Eating a restricted sodium diet

[logan82]

I would never eat spaghetti sauce out of a jar. It is so easy to make a decent sauce. Buy some paste, sauce, garlic, oregano, basil, and bay leaves. Add meat. You have sauce. Or you can just substitute tomatoes for the sauce and paste. Takes some time to cook them down though.

[1992casey]

One of these days I'll get into a recipe, make a bunch, and freeze portions. The trick, of course, would be to find no salt added paste. I think I've run across that, but I'm not sure.

 

I realize that sauce is relatively easy to make, but given that so many convenience foods have become verboten, using sauce out of a jar makes for a fast meal.

 

One thing I forgot to mention is that Whole Foods has pizza crusts with only 75mg sodium in a serving. (This would be the whole wheat crust; the white crust has 90mg, which is still good.) In this case, a serving is 1/4 of the crust. Most foods have pretty standard serving definitions, but with pizza crusts, they vary. One defined a serving as one piece, with a piece being defined as one ninth of a crust. That makes me wonder how one would cut a pizza into nine pieces.

[1992casey]

Several varieties of Lärabar snack bars have between 0 and 10mg of sodium. Others have more typical amounts (a little over 100mg). They're available in the Natural Foods section at Woodman's.

[1992casey]

Lärabar is also available at Pick 'n Save, although it's more expensive than Woodman's and there aren't as many varieties. You have to look in the drug aisle (of all places).

 

I've checked out nutritional information for a few restaurants. Friday's is pretty much out as pretty much everything is very high in sodium. I think that a good deal of that is caused by the fact that much of the food is factory prepared, with minimal preparation on site.

 

Ruby Tuesday's and Culver's have a few options that can be considered manageable. By manageable, I mean that you can find a meal that doesn't blow your entire day's allowance (and then some). At Culver's, for instance, you can eat a double butter burger and small fries, although you should make sure that the fries are unsalted and you should skip the ketchup.

 

Culver's gets a booby prize for its green beans, though. There's almost 1000mg of sodium in a serving despite the facts that green beans don't have any sodium to start with and that there's nothing "special" about the finished product (no sauce or anything like that). They must use canned beans with a high sodium content, then add a significant amount of salt and butter.

[hawing]

That makes me wonder how one would cut a pizza into nine pieces.

You could slice it like a tic-tac-toe board. The resulting nine pieces wouldn't be equal in size, but there would be nine.