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Comment by whistlerbrk | Hacker News Reader

That's half a teaspoon a day. I cook every single day, so I'm very well aware of how little that is. Id rather die a bit earlier then limit my added salt to half a teaspoon.

Just don't eat processed food. Also restaurant food uses a ton of salt so tread carefully.

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it just takes time for your tastebuds to get used to lower salt, but afterwards food tastes just as good. Some years back after eating probably 8,000-10,000mg of sodium a day for most of my life I had to permanently switch to an extremely low sodium diet (<500mg/day) and taste has not been an issue after the first few weeks of acclimatization, tastebuds are very adaptable and interestingly nowadays some vegetables (potatoes for example) will taste slightly salty to me on their own for example.

The major issue has been of course that eating out or eating pretty much any packaged/premade food is impossible, due to everything having tons of sodium/salt added. For some n=1 blood pressure was not the reason why I had to get on this diet, but my bp went from 145/85 to 105/65 after not that long on it, which really surprised me of course.

To anyone curious about the cooking part: I also cook every single day and my meals have very little salt and nobody had complained so far because we are used to use salt as condiment to make stuff tasty but you need to learn to use real condiments (all those colored powders, you know?) and herbs and build up flavor thru caramelization of the food you prepare (nearly everything edible can caramelize a bit, which enhances flavor and mask out "lack" of salt), then use coarse salt when serving. People will taste the salt, but it will be just a twist and to finish the flavor. If you need a bunch of pinches of salt in your meal you have done something else wrong much earlier. Of course, you eventually need to learn how to live with less salt than you are used to today, but that's another story :-)

Not getting enough salt is dangerous as well. Especially people who exercise and lose salts through sweating often underestimate their intake.

I never add salt to any meal I prepare -- and nobody in my family, nor our dinner guests, has ever complained.

We get our salt and iodine from the natural food itself -- e.g. salmon, seaweed, tuna, pork, potatoes, lemon, milk, and leafy veggies...

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