Too much salt increases the blood pressure and, hence, the risk of heart disease, heart attacks and strokes. We all need a small amount of salt in our diets in order for our bodies to function efficiently but the little that our bodies need (certainly no more than 6g) occurs naturally in our diets through fresh vegetables and grains. This means that most of us are overdosing on sodium virtually every day of our lives.
So where we have to be careful is how much salt we consume and so much salt is hidden in processed foods.
Food labeling remains very confusing indeed. Salt itself is rarely listed as an ingredient on labels. Instead manufacturers prefer to list it as sodium. This requires that we multiply the sodium content by 2.5 % to arrive at the total salt content in each 100g of any given product, and we must then deduce how many grams of the product we are going to consume in order to establish our total intake of salt from that product.
Confused ? You bet! Now imagine how much more perplexed you would be if you had failing eyesight which makes the deciphering of product labels next to impossible. (The type sizes defeat even those with 20/20 vision especially when some bright spark has decided to reverse the type out of a busy background graphic or have it printed black on a dark colour as is often the case.)
Consider too that you are also of an era that has little or no idea what 100 grams equates to in the imperial weight system you understand, or that you simply don`t have the mathematical ability to start multiplying to find out how much salt you are going to be eating in a serving of that product. Shopping suddenly became a whole lot more complicated and with the ratio of staff to customers in supermarkets kept to a bare minimum. What hope is there for the concerned customer who needs help.
It is reckoned that we all eat at least 50 % more salt than we should …every single day and that 80 % of it will have entered our diets via some form or other of processed foodstuff. Processed food these days include commercially produced bread (whether pre-packaged sliced white or the allegedly fresh bread that is baked off from frozen in supermarkets).
You will also find salt in cakes, biscuits, crackers, sauces, pickles, ready meals, sweets - not to mention every daybranded breakfast cereals, so it is clearly very hard to avoid. We may deny our children access to the more obvious salt traps like crisps and other junk snacks but the chances are they will be innocently eating some form of salt laden food every bite you take.
The message is that we must all reduce our intake if we are to avoid the consequences in later life (and in some cases, not so later life) such as high blood pressure and cardiovascular disease. The problem is that salt makes a lot of our food tastier and sheer force of habit has most of reaching for the cooking or the table salt without a second thought.
For years, many processed baby foods contained salt as well as sugar meaning that many of us have grown up having become used to foods that are salty, sweet or, indeed, both. It can take a good while for us to get used to eating foods which are entirely free of added salt.
The good news! Gradually, as our taste buds adjust, we will find that we relish the unadulterated true flavour of our food and with the judicious use of fresh and dried herbs, lemon and lime juice, added salt can become completely superfluous.
Similarly merely switching from salted & roasted peanuts to raw peanuts; or from branded peanut butter that contains added salt to an unrefined pure peanut butter will save on the salt intake. Sea salt too delivers a reduction in salt intake.
If you are trying to limit your salt intake because you agree your health matters , take it one day at a time and slowly become   aware of the hidden salt traps described above. You will be pleased you did because we know you will benefit.
Your health matters to us!
Musa Eric Dumakude
Independent Herbalife Distributor
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