Planning Meals with Heart-Healthy Sodium Levels

After my husband's recent heart attack we were given maximum values for several segments of his nutritional allowances. Keeping the sodium below 2000 mg/ day, while providing tasty meals, has turned out the be the biggest challenge.

Almost every processed food item in the grocery store is loaded with sodium. Even many items marked "reduced sodium" are still way too high to use and stay under 2000 mg/day.

This requirement means that many items now have to be prepared from scratch. In some cases this is time-consuming. For example, Reduced sodium chicken broth (commonly used in low sodium diets to improve flavor) is reduced to between 500 and 600 mg/ cup, depending on the brand. This is still a huge amount of sodium! Chicken broth with no added sodium cannot usually be purchased, so making your own which will include only the sodium which occurs naturally in low levels in raw chicken may be required.

Another common ingredient that is easy to make at home is pureed tomato for use in any tomato-based recipe. Cook the tomatoes down with some onion, celery, paprika, and a bay leaf. When the liquid is significantly reduced, remove the bay leaf, process in a blender, and then freeze or can the puree.

However, lots of recipes can just have the salt left out, or drastically reduced. But if you are cooking with things from the store like mushroom soup, tomato soup, tomato sauce, or canned vegetables (even some frozen ones), you will have trouble. Condiments are always a problem: ketchup, mustard, pickles, olives, etc... check the labels and beware.

Frozen chicken, and virtually all turkey unless it is organic has been injected with "flavor enhancers," which add huge amounts of sodium. Buy fresh chicken, straight from the farm if possible. You may have to search harder to find turkey which is not artificially pumped full of salt.