, successfully decreasing the amount of sodium in our diet can be quite difficult given the prevalence of high-sodium foods that exist all around us.

For some of us, taking on a low-sodium lifestyle is a choice, while for others it is a necessity due to an underlying medical condition.  To assist us in reducing our sodium we can find a wealth of cookbooks on the market that provide low-sodium recipe options.  But cookbooks don’t help us understand sodium.  They don’t tell us why sodium is needed in our body, or why too much is problematic.  And they don’t teach us how to reduce sodium in our diet.

Living Low-Sodium was written to address these issues and serve as a comprehensive resource for individuals who have decided to take on a low-sodium lifestyle.  It is written by a scientist and educator who understands the science of sodium but who also wants to explain the ‘how’ and the ‘why’ of sodium’s interaction with our body.  Furthermore, it is written by someone who has successfully navigated his own low-sodium journey for nearly a decade.

With this book, you will learn:

• What sodium is
• How sodium is utilized by our body
• What medical conditions are affected by sodium
• Sodium’s role in the food industry, including why sodium is a part of so many foods and recipes
• How to recognize the sodium content of food items
• How to easily reduce sodium in your own diet

Excerpts

The use of salt for seasoning is not its only need in a recipe, though, as certain sodium-based compounds are necessary to generate a reaction that is an essential part of the food’s production.  For example, quick breads (e.g. banana bread) require compounds like baking soda in the ingredient list because of the compound’s ability to generate a specific reaction.  To understand how all of this works we need to consider a phenomenon commonly known as ‘potential hydrogen’, or “pH”.  In relatively scary science terms, pH represents the negative log of hydrogen concentration in a water solution.  In less scary terms, pH is the concentration of hydrogen ions present in a solution.  As hydrogen ion concentration increases, the pH becomes more acidic.  Conversely, as hydrogen ion concentration decreases, the solution becomes less acidic. 

Sodium chloride plays several roles in the food industry including not only food preservation and flavor enhancement, but also in helping food maintain its color as well as influencing food texture.  Salt’s diversity in the food industry is largely the reason that Americans consume almost twice the recommended intake of sodium each day, and nearly eight times the body’s reported requirement of 500mg of sodium per day [1].  By far though, the two predominant uses of sodium chloride in the food industry are for food preservation and flavor enhancement (e.g. “palatability”).  As we reviewed in Chapter 4, excess consumption of sodium chloride among those of us with certain medical conditions can have unfortunate complications, making it imperative that sodium intake is closely monitored.