Sodium & the Diabetes Diet

"Hi, I'm Brenda Thompson, registered dietitian and owner of Life Skills Nutrition. In this segment I'm going to talk about sodium and diabetes. People who have diabetes are at high risk for high blood pressure. Limiting salt may help reduce the risk of developing high blood pressure. Exercise also helps decrease high blood pressure. Some tips to decrease salt in your diet or sodium, you want to limit your sodium intake to about two thousand to three thousand milligrams per day and in a moment we're going to look at some foods and you can see how easy it would be to rock up the amount of sodium in one day. You want to avoid or decrease the amount of salt during cooking and eating. Sometimes that is a little bit hard to get used to but after you do it a little while you will be okay. Limit convenience in snack foods such as crackers, pickles, olives, packaged rice, pasta, and entree dishes. Those are the ones that are already packaged up conveniently and we will examine some of these in a minute. Canned and packaged soups and canned vegetables can also be very high in sodium. Limiting dinning at fast foods restaurants can definitely decrease your sodium intake and limiting curred meats such as bacon, ham, sausage and cold cuts. Let's go ahead and examine some of these products. Here we have some bacon and if you look here on the label; two slices contains three hundred and eighty milligrams of sodium. Now remember that our sodium intake should be between two thousand and three thousand per day. For this Strogenoff that we have prepackaged; for one cup prepared if you look here the sodium is seven hundred and seventy milligrams. How many of you just consume one cup in one serving? Also we have the chicken and broccoli already prepared; for a half of cup here you can see that the sodium is eight hundred milligrams in just in a half of a cup. Then we have some marinara sauce or spaghetti sauce; where half of cup is six hundred and sixty milligrams. This roman soup here; it contains two servings so half of this serving is eight hundred and eighty milligrams. If you consume this whole package you will almost be at your full daily recommended amount. Consuming five of crackers is two hundred and fifty milligrams. And then this is salt and a quarter of a teaspoon of salt is five hundred and ninety milligrams to just to give you an idea of how much that is. Also be careful of other foods like snack foods such as pretzels. So when you have diabetes it is very important that you pay attention to the amount of sodium that you take in so that you don't have the problems that may occur with high blood pressure."