Low Sodium

There are three electrolytes found in a human body. These are potassium, chloride and sodium. Being an electrolyte, sodium is highly essential for your sound health and survival. It serves many vital functions in your body. To mention a few, sodium controls the entry and exit of fluids in body cells. It regulates blood pressure, blood volume, nerve impulses, muscle contraction and acid base balance of blood and other fluids of the body. Sodium also assists in the transmission of nerve impulses. Thus, sodium is highly essential for life. You need to have it in optimum amounts in your daily diet. The recommended intake of sodium for a healthy adult is 2,400 milligrams. Taking sodium more than the recommended amount opens ways to numerous health issues.

Many people take sodium, more than what is recommended. Higher sodium levels in the body gives rise to numerous health issues. Excess of sodium causes more fluid in the blood. This leads to increased volume of blood. The heart beats faster in order to move the blood through the body. Faster heart activity results in chronic high blood pressure. This further leads to several types of kidney and heart disease. Some of the undesirable medical conditions created as a result of high levels of sodium in the blood are stroke, gastric cancer, edema, left ventricular hypertrophy, osteoporosis and heart failure. Lastly, sodium can cause significant water retention in the body, resulting in increased body weight and size. Read more on http://www.fatfreekitchen.com/nutrition/food-nutrition.html

Dieting on sodium free foods is practically impossible and never recommended. Therefore, if you wish to lead a healthy life and enjoy different flavors of food at the same time, you should make meals from the low salt foods. In a low sodium diet plan, you can have protein giving foods such as meat, milk, eggs, pea's poultry and fish. As per the data given by the nutritionists, a low sodium diet should have an intake of sodium in the range of two thousand and three thousand milligrams of sodium in a single day. The best type of low sodium diet is the DASH diet which provides all the essential nutrients to the body.