A low-salt diet is enormously important in kidney disease. It lowers blood pressure, ensures that blood pressure-lowering medications work better, and reduces your thirst.
What do water, salt and sodium have to do with each other?
Chlorine and sodium together form the chemical compound for classic table salt (=sodium chloride). So, since salt contains more than just sodium, a little conversion is needed to determine the sodium levels in food: 1 gram of table salt equals about 0.4 grams of sodium, the rest is chlorine. Your doctor has probably talked to you before about the importance of a low-salt diet for kidney disease. But how exactly are sodium, table salt, and kidney disease related?
What happens to salt in kidney disease?
When you consume table salt in your diet, sodium naturally enters your body. This sodium binds water in your body and blood vessels. In a healthy state, your kidneys can balance sodium and therefore water in your body.
In kidney disease, this ability progressively decreases. If you consume a lot of table salt, the sodium it contains binds water in your body and also increases your feeling of thirst. Simply put, salt binds water in the body and thus promotes water retention. This can be very dangerous for your cardiovascular system.
For example, you've probably heard many times that a Mediterranean diet is often recommended to people as it tends to be lower in salt. So this is even more true for you if you have early-stage kidney disease.
How much sodium should I have in my blood?
So a low-sodium diet is very important in kidney disease. As mentioned at the beginning, it lowers blood pressure, ensures that medications work appropriately, and reduces the feeling of thirst. In case you're interested, an approximate target for your blood sodium is 135 - 145 mmol/l. However, unfortunately you cannot blindly use your blood sodium level to judge whether you are eating too much or too little. This is because your values in the laboratory fluctuate greatly and can also be influenced by a number of other factors. For this reason, using daily guidelines as a guide for your diet is even more important.
How much salt do you eat on average per day?
The average salt consumption in many European countries is 8-10 grams per person per day. However, this is several times the 6 grams recommended by the German Nutrition Society, for example. Of these 8-10 grams, about one-third comes from natural foods, one-third from industrially produced foods, and another third from salt used to season food. This is not surprising, because ready-made products such as a canned soup or a ready-to-eat pizza directly contain between 5 and 10 grams of table salt.
How much salt should I eat daily if I have kidney disease?
In most cases, a low-salt diet is recommended for kidney disease, at the latest from stage 3. More specifically, this means reducing daily salt consumption to slightly less than 6 grams. This corresponds to a maximum of 2,400 mg of sodium. So that's a little less than half the amount of salt you normally consume. If you can manage that, you'll be supplementing your medications in the best possible way.
Do I have to give up salt completely now?
Absolutely not. Since we add too much salt to our diets these days anyway, it's actually not that difficult to reduce the amount of salt in your diet. You can do this with just two tricks:
1. Get into the habit of seasoning without salt.
This is a bit of an adjustment for some at first, but actually not that difficult and tastes just as good, if not better. Spices are more versatile and in some cases much more flavorful than seasoning with just salt.
2. Pay attention to salt content in your choice of processed products.
Salt is often used to preserve convenience foods. If you buy more fresh produce and pay attention to the salt content on the package label for processed products, you can also save a relatively large number of "salt points" fairly easily.
Perhaps you are now saying to yourself that food without salt is rather tasteless. This is only partly true, because the need for salt has been trained in humans. And it's just as easy to get rid of it. The taste buds of the tongue adapt to new amounts of salt in just 2-3 weeks.
"I can't offer my guests unsalted food"
Instead of salt, you can season with a variety of spices. Many countries, such as Italy or Asian countries, produce delicious dishes despite low-salt preparation. And did you know that many professional chefs often cook completely salt-free? Only at the end, i.e. shortly before serving, do they often add a little sea salt. The reason for this is that as soon as salt gets into the food, it prevents all the other existing flavors from developing further. Of course, you don't have to be a professional chef either.... Guests at the table and family members can always reach for the salt shaker if necessary.
If you find it difficult to eat a low-salt diet, the Mizu app has many more tips & tricks, as well as examples, alternatives and recipe suggestions for a lower-salt diet. With chronic kidney disease, it's incredibly important for your health to optimize your diet. This way you can support your body in the best possible way despite the missing work of your kidneys.
