– Some of this stuff is very targeted
toward patients with heart failure. I know many in the room don't have heart
failure, but actually a lot of these things are good to keep in mind in
general. Sodium is is kind of one of mine and a lot of cardiologists biggest pet
peeves. In heart failure it just wreaks havoc on the body. It really causes you
to retain extra fluid leading to that that swelling, whether it be in the
lungs the legs, whatever. It also increases the blood pressure which makes
the the heart have to work harder. So it's really just oftentimes the bane of
our existence. And I can't tell you how many times a patient will come into the
clinic or the emergency department totally swollen with fluid.
And then you
find it was you know either some chicken wings or a can of soup or something that
they ate a day or two ago and just started retaining fluid ever since then.
That said, it's not just heart failure patients, especially if you have high
blood pressure. But even just the general population. There's there's some evidence
coming out that just higher sodium diets are linked to death in in just broad
populations, whether it be from stroke or heart disease, or something. There's
there's a good correlation now between dietary sodium intake and bad outcomes.
So, whether or not you have heart failure you should you should pay attention and
try to incorporate these as best as you can.
2,000 milligrams a day is kind of the rough consensus of opinion.
Different
different societies will have different recommendations, but I think that's it's
not impossibly strict you know. If you tell a patient eat 500 milligrams of
sodium a day there's no way they can do it. But but I think it kind of finds a
acceptable balance. 1 teaspoon of salt is 2300 milligrams of sodium. So it's not,
this isn't a lot of salt that I'm saying you should be eating. So it's something
to keep in mind. So it depends on the chips, but my guess would be at least 400
milligrams or so. Chips are a great source of salt and and I mean that in a
bad way of course that. But we'll talk about label reading which is kind of the
most important skill you could take for when it comes to diet. A lot of patients
say cutting down on salt is really hard at first, but eventually you kind of get
used to it.
Your taste buds sort of adapt to the lower salt foods. Some patients
even say they start to appreciate new flavors that they used to just drown out
with salt, so it is doable..
