The No Salt, No Fat, No Sugar Journal
Creating healthier food choices
With Thanksgiving 2021 almost here, you’re likely scrambling to get ready like so many of us are. As a service, here are links to 10 stories that might help. The best place to find low-salt, low-fat and low-sugar holiday recipes is still our recipe page, just click here to see it.
Enjoy and Happy Thanksgiving. Even in this difficult year, hopefully, you have much to be thankful for.
Continue reading “10 Helpful Sites for Thanksgiving prep & cooking from the No Salt, No Fat, No Sugar Journal”Amazon Fresh Stores have come to the Chicago area, with one now open in the northern suburb of Morton Grove, only a short drive from my house. So I went to check it out. I was disappointed to see none of my favorite low-salt and no-salt products on shelves.
Prices were comparable, or sometimes higher, than other mainstream supermarkets and the only sales I saw were in the produce section.
This is a high-tech store. You can shop and checkout with the Amazon app on your phone, with no need to wait on checkout lines. But the day I visited, everyone was on checkout lines, I saw no one going out through the automatic areas where you could scan your app to pay and exit.
Continue reading “My first walk around an Amazon Fresh — few low- and no-salt products, few deals”I knew this would be a difficult year to find a low-sodium fresh turkey for Thanksgiving because of the
Pandemic and supply chain issues it had caused. But I was not prepared for how difficult it would be to find what I wanted.
Keep in mind a fresh turkey, one not injected with sodium solutions for self-basting should have about 70 mgs of sodium per serving. Turkeys with liquids injected can range as high as 300 mgs of sodium per serving. And, really who eats just one serving of turkey on Thanksgiving.
I’d written you might have to buy a bigger bird than you wanted this year. But what I found was the opposite, larger turkeys, those over 14 pounds, were extremely difficult o find, regardless of salt content.
I started at a local Jewel, an Albertson chain in the Chicago area, where I found Butterball premium turkeys that were loaded with salt. I next tried Whole Foods, one had no turkeys whatsoever, the other had only frozen turkeys. A butcher there told me fresh turkeys would be in a few days later. But when I returned on that day, they had yet to appear.
I then swung by a local Mariano’s outlet (a Kroger chain in the Chicago area). Its website listed a low-sodium Jenny O turkey option but there were none in the store I went to.
Continue reading “My 2021 Pandemic Low-Salt Turkey Quest”This site, the No Salt, No Fat, No Sugar Journal hit a record number of views for a year, 66,881, with two months still remaining in 2021. Its previous annual high was 65,965 views in 2017. The site is on track to smash through 70,000 views by the end of the year.
The site also has had a record number of visitors in 2021 — 36,588 — compared to its previous annual record of 34,756 in 2020.
The site’s most popular feature is its recipe page, which has been updated with Pandemic recipes for families now eating more at home than ever before.
“The Pandemic no doubt has sent people,e looking for healthier recipes and healthier ingredients and they are increasingly finding information about that and more on our site,” says John N. Frank, founder of the site which went live in late 2013 as Frank was recovering from his first heart surgery in 2012.
The site has recorded more than 430,000 views since it began with more than 226,000 total visitors. “It’s gratifying and humbling,” says Frank, who began the site after leaving an earlier site he had founded because of differences about its direction with a former writing partner.
“I wanted our site to be about good eating, even with health restrictions, but my old partner wanted to concentrate on medical information. I’m not a doctor, I’m a home cook who wants to find ways to cut fat, salt and sugar in the foods I love to cook, so that’s what I’ve been doing these past eight years here. I’m so happy to have found an audience that wants to do the same.”
If you know someone who loves quinoa, here’s a great holiday gift suggestion for them (or for you if you love quinoa) — a new cookbook that has more than 100 recipes using quinoa.
Written by Catherine Gill, who writes the Dirty Vegan website and wrote the Dirty Vegan Cookbook, the book is aimed at vegan and plant-based diets adherents.
But quinoa also is a heart-healthy ingredient that anyone like me with heart disease should be aware of and use in their cooking.
“The fiber in quinoa can also help with cholesterol and blood sugar levels, lowering your risk of diabetes and heart disease,” notes WebMD in its discussion about quinoa.
The book includes recipes using quinoa for breakfast, snacks and appetizers, lunch and dinner, and even desserts. Quinoa-stuffed grape leaves in the appetizer section got my attention, I may try those for a holiday meal.
Each recipe comes with a tip for making it, but unfortunately, the recipes don’t list nutrition information for finished dishes.
Not many cookbooks do that, granted, but seeing that can make heart-healthy meal planning so much easier.
The book retails for $20 on Amazon. At a time when everyone is cooking more because of the Pandemic, this could be a great gift.
When you’re trying to get the salt out of your diet, you need to be constantly aware of the salt hidden in every food you buy. This was recently brought home to me when my wife asked me to pick up a can of garbanzo beans (also called chickpeas).
She planned to put them into a homemade soup that she wanted to be low-salt for me. Luckily, when I was searching for them, I came across a low-salt variety.
The low-salt chickpeas had only135 mgs of salt per serving. Regular brands had 340 mgs! Multiply that by the number of servings per can and you can see your salt intake rising before your eyes.
For more tips on cutting salt, read my post, Salt is everywhere, beware; become a smart shopper & diner, and check my Ingredients and Smart Shopper pages.
Intimate theater showcasing emerging talent
An honest look at living with bulimia.
This is how I spend my quality free time...
Feeding a hungry family!
Big living from a small space
Balance your body and your life with the alkaline lifestyle.
Italian Home Kitchen Blog
By: Raquel Moreira
Food, foraging, recipes... simple, cheap & stylish... ideal for hipsters or hobos
Creating healthier food choices
Expert dietary advice from a registered dietitian and nutritionist
Food for folks who have yet to figure it all out
Just another WordPress.com site
Sharing My Kitchen
"Home is where the Hearth is"
The greatest WordPress.com site in all the land!
The No Salt, No Fat, No Sugar Journal 