The Ultimate Low-Salt Diet Cookbook: Includes Diet Tips, Meal Plan and Lots of Healthy and Delicious Recipes

Salt and health


Eating too much salt can damage your health. A high salt diet will slowly raise your blood pressure which increases your risk of heart disease and stroke.
Adults should eat less than 5-6g of salt a day and children much less.

Who is at risk?
Certain groups of the population are particularly sensitive to the effects of too much salt. They are at a higher risk of developing high blood pressure and other health problems related to a high salt intake and they need to take particular care to keep their salt intake to a minimum and lead a healthy lifestyle. These groups include people of black African and South Asian descent. World wide, other vulnerable groups are children, like blood pressure and the risk of future health problems can be influenced from a young age; men, due to a higher risk of heart disease; and the elderly, as blood pressure increases with age.

What can you do?
The good news is that with simple diet and lifestyle changes, such as improving your diet, increasing exercise and reducing alcohol consumption, you can make a big improvement to your health.
Reducing your salt intake will significantly reduce your risk of developing health problems.

Salt in your favorite foods
Salt can be found where you least expect it. Most of the salt we eat is hidden in the food we buy, particularly processed foods such as ready meals, pizza, bread, pasta and curry sauces, baked beans and sausages. Almost everyone eats at least some of these types of foods, so it pays to cook food yourself from scratch. Salt can quickly add up throughout the day so think about what’s in every meal and snack, not just your evening meal.
We are all eating too much salt. The good news is that it is easy to cut down on salt!

Labeling
Many countries now have product labeling making it possible to check the salt content of the food we buy in supermarkets and shops. By looking at the label we can add up how much salt we are eating each day. If the label only gives the sodium content, you need to multiply sodium by 2.5 to get the salt content.

Cooking at home
Try cooking your favourite meals at home more often, use the low salt recipes in this book to make a drastic reduction to your salt intake.