Joel Fuhrman - Eat To Live

Eat to Live 241

of platelets to clot. I recommend that people resist adding salt to

foods and look for salt-free canned goods and soups. Since most salt

comes from processed foods, bread, and canned goods, it shouldn't

be that hard to avoid added sodium.

That said, if you desire to salt your food, do so only after it is on

the table and you are ready to eat it. It will taste saltier if the salt is

right on the surface of the food. You can add lots of salt yet hardly

taste it if the salt is added to the vegetables or soup while they are

cooking. Vege Base instant soup mix by Vogue has a nice salty flavor

and can be added to salads or sprinkled on food. Use herbs, spices,

lemon, vinegar, or other non-salt seasonings to flavor food. Condi-

ments such as ketchup, mustard, soy sauce, teriyaki sauce, and relish

are very high in sodium, so if you can't resist them, use the low-

sodium varieties sparingly.

Ideally, all your foods should have less than one milligram of

sodium per calorie. Natural foods contain about half a milligram of

sodium per calorie. If a food has a serving size of 100 calories yet con-

tains 400 mg of sodium, it is a very high salt food. If it has 100 calo-

ries and less than 100 mg of sodium, it is a food with hardly any

added salt and is an appropriate food for your diet. Try to rarely use

products with more than 200 mg per 100 calories. Within these

guidelines, you should be able to keep your average daily sodium in-

take around or below 1,000 mg.

If you don't use salt, your taste buds adjust with time and your

sensitivity to taste salt improves. When you are using lots of salt in

your diet, it weakens your taste for salt and makes you feel that food

tastes bland unless it is heavily seasoned or spiced. The DASH study

observed the same phenomenon that I have noted for years — it

took some time for one's salt-saturated taste buds to get used to a low

sodium level. If you follow my nutritional recommendations strictly,

without compromise, avoiding all processed foods or highly salted

loods, your ability to detect and enjoy the subtle flavors in fruits and

vegetables will improve as well.

What about coffee?

Clearly, excessive consumption of caffeinated beverages is danger-

ous. Caffeine addicts are at higher risk of cardiac arrhythmias that

could precipitate sudden death.^21 Coffee raises blood pressure and

raises both cholesterol and homocysteine, two risk factors for heart

disease.^22