Researchers have found a way to make your food taste salty without excessive amounts of sodium chloride, which can damage our health. Researchers at Washington State University conducted the study.
"It's a stealth approach, not like buying the 'reduced salt' options, which people generally don't like,"Carolyn Ross, a Food Science professor at WSU, told a news portal. Adding, "If we can stair-step people down, then we increase health while still making food that people want to eat."
The team investigated a number of salt blends that used less sodium chloride but more of other kinds like calcium chloride and potassium chloride.Calcium and potassium chloride don't have the same effect on our health in the way that sodium chloride does. Potassium can help manage blood pressure levels even though they are great when it comes to taste. "Potassium chloride, especially, tastes really bitter and people really don't like it," Ross told a news portal.
Tasting panels and WSU’s electronic tongue were used to test how much of the replacement salts could be added for standard sodium chloride before people didn't like it. Some tasting panels tested out different types of salt solutions like a combo of salt and water. Meanwhile, others tested salt in tomato soup.
Through this process, researchers discovered using close to 96.4 per cent of sodium chloride with 1.6 per cent potassium chloride and 2 per cent calcium chloride was an ideal formula. However, when they added only calcium chloride, which was a combination of78 per cent sodium chloride and 22 per cent calcium chloride, the rates were more acceptable. “This combination of the two salts did not significantly differ compared to 100 per cent sodium chloride,” Ross told a news portal.Adding, “But when we added potassium chloride, consumer acceptance decreased.” The study's findings were published in the Journal of Food & Science.
Previous research has found that people who consume a healthy diet that includes fruit and vegetables could still be at risk of high blood pressure if the food they consume has a lot of salt. “This matters because it indicates that the problem of excess salt intake and its adverse effects on blood pressure cannot be solved by augmenting the diet with other nutrients,” lead author of the study a Dr Jeremiah Stamler of the Feinberg School of Medicine at Northwestern University in Chicago, told a news portal. Adding, “The solution is reduction in salt intake,” Stamler said. “This is difficult since, as a result of commercial food processing, salt is almost everywhere in the food supply.”
High blood pressure, which has become a growing issue around the world, can lead to serious health conditions like heart disease, heart attack, stroke and heart failure. According to the World Health Organisation (WHO), people need to reduce their sodium intake to about a teaspoon of table salt a day in order to tackle this issue.
