Get the Salt Out (10 page)

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Transform a quality olive oil into an extraordinary herbed oil through the art of infusion.
Fill a one-cup glass jar with three tablespoons of fresh herbs (pounded to bruise them slightly), then add ½ cup warmed olive oil. Allow the oil to cool, then seal the jar, and refrigerate for a few weeks before using. Fat carries the herbal flavor throughout a dish, even when you use only small amounts, so an herbed oil makes an excellent salt-free seasoning to dribble on steamed vegetables, salads, or whole-grain pasta.
One Salt Shaker.

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Another flavorful addition to low-salt cooking
that you can make yourself is herbed vinegar. To make it, loosely fill a clean glass bottle or jar with one cup of fresh herbs of your choice. Add one quart of cider vinegar, white wine vinegar, or red wine vinegar, cap the bottle, and label it. Let it stand in a cool, dark place and after a few days, add more vinegar if needed. Cap it again, then allow the herbs to do their wonders for three to four weeks. Like an herbed oil, an herbed vinegar perks up all salt-free fare, but it’s particularly good in marinades and salad dressings.
One Salt Shaker.

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If convenience is more important to you than price,
you can purchase ready-to-use herbed vinegars and herbed oils in supermarkets. One brand of both of them that I like is Spectrum Naturals, which you can find in natural food stores nationwide. This company makes a nice assortment of flavored vinegars ranging from Italian herb wine vinegar to garlic wine vinegar to peach vinegar. All of its vinegars are made with organic grapes and contain no added sulfites, a common allergen found in commercial vinegars. Spectrum’s herbed oils (called World Cuisine Oils) also are a boon for anyone trying to reduce sodium without reducing flavor. They come in five varieties that range from aromatic garlic-herb Mediterranean Oil to an Asian Oil that is a combination of fragrant sesame oil and fiery ginger and hot pepper. Just a few drops of either an
herbed oil or an herbed vinegar gives surprising punch to otherwise bland food.
One Salt Shaker.

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When you’re looking for flavor without the salt,
you might be tempted to want to use a flavor enhancer such as monosodium glutamate (MSG). MSG can fool our taste buds into thinking foods have greater flavor than they actually do, but at an unsuspected but increasingly serious price to our health, as this section will explain.

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MSG excites not only the taste buds,
it also excites nerve cells, eventually damaging and killing them. Recent scientific evidence suggests that the long-term ingestion of so-called excitotoxins like MSG contributes to the development of diseases of both the brain and nervous system. As Russell L. Blaylock, M.D., says in his book
Excitotoxins: The Taste That Kills
(Health Press, 1994), “The distribution of cellular damage caused by large concentrations of MSG is very similar to that seen in human cases of Alzheimer’s disease.”

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A large and growing segment of the population—
more than 25 percent, according to MSG researcher George R. Schwartz, M.D.—reacts to the amounts of MSG that are commonly added to most processed foods today. Reactions range from mild to severe and include everything from headaches to asthma and nausea to depression. Among the most disturbing symptoms MSG can cause are chest tightness and pain, heart palpitations, and other heart irregularities. Because of serious effects like these, all of us, but especially those who have heart disease, should avoid this common but hazardous food additive.

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Like salt,
MSG has the ability to mask inferior food quality and disguise food spoilage.
This makes MSG a nightmare for health-conscious food consumers. Restaurants and food manufacturers can use the substance to disguise unappetizing, nutrient-poor processed foods that our sense of taste would normally tell us to avoid.

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Naturally occurring MSG isn’t the problem that synthetic MSG is.
A compound of sodium and the amino acid glutamic acid, MSG is actually found in many natural foods such as mushrooms, tomatoes, peas, and cheese. Naturally occurring MSG does not appear to cause health problems in small amounts, but isolated synthetic MSG, which is commonly added in large amounts to processed foods, clearly does.