Sugar, salt limits coming for school lunches

Somehow making school lunches healthier became a political issue in recent years. The Obama administration pushed for less salt, fat and sugar in school lunches. Then the Trump administration did the opposite. Now, with Biden in the White House, federal regulators are ready to bring out restrictions on salt and added sugar in school lunches.

Associated Press reported that the USDA “proposed new nutrition standards for school meals, including the first limits on added sugars, with a focus on sweetened foods such as cereals, yogurt, flavored milk and breakfast pastries.

“The plan announced by Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack also seeks to significantly decrease sodium in the meals served to the nation’s schoolkids by 2029, while making the rules for foods made with whole grains more flexible.

The goal is to improve nutrition and align with U.S. dietary guidelines in the program that serves breakfast to more than 15 million children and lunch to nearly 30 million children every day, Vilsack said.”

Unfortunately, the first limits of added sugars wouldn’t;t go into effect until the 2025-2026 school year, after another national election that could upend these plans all over again.

Children’s health should not be a political issue, just as the country’s obesity epidemic should not be a political issue. Both need to be addressed, and soon.

February 7, 2023 0

Summer no-salt shopping — my latest assortment of goodies

The Pandemic knocked a lot of no-salt food products off mainstream store shelves as retailers pared down their assortments to concentrate on stocking their biggest sellers. So those of us eating no-salt diets had to turn elsewhere, primarily online to places like Healthy Heart Market..

I’ve written about Healthy Heart before, noting it can get expensive to ship heavy food offerings. But sometimes there’s no alternative for a given product you want.

I’ve been buying reduced sodium pickles, for example, but really wanted salt-free ones. Healthy Heart has its own brand of no-salt pickles. Buying just two jars, though, doubled the cost when shipping was added in. So I decided to look for other items to spread out the shipping cost a bit.

My Healthy Heart Market purchase, and the bill.

I also bought some lite Greek dressing, which I’ve reviewed here in the past, some Mrs. Dash salt-free fajita mix since I can’t find that locally, a jar of no-salt tomato paste (not pictured) and some no-salt bullion.

I’m particularly interested in trying to bouillon since I rarely eat any soup these days because of the the high salt content.

My bill came to $52.36, of which $14.55 was shipping (I used a $5-off shipping deal).

Expensive, yes, but with my blood pressure rising all through the pandemic, despite my doctor adjusting my various medications, the more salt I can get out of my diet, the better.

June 11, 2021 0

Always hungry? Me too. Here’s a surprising possible reason why

It’s not an exaggeration to say I’m always hungry. It takes mountains of food to fill me up, mountains of foods that I can’t eat on my heart-healthy diet. So I’ve written before about possible causes of being hungry.

It takes a mountain of food to fill me up, so to eat healthy, I remain hungry most days.

Now I’ve come across a new one. My old nemisis salt can cause sensations of hunger, according to a piece I saw on CookingL:ight.com. I’ve cut my salt intake dramatically since my first angioplasty in 2012, so I don’t think salt is causing my problems with hunger.

But it may be for you if you’re still eating processed foods and restaurant foods that are high in salt.

“Experts say this counterintuitive discovery—that dietary salt boosts appetite but decreases thirst—upends more than 100 years of conventional scientific wisdom. The findings are published this week as a set of two papers in the Journal of Clinical Investigation,’ according to the Cooking Light article.

It’s a reminder that we don;t know as much as we think we do about eating and our health and how the two intersect.

March 22, 2021 0

Ordering Meal kits/meal delivery in the pandemic? Here are ratings to consider

Meal kits, sold by most major supermarket chains these days, are something I’ve avoided because of the generally high salt content of most offerings. I wrote about one that my local supermarket chain was offering, you can read about that by clicking here.

But if you’re a non-cook being forced to eat at home during the coronavirus pandemic, you may have turned to meal kits or home meal delivery services as a way to eat with minimal cooking involved.

Men’s Journal, presumably aimed at non-cooking men, recently rated several of the most popular services, you can read its ratings by clicking here.

You’ll have to check to see which are available in your particular area.

The article breaks them down as best for vegans, best for health enthusiasts, best for too lazy to cook but staying one specific diet. The categories are cleaver, see where you fit and make your decisions accordingly.

May 12, 2020 0

Healthy eating in Hawaii??? You have to work hard to search it out

My wife recently put together a winter vacation for us that had been a dream of mine for about 40 years — going to Hawaii. I’d been there, alone, in the early 1980s and loved it, vowing at the time to go back someday with someone I would want to share it with.

That’s exactly what I did with my wife in January. But there’s been a major change for me since 1981, my heart issues. And that complicated our eating while there for almost two weeks.

Fast food in Hawaii is inevitably salty and fatty. SPAM on rice anyone? It’s a popular sushi option there as is breaded fish of all kinds, tacos or all kinds and poke, which is highly salted fish. So we had to work hard to find healthy alternatives.

I had expected more fresh fish and fruit, which I remembered from my last visit. We had to search that out, most often in more expensive restaurants. We found some great meals, but had to pay $100 a couple and up for them (and we don’t drink alcohol very much so that was usually without drinks).

I’ll be blogging about our meals the next few days, come read about them. Here’s a tease, a beet salad and sashimi plate I had at Duke’s at the Marriott resort on Kauai.

February 18, 2020 1

Meals kits are getting popular but beware the hidden salt!

Meal kits, which have all the ingredients for a given night’s dinner, are gaining in popularity, especially among younger consumers who may not have very developed cooking skills. Several companies will deliver them to people’s home and now supermarkets are stocking their own versions. The idea may sound appealing, but beware and, as always, read the ingredient labels before buying any.

Doing that myself, I found what seemed like a relatively appealing kit — with pasta and tomatoes, was a salt bomb, containing 1,320 mgs of salt per serving or 2620 mgs in the entire package which is supposed to be two servings. Continue reading “Meals kits are getting popular but beware the hidden salt!” →

April 9, 2019 1

Salt is salt, isn’t it? I say yes

Salt is my food arch-enemy, driving up my blood pressure and likely contributing to my need for two stents in the past seven years. That’s why I have an entire page devoted to low-salt recipes and another that looks at how to minimize salt when eating out. But some people like to distinguish between types of sale, saying the most highly processed kind we normally consume is worse that other, more raw products that have other minerals in them.

Himalayan pink salt, yes there really is such a thing, fits in that category of the supposed better-for-you salts. Or does it? This article recently caught my eye on the website care4you.com.

Is pink salt better for you than regular salt? Don;t count on it.

“Many ads for Himalayan pink salt claim that it contains 84 minerals. This appears to be true, based on spectral analysis of the salt. But, most of these 84 minerals are found in very trace amounts. Also, not all 84 are beneficial minerals. Himalayan pink salt also contains trace amounts of toxic and radioactive substances, such as arsenic, mercury, uranium and plutonium,” the article states. Continue reading “Salt is salt, isn’t it? I say yes” →

March 26, 2019 0

Women may benefit more from low-salt diets than men

Women may benefit more from low-salt diets than will men when it comes to reducing their high blood pressure, a study published in the research journal Hypertension.

As all too often happens, past research has looked primarily at men and their reactions to salt, the study authors note.

The researchers worked with male and female rats and found It all has to do with levels of a hormone called aldosterone. If you want the scientific specifics, click here.

The point is women need to watch their salt intake, especially if they’re already dealing with high blood pressure. We have plenty of low-salt and salt-free recipes on our recipe page, start your efforts to dump the salt there.

March 5, 2019 0

Ever eat at Corner Bakery? If you’re cutting your salt, don’t

Life can have unexpected consequences sometimes. Since the New Year began, I’ve been on a cleaning and organizing binge, likely because of Japanese-super-organizer Marie Kondo and her new Netflix series. My wife and I even organized our kitchen junk drawer, usually a no-mans-land of forgotten items.

And in that drawer I found I had an old Corner Bakery gift card. Corner Bakery was an early entrant in the fast casual category of restaurants — places that tried to be a cut above hamburger joints and positioned themselves as healthier with fresher ingredients than tradition fast food.

But as always with such claims, the devil is in the details. Or should I say the salt is the devil in the menu? The reason I never finished using my Corner Bakery gift card was because of the high salt content of most Corner Bakery offerings. So I’ve had this card for years with about $7 left on it to spend.

So I visited the Corner Bakery site today to see if by chance its menu has changed from the high-salt offerings I remembered. Sadly, it has not. It does have some very cool nutrition search functions, including one where you build a meal and another where you can rank all the menu items by salt content (or any nutrition content). Continue reading “Ever eat at Corner Bakery? If you’re cutting your salt, don’t” →

February 28, 2019 0

Getting the salt out — it’s everywhere, here are some examples

Salt has become one of the three evils for my body since my first stent in 2012, and the second in 2016. I’ve redone my eating, cooking and food shopping habits to get the salt out of my diet and seen my blood pressure fall as a result.

Salt can lead to stomach cancer, one more reason to get it out of your diet. — Too much salt will be in processed and restaurant foods for years to come.

Americans eat more than the recommended amounts of salt daily because salt is in almost every food we buy, especially at restaurants, If you don’t believe that, take a look at this WebMD slide show about where salt hides in our foods.

Some, like frozen dinners or processed meats, you might already know about. But what about cereals, juices and canned veggies? Yep, there too. Enjoy and learn from the show…and do pass [up on] the salt.

February 27, 2019 0

Tag: salt