High Risk High Dietary Sodium Foods

Excessive dietary sodium intake is closely linked to a whole host of serious health issues including hypertension (high blood pressure), congestive heart failure, cardiac arrhythmia, other abnormal and irregular heart function; such as tachycardia, that lead to cardiac insufficiency, renal disease, arteriosclerosis, neural abnormalities and complicating endocrine anomalies to name but a few.

The Importance of Sodium to Your Health and Well-being

We should all know the importance of ensuring that we regulate and replenish electrolytes when we are exercising or when the temperature is high. The trick is to strike a balance that is adequate without going over the top or not being enough. In order to assess this we need to know a little about some of the important functions that sodium serves in our bodies.

Sodium plays a very important role in our body’s metabolism and homeostatic functions including the maintenance of a constant pH, water balance, blood and interstitial fluid pressures, osmosis, neural transmission and metabolite transportation.

Homeostasis

The important thing to realize is that; as with most of our body’s metabolic functionality, sodium levels are highly regulated and maintained within a very narrow range of acceptable variance. As a result; even though our dietary sodium intake can vary wildly, our serum and interstitial sodium levels remain relatively constant. This is known as homeostasis.

Unfortunately; there are many factors that can affect the way that the body metabolizes sodium including age, medication, complicating medical conditions, disease processes, infections, nutritional status, dietary habits overall physical fitness, sex, lifestyle and a host of other variables.

Too Much of a Good Thing

As with most things in life even though sodium plays an important part in the regulation and maintenance of our body’s homeostasis there is an upper limit where you can have too much of a good thing.

In order to determine the ideal level of dietary sodium intake; the US government, along with a number of privately funded ventures including the Mayo Institute have conducted research into the question of sodium metabolism in order to be able to determine the “ideal” levels of dietary sodium intake. The magic number that they have come up with is a recommendation that the average person should have a daily dietary sodium intake of 2,300 mg.

Typical Dietary Sodium Intake

Another aspect of the dietary sodium intake research was the conducting of a survey to determine the average US resident’s dietary habits with regards to sodium intake. The bad news was that more than 54% of US residents exceeded the recommended daily maximum dietary sodium intake.

One important overriding assumption that the surveys made in compiling this list was that they were not taking into consideration additional table salting of any of the foods included in the study, only the base sodium levels.

Compulsive Behaviors – Individuals that instinctively grab the salt shaker and liberally apply additional salt to all of their food even prior to tasting the food must be considered to be further compounding their own dietary sodium intake. It therefore follows that persons exhibiting these behavioral practices must be considered to have an even higher than average dietary sodium intake as would be first indicated by evaluation simply of dietary food types.

Top Dietary Sodium Intake Source Foods

To determine those foods which constitute the highest sources of dietary sodium in the average American’s diet a wide range of common foodstuffs were evaluated with respect to their sodium content and their frequency of consumption. Here is an alphabetical list of the top dietary sodium food sources in the average American diet.

• Condiments – Ketchup and creamy salad dressings
• Dairy Products – Whole milk, full cream milk ice cream and processed milk products
• Eggs – Regardless of how they are cooked (boiled/fried/poached/scrambled/whole)
• Pasta – Spaghetti and many spaghetti sauces, macaroni with loads of cheese
• Pizza – Particularly those with lots of preserved meats, anchovies, olives and double cheese varieties
• Processed Cheeses
• Processed Meats – Ham, hot dogs
• Processed Potato Foodstuffs – French fries, potato chips, potato crisps
• Rice – Cooked rice
• Noodle Soups
• Salty Snacks – Potato chips (especially the Bar-B-Q and salt and vinegar varieties), corn chips, salty pretzels, salted nuts and especially salted peanuts and cashews.
• Wheat Flour Products – Tortilla, white bread and white rolls

Unexpected Results

Yes; I too was amazed, by the unexpected inclusion of rice on this list of America’s high dietary sodium content foods especially since I already knew that plain rice contains absolutely no sodium what-so-ever. Have I; along with millions of others, been mistakenly under the wrong impression all of these years. Quite obviously this was a state of affairs that demanded further investigation and so I dug deeper.

Well; we can all breathe a deep sigh of relief, since it turns out that we have not been under a mistaken impression all of this time. Cooked plain rice does indeed contain practically no sodium what-so-ever. The true culprit lies in the way that the rice is cooked. Actually to be more precise it is the way in which the rice is seasoned that causes it to become a high sodium content food.

The flour with the highest sodium levels is the type of wheat flour typically used in making tortilla

You will notice from this list that many different types of processed foods and products like pizza that have high levels of processed food products among their ingredients are very prominent on the list. This is because salt is often used by manufacturers to increase the shelf and storage life of many foods.

Remember that way back in the good old days; long before the advent of refrigeration, salting food was by far the most common method used to increase the storage life of foodstuffs and other perishables. Well the manufacturers learned their lesson well and these practices continue into today’s manufacturing processes and sometimes needlessly so. Maybe it has a lot to do with our “cultural palate”. Taste and taste preferences are often more learned and acquired than inherent.

Evaluating Risk Levels

The only recognized way of telling whether or not you are at risk of developing seriously debilitating and potentially fatal health issues as a result of a life-long over consumption and excessive dietary sodium intake is to evaluate the types of foods that comprise your diet. Once the types of foods that you eat have been categorized consumption frequency data needs to be factored in.