Reducing salt

One of the common themes that will come up frequently is the necessity to cook for yourself in order to control the amount of crap that you consume. Pre-packaged foods contain tremendous amounts of salt, fats, sugar, and chemicals that our bodies don't need. The more we eat them, the more our bodies want them, becoming addicted to them physiologically.

Salt is one of these over-used ingredients in pre-packaged foods that, the more we eat, the more we want. Our commitment to healthy eating started with the effort to reduce our salt consumption. It didn't start with trying to lose weight. Nice added bonus maybe, but not the primary motivator.

You just try to cut back on salt and see just how hard it is. Salad dressing, BBQ sauce, ketchup, mayonnaise, mustard, whole tomatoes, pre-made muffins & cookies, salsa, hot chocolate mix (!!!!), ice cream, bread, juice ... The list goes on: "healthy" foods just as much as junk foods are packed with salt and other crap. Salt is pervasive and insidious in every single food around us. So how do we reduce our consumption?

We committed to cooking our own foods and not buying pre-made foods. We started small. The easiest things to eliminate were boxed pre-made food. We started making our own bread, salsa, salad dressing, cookies and muffins. It was better for us anyway, we could make exactly what we wanted! Other groceries were harder: what about mustard and mayonnaise and canned tomatoes? Some things we just had to reduce our intake, like mayo and mustard.

We started canning our own vegetables, particularly tomatoes. We make all kinds of canned tomatoes: roasted, oven-dried, and canned, no salt no sugar no oil added. Bought directly from the farmers market and 2 hours later, we have our own salt-free tomatoes.