Making Bread

Bread is pretty high in sodium, and it's something we eat a lot of in this country. So one way of reducing your dietary sodium is to make your own, salt-free bread. It is a bit of an acquired taste, but once you're used to it, I have been assured that you'll find normal bread way too salty.

The first bit of advice I would give on this is to get yourself a bread machine. I got mine for a few quid from a friend (the lovely Cathie at BecomingDomestic) who was upgrading hers to a larger version, and it has been fab. It's not something that needs to be expensive - I have seen a few on Freecycle and in charity shops. I think it's the sort of thing people get as a wedding present, or in an earth-mother moment, and then never use.

It should come with a recipe book (if you get a second hand one that doesn't, then take a look at the manufacturer's website, as most have lists of instructions for their products nowadays). You can buy ready-made mixes for bread machines, but you will probably end up with bread just as high in sodium as "bought" bread. And to be honest, I don't think that getting the ingredients together is that much more hassle.

Some advice:
- Leave out the salt (obviously). This may affect how your bread rises, so you might need to experiment a bit with quantities of the other ingredients to get it right.
- Use unsalted butter or olive oil.
- If you use use the dough setting (on mine this is 90 mins long), then you can make pizza bases/rolls etc.
- Add extra ingredients - if you find the bread too bland, add some raisins, chilli, garlic or herbs. Be careful not to add them too early though or they will get chopped up too much.
- Fathom out how the timer works, and use it. That way you can wake on a Sunday morning to the smell of baking bread, or if you're making bread rolls in the week then the dough can be ready when you get in from work, ready to put into the oven at the same time as dinner.

This week, I have managed to make Mr. C packed lunches made with sodium-free home-made rolls, and to also knock up some very tasty garlic bread, with roasted garlic. And very virtuous I feel too.

Update: Based of 9 months of experience, I have added some new tips here.

Breakfast Cereals

I've been looking into this quite a lot. Breakfast is one area where, for at least 5 days a week, you want to grab a bowl of something and just dash out of the house. In our house we certainly don't have the time to be making our own muesli from bags and pots of interesting-sounding things from Holland and Barrett in the morning, because we are too busy getting children and bags ready, and timing our departure so we reach school and nursery at exactly the very moment that their doors open, in order to then catch the earliest possible train into work.

So we rely on bought cereals. And why not? We stick to the healthier end of the spectrum, avoiding the particularly sugary/chocolatey/delicious ones. Many breakfast cereals make health claims, and it's good to know that for at least that one meal a day, we are guaranteed to get good percentages of various GDAs and vitamins, and a decent dose of fibre. So surely they will be low in sodium too? Disappointingly, the answer is no.

Here's a quick run-down of some of the popular cereals...all figures are g of sodium per 100g. See here for more on recommended sodium/salt levels.

Saltier than Walkers Crisps:
Kelloggs Corn Flakes 0.7g
Kelloggs Rice Krispies 0.65g
Kelloggs All Bran 0.6g

High:
Kelloggs Fruit n Fibre 0.55g
Kelloggs Bran Flakes 0.5g
Cheerios 0.5g
Kelloggs Coco Pops 0.45g
Kelloggs Crunchy Nut 0.45g
Kelloggs Frosties 0.45g
Kelloggs Special K 0.45g
Weetaflakes 0.4g

Middling:
Shreddies 0.3g
Weetabix 0.26g

Low:
Alpen 0.15g
Ready Brek <0.1g
Oatibix 0.15g
Quaker Oatso Simple "Trace"
Quaker Granola "Trace"
Shredded Wheat "Trace"
Shredded Wheat Bitesize "Trace"

Some of those figures are pretty high. In a "serving" of Kelloggs Corn Flakes you'd get half a gram of salt - that's the same as a normal-sized bag of crisps. Generally, the Kelloggs cereals came out high; those at the bottom of the list above are largely made by Weetabix (although you can get an even lower sodium Weetabix-type cereal from Doves Farm at 0.2g).

I took a look at some own-brand versions of the Kelloggs cereals to see if they were any better.

Bran Flakes - Sainsburys 0.6g, Tesco 0.6g
Choco Snaps - Sainsburys ?, Tesco 0.4g
Corn Flakes - Sainsburys 0.6g, Tesco 0.6g
Frosted Flakes - Sainsburys 0.6g, Tesco 0.6g

Um, no, not really! So it's Shredded Wheat and porridge from now on until Kelloggs sort out their act.

Gromit, that's it! Cheese! We'll go somewhere where there's cheese!

A quick look at the labels on the lumps of cheese in our fridge turns up some alarming results. It seems that cheese, as a rule, is very high in sodium, with 0.7g per 100g being typical. The Dairy Council state that salt is necessary in cheese, as a preservative. Do we really need levels that high given that most of us have fridges now?

So, off I trek to the supermarket to check some labels. The values below are all sodium per 100g. To put it into context, 100g of cheese would be about right to fill a chunky sub-sized roll for lunch. Government guidance on sodium is 2.4g per day. See here for more on this.There was only one cheese I could find that would be classed as "low" in sodium! It was:

Mascarpone - 0.05g

Good to know I can still make cheesecake should the desire ever take me. The next best options were:

Emmental - 0.17g
Cottage cheese with pineapple - 0.2g
Goats cheese - 0.28g
Wensleydale with blueberries - 0.3g

Obviously the bits of fruit in the wensleydale and cottage cheese reduce the amount of cheese you're getting, and so therefore the sodium too. Maybe we can all learn a lesson from that and simply buy our usual cheese, hollow bits of it out and stick fruit in.

The worst offenders were the blue and smoked cheeses, which were generally over 1g. More surprising was that Edam came in at 1.04g, about the same as feta. The worst was a pecorino at 2.36g.

The big problem I found, however, is that the cheddar-style cheeses were up at 0.6 - 0.8g (about the same as the parmesan I found). I love posh cheese, but let's be honest, it's cheddar that we eat most often, especially our eldest daughter. So it looks like we'll be splashing out grating emmental onto our baked spuds until I can find a low salt version.

There's some more guidance on sodium levels on the British Cheese website, which largely agrees with my findings, although I'm a bit confused by their numbers on cheese spreads, which doesn't seem to be backed up by the Philadelphia website.

What the Government Say

Now there's a post title to get you excited.

I really do need to include this as a starting point though, so bear with me. There's an excellent Food Standards Agency salt/sodium site here, which I will leave you to read. Honestly, it's worth a look. There is a lot of useful, well-explained information on there, and also a picture of the wonderful Jenny Eclair.

In summary, you should have no more than 6g of salt a day for a normal diet. That's not a lot - it's about a teaspoon-full, and equates to 2.4g of sodium. Most people eat a lot more than that, on average over 9g. The advice for children varies by age - my 6 year old daughter should be getting half that recommended for an adult, at 1.2g sodium a day. A "low sodium" diet is often referred to as either less than 1.5g or 1g of sodium a day - GPs will give different advice to different people.

Quick Reference:

Salt = Sodium x 2.5

1 to 3 years - 2 g salt a day (0.8g sodium)
4 to 6 years - 3g salt a day (1.2g sodium)
7 to 10 years - 5g salt a day (2g sodium)
11 and over (including adults) - 6g salt a day (2.4g sodium)

On this blog I refer to sodium levels rather than salt, as sodium is the significant bit for health, and can come from sources other than salt (such as sodium bicarbonate in scones). We're aiming for less than 1g sodium a day, to allow us to have the occasional lapse by eating out, and to be low enough so we can eat with the kids (something we don't really do enough of).

The Food Standards Agency categorises foods as follows:

High is more than 1.5g salt per 100g (or 0.6g sodium)
Low is 0.3g salt or less per 100g (or 0.1g sodium)

So that also gives us a "Medium" category with a huge range of 0.1ish to 0.6ish sodium per 100g.

At the risk of stating the obvious, how much salt you actually get depends on how much of that particular food you eat. Naturally, it's more of a concern when things that you eat a lot of (such as bread) are very high in sodium, than things that you only have a small amount of (such as anchovies). Unless of course you eat an awful lot of anchovies.

About This Blog

First of all, a bit about me and why I've started this blog. I'm Ann C, I'm in my mid-thirties, and am married with two small children. I work full-time in the City, and live just outside of London. My husband has recently been diagnosed with high blood pressure (hypertension). At the moment, we don't know if there's a root cause, and really it's all a bit mystifying - he's young, gets plenty of exercise, eats well, doesn't drink to excess, and, although he works in the City too, it's a job he enjoys and doesn't find particularly stressful.

Anyway, having Googled "hypertension" (isn't this how everyone gets health advice nowadays?) it seems it can have some pretty serious consequences, which I am trying hard not to think about too much. However, I also found that there is a large body of evidence that reducing the sodium in your diet can bring your blood pressure down considerably - some people suggest that you can even reduce it far enough to avoid having to take the (rather nasty-sounding) drugs that are usually prescribed for hypertension (although, unsurprisingly, the Salt Manufacturers Association disagree).

Our diet is already a good one - we eat a good range of foods with plenty of fruit, veg, fish etc. - but one area really needs addressing, and that's the sodium content. I have found very little practical guidance out there on how to do this (everything seems to be US-biased). So, welcome to my humble blog, where I will post my experiences of trying to reduce our sodium intake, and hopefully improve our health.

Please see here for details on the government guidance on salt intake, a good place to start.