KareninTN wrote:In the video of your lecture, when you are talking about your guidelines for sodium, on the slide near the bottom, it says "exceptions" and underneath that, "condiments". I can't see below that. Were there any other exceptions other than condiments? What are your guidelines about condiments? (I use a lot of condiments!
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karenturtle
Hi Karen
The exceptions to the sodium guideline listed on the slide were "condiments" and "recipes".
For condiments, the sodium ratio can be over 1:1, even upwards of 4:1 or maybe even 6:1 for 3 reasons.
1) there are few condiments that will make the 1:1 ratio
2) hopefully, we are using small amounts of condiments so the contribution of the sodium will be minimal
3) hopefully we adding the condiment to some healthy food, which will help "dilute" out the ratio.
For instance, if you have a salsa and you use 1/2 cup on a medium baked potato. If the 1/2 cup of salsa is 36 calories, and the sodium is 144 mgs that is a 4:1 ratio, which would normally fail. But, the potato is 161 calories and 17 mgs of sodium. So, together, the total calorie of the potato and the salsa is 197 calories and the total sodium is 161, which is below the 1:1 ratio.
In regard to recipes, there is no real "exception" however, the point I was going to make in the talk is that you can use the 1:1 as a guide to how much sodium to add to a recipe. Lets say you make a recipe for a vegetable soup and lets say the total recipe is for around 8 servings and the total calories of the full recipes is around 800 calories. And you analyze the recipe and see that the sodium for the total recipe is 100 mgs. You now know that you can add enough salt to raise the total sodium to 800 mgs so the ratio for the total recipe will be 1:1. In this case, you would be able to add up to 1/3 of a tsp of salt to the recipe.
However, let me caution you to not "push" the limits of these exceptions to far because if you do, you can easily exceed the recommend amounts and the upper limit.
Even if you were to follow the 1:1 on everything you consume, you would exceed the recommended amounts. The guidelines are to help you make healthier choices amongst packaged products which should be a small part of ones intake. The guidelines will only work if you make most of your choices from whole natural foods as they occur in nature.
In Health
Jeff Novick, MS, RD