We all know we shouldn’t eat so much salt, but how can you cook properly without it? Easy. With just a few basic changes in the kitchen, your food will be tastier – and much healthier too.
Salt livens up food, which is why we find it so hard to resist. And we do need salt, of course – it’s vital for keeping our body fluids at the right concentration and helping our cells to absorb nutrients. We can’t make salt ourselves, so we have to ingest it.
The Food Standards Agency (FSA) recommends that we eat no more than 6g of salt a day – that’s about one level teaspoon. In actual fact we consume closer to 9g, which is two-and-a-half times more than we need – and that’s dangerous.
FSA research shows that if you eat too much salt you’re more likely to develop high blood pressure – which in turn makes you three times more likely to develop heart disease or have a stroke than someone with normal blood pressure. Left untreated, high blood pressure can also lead to kidney failure and eye damage.
Around 16 million people in the UK have high blood pressure and because most sufferers don’t have any symptoms, without regular check-ups the condition can go undetected, sometimes with fatal results.
More than 60,000 of us die from stroke each year, and more than a quarter of a million from heart disease. However, the salt we add to our food only makes up a quarter of what we actually eat.
The rest lurks in the food we buy. Added for seemingly good reasons – as a preservative, binding agent, or bacteria-inhibitor, or for colour and consistency, the fact remains there’s just too much of it.
There are some simple steps you can take to reduce or ditch salt completely. Make a mental check list of what to cut down on when you’re shopping: bacon, canned and cured meat such as ham, sausages, smoked fish, canned fish in brine and tomato sauce, shellfish, cheese, biscuits, soups, crisps, salted nuts, stock cubes – OK, pretty much everything!
Become a label-worrier too. The salt content of a product is high if it’s more than 1.5g per 100g, and low if it’s 0.3g or less per 100g.
Salt is a habit – and one to break. Food won't taste bland if you cut back you’ll rediscover the natural flavours of what you’re eating. Your palate will readjust and your food will simply taste of itself. And, when you do eat salt, remember that although sea salt is pure and tastes great, it still contains the same sodium levels as highly refined table salt. In other words, as far as your health goes, it’s exactly the same.