Ten ways to keep your daily salt intake down

As part of William’s illness he is on a low-salt diet. At first I took this to mean a no-added salt diet, but when I added up all the salt he was consuming in a day we realised he – and all the children – were eating well over their daily recommended allowance. Crap mum alert!

Children between the age of 1 and 3 years should have no more than 2g salt a day.

Because I never add salt and I watch their intake of instant meals like fish fingers and salty snacks (no crisps for instance), I thought their diet, which admittedly includes sausages, ham, cheese and bacon now and again, was fine. We rarely eat other processed food so I didn’t think we would need to do much to William’s diet. But the problem lies apparently with not only those processed foods we do eat, but things we eat everyday as part of a regular diet, specifically breakfast cereals and bread (which we eat in some form at almost every meal) and even things like noodles.

So I am now perfecting my no-salt bread making skills and I have decimated the breakfast cereal cupboard and larder and secretly thrown out anything salty. At first I thought I might die from the blandness of our diet. How could food be so utterly tasteless? But a few weeks on and we have all become accustomed to the new flavour. In addition, I can bore dinner party guests rigid by quoting exact sodium or salt levels of most foods. It’s win-win all round!

So if you are interested in keeping you family’s salt intake down – and let’s face it, most people are not but you should anyway – here are my top ten tips:

1. Find out the recommended daily sodium intake for the members of your family. Children should have a lot less salt than adults. The sodium level (rather than salt) is what’s important because it is found in other products like sodium bicarbarbonate.

1 to 3 years – 2 g salt a day (0.8g sodium)
4 to 6 years – 3g salt a day (1.2g sodium)
7 to 10 years – 5g salt a day (2g sodium)
11 and over (including adults) – 6g salt a day (2.4g sodium)

2. Look at sodium levels on food labels. You may be surprised at how much salt is in some everyday products.

3. Don’t cook with salt or add salt to your food. Put the salt shaker at the back of the cupboard and leave it there.

4. Cook from scratch whenever possible. Make this easier by cooking extra and freezing the leftovers or use leftover roast meat in sandwiches.

5. Make your own no/low salt bread. Or look for low salt breads by comparing labels.

I make no-salt bread by using 350g of water, 575g of bread flour, 1 tbsp of sugar, 1 and a half teaspoons of yeast and a splash of vinegar because we are in a hard-water area. Cook as per your breadmaker instructions. Brown flour makes an edible but not very light loaf which is best eaten while still warm, but white flour bread works pretty well.

6. Look for breakfast cereals with lower sodium levels. We’ve swapped Special K and Cheerios for Shredded Wheat and porridge. Weetos and Sugar Puffs are high in sugar but low in salt so Willam can have them now and again and then he doesn’t feel like the world has come to an end.

7. Buy low salt versions of processed food. For instance you can buy low salt, low sugar Heinz baked beans. They do taste different to start with but then you get used to them.

8. Most lunch meats, processed meats, fish and cheese are high in salt. Consider alternative sandwich fillings, try cheeses like Emmental and mozarella which are lower in salt than most other cheeses and swap processed foods for whole foods (for example, have roasted chicken rather than ham) wherever possible.

I now make no-salt sausages by mixing very lean minced pork, chopped onion, garlic and chopped oregano (you can also add no-salt breadcrumbs too if you want) together into sausage shapes and frying them in olive oil. Easy-peasy. They do look and taste different but they are a really good alternative.

9. Some condiments and sauces are high in salt. For instance English mustard in a jar is high in salt (but there’s no salt if you make it from mustard powder).

10. Use spices instead of salt. Spices, herbs, garlic, ginger, onion and lemon juice all add flavour if you’re missing salt.

So these are my tips for reducing salt intake. Some are more time consuming than others but you don’t have to do them all. And even if you do – for health reasons like high blood pressue or kidney problems – it becomes easier once you have done the initial homework and got into the routine of knowing what to buy and cook with.

Useful links:

Reduce Sodium and Salt inYour Diet

Tagged as: healthy eating, low-salt