Tightening the Belt on a Too Highly Salted Diet

The next six months are certain to be the most tasteless of my life--literally. Having wallowed in sloth, a carefree glutton since hyperactive youth, I have grown in uncomfortable middle-age to become a figure of abdominal proportions.

That unfashionable contour and my wife’s ungentle nagging have impelled me to a low-salt diet.

Not that a low-salt diet will do much in itself for me, Mr. Average Everything, but it will help. Each teaspoon of salt the human body retains is diluted in about 1 liter of retained water; that water weighs about two pounds.

Cutting the salt intake then is a way to tighten the belt around a waist once so lithesome.

But it is not so easily done. On the average we ingest about 10 grams (10,000 milligrams), or something approaching two teaspoons of salt per day. Forty percent of that is sodium, the “salt” to fear most.

Apparently I was more than average. For lunch I wolfed down Quarter Pounders with cheese and Arby’s super roast beef sandwiches, both high in sodium. For supper I popped into the microwave a Hungry Man chopped beef dinner (2,030 milligrams of sodium), La Choy’s sweet and sour pork (2,200 milligrams) or a Banquet veal parmigiana at, gulp, 4,210 milligrams. A bit of salt for seasoning on these was another 2,544 milligrams for every teaspoon.

Even breakfast was a salt mine. Cheerios has 330 milligrams per serving, Life--wholesome, good-for-you Life--163 milligrams per, and that winter favorite, instant oatmeal, 523 milligrams of salt in every steaming bowl.

(Those sodium figures are from the book “Barbara Kraus’ 1986 Sodium Guide to Brand Names and Basic Foods,” published by New American Library.)

My kitchen cupboards were veritable saltcellars. One teaspoon of Del Monte catsup splashed on that sweet and sour pork (I can’t stand the flavor otherwise) contained 181 milligrams. The pricey Dijon mustard in the refrigerator has about 150 milligrams per teaspoon, French’s smoky barbecue sauce about 300 per tablespoon. And so it went.

It was some comfort, then, when an announcement I made in a class flushed a student who acknowledged, with a touch of guilt, that she too was having difficulty curbing her salt intake. And Ramsey Bieber has far more imperative reason to hew to a low-salt diet than do I.

The USC sophomore, once the No. 7 oar on the women’s novice crew, may be suffering from a tumor behind the parathyroid gland. That has resulted in an imbalance of calcium in her system. While doctors continue their tests, she has been placed on a low-sodium, low-calcium diet to avert the threat of kidney stones.

“It hasn’t been easy,” she said ruefully. “I cheat. I can’t help it.”

She sighed. “I’m a Doritos freak.”

Doritos, like so many tempting snacks, are a no-no, the fine arts major continued.

Worse, Bieber was used to a lot of salt in her diet. “I come from a big German family and we add salt to everything. And I was especially fond of salty dishes like sauerkraut and knockwurst.”

Bieber and I have discovered what nutritionists have long known. “Buying in packages, that’s really where our salt comes from,” Dr. George A. Bray, chief of diabetes and clinical nutrition at Los Angeles County-USC Medical Center, said. Perhaps a third of all salt ingested occurs naturally. The remainder is added, by the manufacturer at the factory or by the consumer at the table.

Dumped in Packaged Foods

Salt, once an essential preservative, is now apparently dumped into packaged foods largely to enhance the taste, noted Dr. David Heber, chief of the Division of Clinical Nutrition at UCLA’s School of Medicine and director of the Weight Management Center there. A host of other chemicals infused into packaged food secure longer shelf life; one, sodium nitrate, also contributes more than its share of sodium to the average American’s diet. (Such other common preservatives and taste enhancers as sodium carbonate, sodium alginate, disodium inosinate, disodium guanylate and sodium citrate apparently contribute little to the sodium level, Bray said.)

“The tongue gets used to a certain level of salt,” Heber added. “Salt-free soup tastes like dishwater.”

Bray, considered by the American Heart Assn. as one of the nation’s foremost authorities on dieting for health, agreed with his cross-town colleague. “A lot of our preference for salt is what we are used to.”

The salting of our diets begins early. “Mother tastes the baby food, finds it bland, and adds salt to ‘perk it up,’ ” Bray said. “We go right on adding salt.”

Like Ramsey Bieber with her sauerkraut. And her cheddar cheese. And her catsup. She now avoids salt “by careful shopping and by not adding it at the table.”

The result is that foods taste bland. “Soups without salt are disgusting,” she noted.

So there is some slippage in Bieber’s diet. To the irritation of her parents--both medical doctors and both researchers on the faculty at Stanford. “They come down on me more than my doctors do.”

Bray is sympathetic with people like Bieber--but unyielding. “You can make wonderfully good soups by using herbs,” he suggested. Cold comfort that, when Bray admitted he used table salt himself.

If it is difficult for the weight-conscious to avoid supermarketed salt, it is critical for people with high blood pressure or victims of heart failure. Sodium triggers hormonal changes that regulate blood volume and pressure in a manner not yet understood by scientists.

About one of every five average inactive Americans has high blood pressure. For the most severe cases, like C. A. Workman of Del Mar, lowering the daily salt intake to 200 or 300 milligrams is part of the treatment. Lower sodium levels in the blood are correlated to reductions in blood pressure.

Doctor Got Excited

In October, 1974, Workman learned he had high blood pressure, 165 over 105. “My doctor got kind of excited. He told me that I was dead,” Workman said in an interview.

Workman, a real estate developer, stopped sprinkling salt on his meals. He also learned to avoid at least some foods with high sodium levels, notably dairy products. He gave up snacks of vanilla ice cream, slabs of cheese when he came home, and mayonnaise-greased sandwiches.

Similarly, he no longer eats French fries and popcorn. “They have no taste without salt. It’s like eating breadfruit,” he said with curled lip.

Workman succeeded; his blood pressure is now a steady 110 over 70. Yet he has his momentary lapses. “Mayo is out, but sometimes I use Thousand Island on a hamburger. If I’m really bad I come home and open the refrigerator and take a slab of cheese or peanut butter. Then I eat real fast so it’s over sooner and the damage isn’t as bad,” he joked.

But lowering sodium and with it blood pressure isn’t easy when a single slice of bacon contains 10,000 milligrams of sodium, three to five times the desirable limit for the average man. The refrigerator becomes a humming snare for the unwary.

“The one thing that’s good in all this is that you can find out the sodium content of prepared foods. Sodium labeling is pretty good,” Heber said.

Still, it takes Bieber twice as long to shop at her neighborhood supermarket than it did in the carefree days of yore each week because she forgets precisely which products are below 100 milligrams per serving, her self-imposed quota.

Some markets make it easy with ghettos for diet products. Others, like Gelson’s Century City store where I shop, scatter dozens of low- and no-salt foods among the salted. A health-conscious chain like Mrs. Gooches’, with a high proportion of low-sodium foods, makes shopping easier, if more expensive.

That chain carries more than 300 salt-free products, the manager of the West Los Angeles store, Stan Kelly, said in an informal interview in the busy aisles. The number is steadily growing. About one in nine food products stocked in his store is salt-free, he noted.

“You can get soups, crackers, cheese, peanut butter, even pasta sauce salt-free.” Mrs. Gooches has a low- or no-sodium version of “virtually all” packaged foods, Kelly said.

No-Salt Versions

“If something is traditionally salted, specialty manufacturers are coming out with no-salt versions.”

A vegetarian by choice, the 29-year-old Kelly still uses salt and salt-heavy soy sauce on his table at home. “But I eat a lot less salt than I used to.” Kelly, in effect, puts forward a third reason to avoid salt; preventive medicine.

Sales of these low-sodium foods are apparently growing, Kelly said. Despite the consumer’s initial period of adjustment to the blander tastes.

“Salt, like sugar, is a learned taste,” UCLA’s Heber pointed out. It can be unlearned. Heber recommends fresh fruits and vegetables, which have little or no sodium, to clear the palate. It takes about six months for the taste for salt to change, six months during which favorite foods will be rendered flat or bland, as appealing as coarse straw. Heber recommends using garlic and lemon--”as much as you want”--as a salt substitute.

But neither garlic nor lemon go well with oatmeal. And schmearing a steaming bowl of cereal with sugar is another dietetic disaster.

I confront a salt-free season. On the other hand, maybe I could use salt but cut out the fats and the sugar instead.

I am bargaining with God. My belly for my palate.

SALT AND THE AMERICAN DIET Breakfast is the meal most likely to be worked off during the day, so some nutritionists recommend making it a big meal. But following their advice can lead to a surprisingly high sodium intake. For example, the “healthy breakfast” below includes more than 1,840 milligrams of sodium, over half of recommended daily total of 3,500 milligrams.

Campbell’s tomato juice, 6 oz. glass 625 mgs. sodium Cooked oatmeal, 1 cup 523 mgs. sodium Sugar, 1 tsp. trace Skimmed milk, 1/2 cup 64 mgs sodium Two poached eggs 318 mgs. sodium Two pieces white bread, toasted 280 mgs. sodium Unsalted butter for same trace Diet Deliht strawberry jam, 1 tsp. 30 mgs. sodium Coffee trace

So-called diet foods are not necessarily low in sodium. Among packaged diet items are:

PRODUCT SODIUM Campbell low-sodium chicken broth 100 mgs. Sego Lite Dutch chocolate 475 mgs. Slender liquid canned vanilla 550 mgs. Lean Cuisine Salisbury steak 820 mgs. Lean Cuisine fish dinner 837 mgs. Weight Watchers FlorentineCanneloni 894 mgs. Weight Watchers Lemon-butter sauce mix 1,895 mgs.

Source: 1986 Sodium Guide to Brand Names and Basic Foods, by Barbara Kraus. (Brand-name information from manufacturers, non-brand-name information from U.S. Dept. of Agriculture.)