Guest article provided by FoodFacts.com
Do you recall the older winter-time commercial of a snowman dragging his feet into his home from a blizzard; and sitting down to a bowl of hot chicken noodle soup? As he took one sip the snow melted off and what was left was a little boy with a huge smile. That’s Campbell’s. They’re marketing and ads have proven to be successful for many years now, because they are the most popular soup can on store shelves. Why? It could be their advertising, their coupons and incentives, or it could be their salt-filled broth that most Americans have grown to adore.
Fact of the matter is that people-love-salt. Salt on pasta, salt on eggs, salt on mashed potatoes, salt on chicken, the list goes on and on. Campbell’s took notice of this a LONG time ago. They’ve been producing soups with high sodium levels since they first opened their factories in 1869. One half-cup serving of their chicken noodle soup is 890mg of sodium. That’s almost HALF of your daily value of sodium for one day, in just HALF a cup. So basically, you consume one whole can, you’ve had your recommended sodium for the entire day in just 5 minutes, and maybe a little more.
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Did you know that Subway has more locations worldwide than McDonald’s? According to USA Today, there are 34,433 locations across the globe. Why is this significant? Well, the company has announced that it will be cutting the sodium levels in their sandwiches and with a food chain that has this kind of reach, maybe it can impact the decision making at other fast food establishments.
Subway is now offering their “Fresh Fit” sandwiches in the U.S. with 28 percent less sodium as compared to 2009 when they first started to reduce sodium levels. The sodium in its overall sandwich line will be cut by 15 percent.
In the past, the healthfulness of Subway’s sandwiches was called into question, not only for their sodium levels, but the high levels of high fructose corn syrup in the bread.
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With a variety of subs, soups and salads, Quiznos seems like a pretty healthy place to eat at for lunch or dinner, but because sometimes things that look healthy aren’t really that good for our waistlines, we decided to take a deeper look at the menu.
Below are meals that met our registered dietitian Rebecca Scritchfield’s healthy guidelines of having less than 500 calories and less than 500 milligrams of sodium, according to the the new daily sodium recommendations. Thankfully, there are quite a few options!
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When you hear high sodium food, you usually think salty snacks: pretzels, chips, crackers and the like. You may be surprised, however, that some of the highest sodium foods aren’t salty tasting at all.
We all should be cutting down on our sodium intake, as recommended by the 2010 American Dietary Guidelines, so head to your pantry and see if any of these sneaky sodium-packed foods have found there way into your kitchen.
Breakfast cereals are notorious for not only being packed full of sugar, but sodium as well. Cereals “are more concentrated in salt than 50 to 60 percent of the items in the salty snack aisle,” says Dr. David Katz, founding director of Yale’s Prevention Research Center.
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With many of us trying to keep our salt intake down (especially after these new, more restrictive, sodium guidelines were released), it’s always nice to hear that there are delicious ways to season our food without adding sodium. Now, new research shows there’s something you can do outside of the kitchen to keep sodium low: Exercise!
Scientists at the recent American Heart Association’s Nutrition, Physical Activity and Metabolism/Cardiovascular Disease Epidemiology and Prevention 2011 Scientific Sessions found that the more physically active you are, the less your blood pressure rises in response to a high-salt diet. Talk about good news for those who work out, and fantastic motivation for those just thinking of starting a workout plan, right?
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