What Can You Do When Salt Is off the Table?
What Can You Do When Salt Is off the Table?
When the holy grail of seasoning isn't available, you can still make good food
It’s the kind of thing your general practitioner tells you at your annual checkup:
Your blood pressure is elevated, she says.
What do I do, doc?
Lose weight.
Ugh.
Reduce stress.
Are you kidding? Do you read the news?
And eat a lot less sodium.
What do you mean?
Salt. Less salt, she clarifies with a shrug. Biology.
Defiant, you pick up a family-sized bag of potato chips on the way home, eating one after the other, feeling your stress level reach new heights.
You’re not alone; far from it. The Centers for Disease Control says that 119 million American adults aged 18 and over—that’s more than 48% of us—have hypertension to one degree or another. It’s a risk factor for heart disease, stroke, and a handful of other woes, and in 2021 it was a primary or contributing cause of death in over 690,000 cases in the US.
The older you are, the more urgent it is to get hypertension under control, but one in every 25 kids between 12 and 29 also suffer from it, so it’s not just an old person’s problem. Also, the effects are cumulative over time, so prevention is everything, and it’s never too early (or too late!) to wrest your sodium intake into control.
I know, I know. Boring. But important things often are.
The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) sets a Recommended Daily Allowance (RDA) for sodium at 2300 milligrams per day, or about one teaspoon. But the average American consumes about 3400 milligrams per day – about 50% more than the RDA.
Most of this sodium is stealth, found not just in salty snacks but in packaged foods like soup, bread, condiments, canned or bottled products, and restaurant or fast food. That makes sense: A primary reason that these things taste good, and that we crave them, is that they contain a lot of salt. Even if they don’t taste salty, they employ large amounts of sodium to enhance other flavors and to make us want more of them. It’s an effective technique—salt sells, because our desire for it lives in our very ids.
We are hard-wired to love the stuff for two intertwined reasons. The first is biological. Our bodies require salt (in small amounts) to function optimally. The second is evolutionary. For most of human evolution, salt was scarce. Like water, protein, sugars, and calories in general, our DNA tells us, through our palates, to grab it when we can. But salt is everywhere now, cheap and plentiful and ubiquitous. And like many things that are cheap and plentiful and ubiquitous, too much is too much.
Avoiding this invisible sodium should be straightforward. Conceptually, it’s simple to ditch packaged snacks and drive-through burgers. (Maybe not easy, but simple.) With discipline, you can curb your enthusiasm. But you’ve gotta eat, and so prefab food is replaced with food from home. For me, that meant dialing back my reliance on salt in my own kitchen.
The first and easiest experiment, which I knew would be unsatisfying but had to try for the sake of diligence, was simply to cook a meal without salt. Just ditch the stuff, no substitution. No shock: My roasted chicken was dull, my potatoes were sad, and my green beans tasted like nothing at all. I ate it, dutifully, wrapped up the leftovers (I saw chicken salad, potato salad, and pasta salad in my future) and went to bed in a funk.
But I woke up optimistic. I love food, dammit, and I was not going to let this restriction compromise my pleasure. I knew a 1:1 replacement wasn’t possible, because nothing else has the suite of chemical properties unique to salt that can, in many cases (like roasted chicken), truly transform ingredients on their own merits (salt restructures protein strands to make meat more tender, and seasons deeply to make chicken taste more like chicken). So I had to find a workaround. I had to fall in love with other things.
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