HALT THE SALT !

We have all heard the fear mongering buzz words in the media and from our health professionals:

Obesity or Hypertension (high blood pressure) but what are some of the contributing factors.....many health risks can be traced to Sodium.

SO HALT WITH THE SALT!

The above health risks can be combated with healthy nutrition and exercise.  But we ask, what has changed since the 1950's that suddenly so many people are overweight and falling into these health risk categories?  One major factor is that everyone got so busy, so the food industry had to start providing fast and easy meal solutions to keep up with the demands of the average family of the 21st century.  Overtime our whole food approach has turned into rising crust pizza where the crust is filled with cheese because there simply wasn't enough cheese on the pizza itself to satisfy?  Thankfully everyone is starting to realize that North Americans are in trouble and now the trend is to come up with healthy convenience food, it is still not whole food eating but moving in the right direction.  Overtime portion sizes have ballooned to obscene sizes and on the whole we are not taking time to treat our body like the temple it is (myself included).  When I ask my clients what their barriers are in this area, they all say the same thing....time.

What does this mean on a whole?  Packed in process foods is too much salt which has an adverse affect on our bodies overtime.  What is reasonable?  Some reports will say that 2300mg is acceptable but intakes should be even lower at about 1500mg to be low risk.  I ask my clients if they look at sodium on the labels of their food, many people monitor the fat and carbs but not so many monitor the sodium.

From a health perspective the sodium is key because it is a major contributing factor to high blood pressure which can bring on a whole slew of other serious health risks.
Any packaging that has more than 400 - 600mg per serving is too much.
Keep in mind the nutrition label does not include the whole can or package. For example, I will use soup because it is the most surprising of all.

If you have a can of "low fat" cream of mushroom soup, the label says "nutrition facts per 125ml, sodium reading is:  640mg !!!  That means if you eat the whole can (284ml) you are eating your whole daily recommendation for sodium in one sitting of low fat soup.  Marketing can be very deceiving and convenience foods along with restaurants are the worst.  Awareness is KING!

We will begin to feature quick and easy meal solutions to replace those that are not, your body is a temple and it is all we have!  CHALLENGE:  Try to eat whole foods for all your meals and snacks for 3 "Whole" days!  Let me know how it goes.....