by Troy Hurst DC, DAAPM

Sugar and salt, if one isn’t making the news, the other one is. Consuming too much sugar will make you gain weight, considering its calorie count, that’s understandable.  Salt is a more complicated subject. It raises your blood pressure, but how it does this dastardly deed is a mystery to most of us. Salt plays a key role in your electrolyte balance. Too much salt can keep the volume of blood circulating in the body higher than it should be.

When that happens, the high blood volume puts pressure on blood vessel walls. To protect themselves, the blood vessels thicken and narrow. That means the heart has to work harder to push the blood through a smaller space and the harder the push the higher the blood pressure. There may be other factors working at the same time to raise the pressure, but doctors at Johns Hopkins and the Institute of Medicine’s Committee on Strategies to Reduce Sodium Intake believe salty diets are the main culprit.

Salt peaks the flavor of many foods, but Americans are going overboard on using it. They consume up to twice as much as they should, which could be the reason why nearly one-third of adult Americans have high blood pressure.

Avoiding the salt shaker can help reduce consumption. But processed foods contain 75 percent to 80 percent of the salt in your diet. You never see it and can’t identify it when you eat it. You should only have 150 to 200 mg of salt at a meal, so read packaged and canned food labels to see how much they contain. Choose fresh foods when possible. Processing always includes a lot of salt. A serving of potatoes au gratin from dry mix, for example may contain 50 times as much salt as one baked potato. Rinsing canned vegetables before cooking can help.

Dining out can be a problem. Some meals at chain restaurants contain two to five days worth of the daily recommended salt limit, so eating in is better than eating out.