Salt is often used to compensate for fat in food

The magazine Consumer Reports has written about how many foods which advertise themselves as being very low fat are laden with salt. Just because something doesn't seem to have salt all over it does not necessarily mean that it has not been infused in big quantities. For example Pepperidge Farm Whole Grain White Bagels had a whopping 440 mg of salt in each one and a low fat pasta sauce was found to contain 430mg of salt in only half a cup. Other things like Heart Healthy V8 vegetable juice contained 480mg of salt in a normal glass.

Salt is often used to compensate for fat in food. The fact of the matter is that fat tastes good and therefore when it is removed from food the result is sometimes bland and boring and so manufacturers spice up their low fat foodstuffs by adding large quantities of salt. Consumer Reports looked at almost 40 different food products and said that they were astonished with the results which showed that far too much salt is added to processed food than should be for good health.

Too much salt is not healthy for you and can cause high blood pressure, kidney problems and heart problems. One report published by the Mayo Clinic shows that 77 percent of the salt in the diet of the normal American comes from eating processed food and that only six percent comes from adding salt manually when eating. This gives you an idea of the extent of how much salt is added to processed food.

In general you should try to consume less than 2.3 grams of salt daily but as this is pretty well impossible to measure you should make sure that you steer away from processed food as much as possible if you want to stay healthy.