Too much sodium is unhealthy, yet salt is an important part of the diet. Learn how to reduce the amount of sodium in your diet from a registered dietician in this video.
Use sea salt
Use herbs as alternative
Use whole foods
Rachael Richardson is a registered Dietician and a licensed Nutritionist with Nutrolution, Inc. in Miami, Florida.
RACHAEL RICHARDSON: Hi. I'm Rachael Richardson, and I'm a registered dietitian and a licensed nutritionist. I'm from Nutrolution, Inc., and we are located in Miami, Florida. This is the beginner's guide to eating less sodium. The first thing to remember about eating less sodium is that our bodies actually do need sodium, so the point is not to cut out all salt from your diet. The point is to focus on whole foods and to actually, I recommend, switching from using iodized salt to sea salt. When you use sea salt, you end up getting minerals from the sea and minerals in balance, which are going to help your entire electrolyte balance and your muscular health and your nervous system health versus just getting the sodium which actually negatively affects all of those areas. So one interesting story that I've read is that in around the 1950s, the dairy industry decided to start giving their cows iodized salt instead of sea salt and what happened over a period of months was that their cows became very, very sick. So this was all in efforts to start changing over the mainstream salt in our diets, and so they changed it for all of the human consumption but they changed it back to sea salt for the cows. So I think that's really instrumental to remember is that iodized salt is much different from sea salt. Another thing to remember is when you stick to whole foods, you don't have to get concerned about measuring how much sodium is coming into your foods because most of the sodium actually comes from processed foods. So if you're sticking to raw, natural foods, you're welcome to add sea salt to the foods to make them taste good. The other way to improve the flavor of your foods is to add more herbs, basil, parsley, oregano, chives, garlic and vegetables. The five most important points to remember are we actually need sodium; switch from iodized salt to sea salt; use herbs instead of salt to flavor your food; stick to more whole foods; and enjoy your food.
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