I’m trying out a low-salt diet for a couple of months for medical reasons. In the past, I’ve given up sugar for weight-loss reasons, and though that was a little difficult, I find that giving up salt is much harder.
Without salt, a lot of food tastes completely insipid to me. Maybe that’s because I’m older and my taste buds are beginning to dull, and it takes salt to get through to them.
So I’m voting that giving up salt is way, way harder than giving up sugar. How about you?
There’s a difference between “give up” and “cut back on”. If you give up salt, you’ll die. You need a little. But there’s a huge amount of room between “the minimum amount of salt you actually need”, or “the amount that prevents food from being completely tasteless”, and the massive amount that’s typically found in most modern first-world food.
Compared to what’s in most processed food, what you sprinkle onto your own food from your salt shaker is a rounding error.
Agreed, salt would be far harder go give up than sugar. I’ve done keto diets a couple times and did not miss sugar all that much at all. I’ve never had much of a sweet tooth.
Give up completely? salt, tone down? sugar.
Salt. Ive had to throw away half eaten bags of potato chips to keep from eating the whole bag at once.
Chocolate? A few bites and Im good.
I live the salt life! I generously use a flaked salt and ground pepper seasoning on avocados. It’s so good I sometimes pour a teaspoon of it in my hand when I’m hungry.
I shouldn’t do that I’m sure. I hear there are salt substitutes, Nu Salt?
Herbs, vinegars etc are the best way to flavor w/o salt.
I love salt! I salt ham. I’d have a much easier time giving up sugar, although there’s nothing better than eating something sweet after you’ve eaten something salty.
Not really. Most “salt substitutes” are just other salts, like potassium chloride instead of sodium chloride. And for most medical conditions that call for cutting back on salt, potassium chloride is actually even worse.
You can also get other herbs and spices, or mixtures thereof, that can be used to season foods, and maybe you’ll like the flavor of them, and maybe you’ll even like the flavor better than salt, but they absolutely don’t taste at all like salt.
right, and for that matter, there are a lot more sugar substitutes that will get you close enough to real sugar to make me say salt would be much much more difficult to give up. And while I’m not one of them, some people even like the taste of sugar substitutes better than actual sugar (such as diet Coke drinkers who don’t like regular Coke).
That’s good to know, since I rarely eat processed foods, whether we’re talking about frozen dinners or potato chips and the like. So I guess practically all my salt intake is a rounding error!
Since the point of that salt I sprinkle on my foods is to bring out their own flavors, since that’s what salt does in appropriate quantities, it’s good to know I’m unlikely to ever have to give that up. Because that would be quite hard.
Sugar, OTOH: thanks to sucralose, I was able to give up sugar in my coffee and sweet tea about 20 years ago, and dropped sugared sodas in favor of my sucralose-sweetened tea. I don’t eat much in the way of sweets - I do like chocolate, but for me, a little goes a long way. And other than chocolate, I don’t keep sugared candy or sweet pastries around the house. So giving up >95% of my sugar consumption was easy, once given a viable alternative.
There are a lot of other differences between the formulas for regular and diet Coke, so it might be those that the diet Coke drinkers actually prefer. That’s why there’s now both Diet Coke and Coke Zero: The latter has a flavor as close as they could get to regular Coke, to appeal to those who prefer that flavor. They also, at one point, had a sugared Coke that otherwise tasted like Diet Coke, because that was what taste tests showed people overwhelmingly preferred, but they dropped it because nobody wanted to buy it: That’s what “New Coke” was.
I remember the ‘New Coke’ fiasco. To me, it tasted nothing like Diet Coke, which in order to drink it, I’d have to be extremely thirsty and with no other remotely palatable alternative. I found the difference between ‘Classic Coke’ and ‘New Coke’ to be slight enough that I assumed it was just a big deal for purists. I mean, the original tasted slightly better, but :shrug: .
Salt. I don’t cook with it; I like the flavor of the dish far more. I often get no salt added potato chips and they’re just as good.
I’m also happy to use herbs and spices when I want more flavor.
Years ago I went on Dean Ornish’s extreme low salt regimen (his data suggested it could actually reverse the progress of some heart diseases). It was excruciating at first, but little by little I started to appreciate the “raw” tastes of foods and eventually everything was delicious again.
When I occasionally (restaurants) tasted “conventionally” salted foods it was overwhelming - way too salty! The conditioning we’ve had for salt was striking.
Sadly, over the years my willingness to maintain the discipline necessary to really keep salt down has been eroded and I’m back to experiencing restaurant food as “normal.”
But I do wish the OP well, I think the effort is worth it and eventually painless. I’m quite sure the health benefits are significant. It’s just difficult in our culture (I live in a very restaurant-dense foodie region).
I eat very liitle sugar (in the form of crystalised sucrose, or dissolved sucrose), to which is what the OP refers. Most sugar I eat is either fructose or more complex sugars (polysaccharides), but I don’t have a “sweet tooth”.
I very rarely add salt when I am cooking, though I will if other people are eating the food I have prepared.
I keep both in my kitchen cupboard, both are important in baking decent bread, although there are ways around using them.
I’ve never tried the sodium chloride alternative, potassium chloride.
I’d give up either, or both, without making much difference to me.
Yeah, me too. I love to go out to eat, and my very favorite restaurants are Asian. Most Asian dishes I like are well-salted. I can make a lot of those dishes at home and add less salt, but although I can cook well, I can’t hope to achieve what a great Vietnamese or Thai cook can.
I still add a teeny bit of salt to a few things, like potatoes or eggs. But like I said, it was easier to give up sugar.
ETA: I went four times up and down the chip aisle at the supermarket today, and could not find one unsalted type of chip, be it potato or tortilla. I did manage to find unsalted pretzels, which I bought and brought home. Bleh. Maybe I can crush them up and use them as crumbs in a meat loaf.
As a diabetic with high blood pressure, I can say salt was harder to give up.
I’d find salt much more difficult to give up, myself. Offer me a choice of a plate of sweet pastries vs a plate of cheese and crackers, I’d choose the latter every time.
I think it’s much easier for me to cook without salt than to bake without sugar. Without salt, I can compliment some vegetables and various protein sources with fresh herbs and ground spices.
However substituting for sugar involves ordering or long-distance drives to buy special high-end sweeteners. For me, the latter would be more an expensive conversion.
I’d rather just die a few years earlier than give up either.