Salty old dog

I’ve now gone a whole week on a low sodium (ish) diet and here are some observations.

I salt a lot! Did you watch those cooking shows in the 80s and 90s? You remember, the ones on PBS and then later there was an entire channel devoted just to cooking shows. Those shows told you to salt everything. Making pasta? SALT THE WATER. I literally tear the top off a box of Kosher salt and dip my fingers in there to cook food. I salt everything liberally.

Boiled eggs are probably my most egregious example. Since I was little, I would peel the egg and then coat the entire surface with salt. Then bite into the egg, and salt the insides! I even know a trick for keeping cut apples from getting brown! A light salt-water solution. let them sit in there for a few minutes, then rinse them off.

Salt, folks. Salt.

I also salt the crap outta my bread. For a three loaf batch, I was using at least a tablespoon of kosher salt. That’s at least 7,000mg of sodium. And my daily routine was basically “oh, I’m a little hungry, let’s cut a hunk of bread and put some butter on it.”

I also made my own ramen and homemade chashu (pork belly) and would cut that up and just eat some leftovers whenever. And of course, pizza. Pizza is a real killer from a sodium standpoint because my dough is already high sodium, then I added tomato sauce (high sodium), cheese (not great!), and typically loved to put kalamata olives and prosciutto! Do I need to tell you that those are salty? And while I was making pizza I would eat a slice of prosciutto and a handful of olives along with some cheese.

Holy cow I ate a lot of salt. My first couple of days where I was consciously trying to use less salt I still hit over 3500mg per day. That was mostly because I would eat something first and then wonder how much salt was in it! I’ve changed that behaviour and I’m much better now.

So, I’ve been cooking with less salt. And it’s not terrible. I made some refried beans the other day, topped them with a little salsa (you have to be careful, some salsas are salt bombs), and some sliced avocado and that was dinner. It was tasty too! I did have to skip the tortillas. Even the mini flour tortillas have a lot of sodium.

I also made a channa masala (chickpea curry) and instead of salt, I just used a lot more of the flavorful ingredients like onions, garlic, ginger, cumin, cinnamon, pepper, capsicum, cloves, etc. Then I measured 1/4tsp of salt (400mg) and it was good! I had it for dinner and I’m having it for lunch.

It’s an adjustment of my tastebuds. I can taste when things are salty now. For example (and this is my second observation) shrimp. I was at costco during this week’s coronavirus panic and they had some shrimp cocktail on sale for $4 off. I figured the cocktail sauce was salty but I could eat the shrimp without any problem! As soon as the first shrimp went in I knew there was a problem. I looked it up and sure enough, frozen shrimp is high in sodium.

Baby carrots are another weird one. It’s not “high” sodium but for 35 calories of baby carrots, you get 65mg of sodium. It’s not a diet breaker or anything but it is odd to find sodium in a vegetable. I figured they were sodium free. And it’s not the baby carrots, it’s all carrots. 100g of carrot has 69mg of sodium.

I also (third observation!) discovered that the USDA web site has the nutritional information of every food. You want to know how much sodium is in kung pow chicken? They got it! Biryani? They got it! And in fact, all of those so-called diet and food information web sites which pump out a thousand ads when you land on their site, pull their information from the USDA Food Data API. You should check it out.

https://fdc.nal.usda.gov/index.html

Fourth observation – I lost a lot of weight very rapidly when I cut back on my salt. I know, I know, it’s all water but I lost 6 lbs this week. My weight normally fluctuates quite a bit but I weighed myself every day and my weight went down every day. Yes, I am drinking lot of water, mom. I expect this to stabilize and maybe even go back up as my body adjusts to my new diet.

And not only have I lost weight but I feel slightly better. Like not so puffy? Does that make sense? My hands felt funny last week. Like tight. I don’t know how else to explain it.

And finally.. I also decided that I’m allowed to have some table salt on my steak. Actually, it’s part of a whole philosophy where I try not to be too rigid about my diet. I am trying to average 2000mg of sodium a day. That doesn’t mean I have to hit that mark every day. I just have to be conscious of my salt intake.

Going forward, I need to figure out what I’m going to eat when I go to as restaurant. Or maybe I don’t. Maybe I just need to accept that that one meal will probably have all the sodium I take in that day and eat nothing but sodium-free food for breakfast and lunch.

Anyway, thanks for listening. Maybe we will have some Arsenal stuff to talk about later this week.

Qq

26 comments

  1. Next? Try gluten-free. Or– even just lower your gluten intake significantly. Your energy level will uptick. Comfort foods are heavily glutenous. Found it helps with sensitivity to arthritic symptoms.

    It’s difficult to avoid glutens. But it will reward you over time.

    1. LOL

      A couple things here: I didn’t ask for advice and I am never going gluten free.

      Cheers.

        1. It’s weird to me that I can post one thing about my diet and here and on twitter I get hundreds of people offering me unsolicited advice. Actually not weird, annoying.

          1. Guilty on both counts.
            Been called much worse.

            Maybe someone finds it ‘useful’.
            Cheers.

  2. Eating at pretty much any restaurant is a guaranteed sodium shower. Even at places that I thought were more healthful, the sodium counts are off the charts – I avoid fast food especially – take a look at the sodium there. But “fine dining” restaurants bathe food in salt and butter too. Salt and pepper rubs on meat and fish are standard cooking procedure, and make the sodium count ridiculous. Kudos for taking this on. It’s something my father and grandfather had to do for their BP issues. Counting my lucky stars that I don’t have it. Keep at it, Tim. Your ability to tackle challenges like this and sobriety head-on are an inspiration.

  3. For the next time any 7 am Kickoff readers are The Emirates:

    NEIL DIAMOND: hands
    CDC: yes, wash them for at least 20 seconds.
    NEIL DIAMOND: touching hands
    CDC: no, please don’t touch hands
    NEIL DIAMOND: reaching out
    CDC: avoid that too
    NEIL DIAMOND: touching me
    CDC: Oh hell
    NEIL DIAMOND: TOUCHING YOU

  4. The Rock has a cheat meal once a week. A complete blow-out with all the whistles and bells. It’s a psychological thing to help you reward yourself for sticking to your diet all week. Works a treat

  5. Good luck with your diet Tim. As a couple of other comments have indicated its hard to decrease sodium in your diet. It comes in so many I places you wouldn’t expect.

    I did not get a chance to comment on the scatter charts regarding Ceballos and Ozil from the previous post. I have to admit I am skeptical that those charts actually have any predictive value with regard to those players ability to provide a true positive influence on our game. If you look hard enough you can find a statistical correlation for almost anything you want to prove. For example, I saw one study in american football where they showed a significant statistical correlation over a 5 year period between the number of letters in the quarterbacks last name and his propensity to fumble. The more letters in his surname the more likely he is to fumble. I understand that is a ridiculous example but it makes the point that just the fact that you can find a statistical correlation for anything if you search hard enough and much of the time those correlations are mostly meaningless in terms of predicting any actual positive or negative effects on the games.

  6. Ozil touches the ball more often then any of our players in the attacking half. Just by happenstance anyone who touches the ball a lot in the attacking half is going to sometimes make a pass that leads to another pass that leads to a shot. The fact that we complain all the time about how poor we are at creating high percentage scoring opportunities indicates that whatever he and everyone else is doing has not really been very effective. With regard to Ceballos his sample size is quite small so the data is suspect and we don’t have anyone else in the squad who is effective at moving the ball forward and making progressive passes.

  7. Pre processed supermarket food is also packed with sodium, so you can’t win. Sugar, as well. The argument being that the food would taste so bland otherwise, people wouldn’t buy it. If you ever find yourself in Florida, go into Publix and buy a tin of baked beans. Unbelievable sweet, presumably to get kids to eat it. Try it for dessert with ice cream, then go and weigh yourself.
    Regarding stats, one of my Economics set books was “How to Lie with Statistics”. Politicians do it all the time. Not difficult to “prove” anything you want.
    “There are lies, damned lies and statistics” -Winston Churchill.
    As a general rule, people will always tend to “selectively gather evidence to confirm an already held belief.”
    Cops are the worst. Football fans come second, myself included.

  8. Important match Saturday, as to finish 8th or better, Arsenal will need to beat both West Ham & Norwich City. Recent matches show neither is a push-over.

  9. I had focused on calories and weight loss successfully. Sodium reduction seems like an entire mountain to climb.

    I was having lunch with a professional colleague who is 20 years my senior and he was telling me about his efforts to go lower sodium. As I ate soup and chili at BJs. It was almost depressing.

    Respect to you tackling this, Tim.

    1. My choices are diet or drugs. Considering the long-term benefit of improved diet (I’m also increasing my fiber intake to a goal of 40g a day) I feel like this is the most logical choice (for me).

      1. Whenever we’re in the US, we use Whole Foods. Always seems pretty good to me. Doesn’t seem to have been to badly Amazonized. Wherever you shop, you have to get in the habit of reading the labels. My wife does. I can never be bothered to get my glasses out to read the small print.

  10. When I lived in the US I was a bit shocked how hard it was to eat even slightly healthily. All the fresh produce at the supermarket was terrible – mealy, tasteless, watery. All the produce at organic stores and farmers’ markets was super expensive and no better than the standard stuff we get here. And there was usually half an aisle of fruit and veg compared with sixteen aisles of frozen and processed food.

    Which is a long-winded way of saying good luck to you, it can’t be easy.

    1. I live in a pretty nice enclave in Washington state. I have a lot of choices and the organic stuff is much better, reasonably priced, and more widely available. But yeah, I did say that I felt priviledged to be able to control my diet this way. It takes a lot of work and planning. For example, I am going to go to dinner with a friend this weekend and on that day I’ll just have to have almost no salt leading up to dinner. That means almost nothing but fresh veg.

  11. Change table salt to sea salt. Guess how much magnesium and potassium has table salt?
    I used to have blood pressure like you in the 20-s and now I’m over 40 and my blood pressure is like 110/70. I eat a few tons of veggies per year(pressure cooked). That mean a lotof good minerals!

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