According to the Ministry of Health, four out of five Fijians are dying from non-communicable diseases including diabetes, cancer, lung and heart disease. Many of these deaths may have been prevented if we better understood the cause and effect relationship between what we eat and NCDs. In this special food series, chef Lance Seeto identifies the danger foods we should be eating less of and how to substitute them in your diet.
IN the dietary battle against non-communicable diseases, learning to reduce our salt intake is one of the major challenges throughout the Pacific. Like sugar, it is one of the hardest dietary habits to break because it goes to the very heart of how we have been brought up to eat and cook. In most Fijian homes and restaurants, salt is still liberally added at the table according to the person’s palate. According to the World Health Organization, Fijian men are consuming nearly double their recommended daily allowance of salt, which is set at less than one teaspoon or five grams per day.
Sodium is key ingredient used to make salt. Nutrition Australia recommends a “suggested dietary target” of 1600 milligrams of sodium (equivalent to about 4 grams of salt) for Australian adults. The American Heart Association recommends no more than 2300 milligrams of sodium a day and an ideal limit of no more than 1500 mg per day, or roughly two-thirds of a teaspoon. Although you may not be physically eating teaspoons full of salt, the hidden salt in processed foods and adding more at the table has contributed to an unsustainable diet which has cut short the life of many family and friends.
Education about how we eat and being conscious of what we put in our body and its potential effect has become critical.
How our body uses salt
This excess salt in our diet is one of the contributing foods that eventually leads to a host of NCDs including heart failure, kidney problems, aggravated asthma and gastrointestinal disease. However, eliminating salt completely is also not the answer as small amounts of salt or sodium, is actually good for us and necessary for survival. If we ate no sodium at all, we would die because the electrical system of every living creature works like a car battery and needs a balanced salty electrolyte solution to charge every part of the body.
We are born in a salty solution in the womb, we cry salty tears, we are hooked up to a salty saline solution when sick and our sweat is salty. In fact, humans are made up of 72 per cent water and 28 per cent mineral salts.
The sodium in salt is necessary for preventing dehydration, for proper transmission of nerve impulses and for normal functioning of cells. Natural salt has many trace minerals and elements that are vital for a well functioning body.
Every animal on the planet needs a small amount of salt to stay alive. The problem with humans is that we are no longer eating it just for survival; we’ve become addicted to its taste. And to make things worse, common table salt, like most processed foods, has some nasty hidden ingredients that we should know we are eating.
What’s wrong
with table salt
Sadly, the bright white substance on most dining tables and found in nearly all manufactured foods has been processed into something quite different compared with the mineral-rich natural salt that was once worth as much as gold in ancient times. The more common refined table salts have been stripped of their crucial minerals during processing, which would otherwise help to balance blood pressure. Consequently, table salt is said to cause gross blood pressure fluctuations, instead of stabilising it.
Many processed foods are very high in sodium, but it is always in the form of table salt, artificial flavours, or flavour enhancers.
Contrary to popular belief, table salt is not just sodium chloride. It also contains potentially dangerous additives that are designed to make it more free-flowing so it doesn’t clump together. During manufacturing it is heated to around 650C and treated with caustic soda to remove other minerals.
Anti-caking agents, like aluminum hydroxide, are then added to improve how it pours from the bottle and it is these additives that makes table salt a dangerous ingredient when eaten too much. When you have this mineral-stripped version of salt in your meals, water is drawn out of your body’s cells to counteract it. This starts a chain of events the puts strain on your kidneys and can, over time, impair their ability to remove waste products from your blood.
What’s right
with table salt
Table salt is cheap. However, the sodium chloride you buy in the supermarket and sold as table salt is primarily an industrial product. It is mass-produced in large processing plants with more than 90 per cent of it is used in the commercial industry. That’s why it’s so much cheaper than the healthier, mineral-rich sea salts.
But its only hidden “goodness” is iodine. Iodine deficiency is a major problem throughout the world as many of us are not getting enough of this vital supplement. Iodine is needed in every cell all over the body. It is the “walkie-talkie” that allows cells to talk to each other and listen to what signals the glands send out.
Iodine also acts like an electric fence; it zaps intruders and therefore helps to fight bacteria and germs. Iodine has all the good “anti” properties of anti-viral, anti-bacterial (ulcers and boils), anti-fungal (cold roes, rashes, tinea), anti-parasitic (tape and other intestinal worms) and anti-toxin (fights hard metals like aluminium). It’s found in all sea vegetables including seaweed and nama sea grapes, as well as eggs, cold water fish like salmon, some dairy and certain fruits such as strawberries.
If you have been diagnosed with iodine-deficiency, are you eating more of these sorts of foods? In the 1920s, iodine was added to salt (iodised salt) throughout the world to combat goiter. A goiter is an enlarged thyroid gland. The thyroid is the gland in front of the neck just below the area of the Adam’s apple. This butterfly-shaped gland plays a critical role in how everything works inside our body. Most of the body’s iodine stores are in the thyroid gland.
An iodine deficiency leads to an enlarged thyroid gland, slowed metabolism, and weight gain, as well as other symptoms of hypothyroidism such as fatigue and intolerance of cold, as well as neurological, gastrointestinal, and skin abnormalities. Iodine deficiency in pregnant or nursing mothers can result in thyroid problems during fetal and child development.
In the Pacific, we have a natural source of iodine from vegetables in the sea. But how often do you eat seaweed such as lumi, nama or even the magical, medicinal red and brown seaweeds of the Yasawas?
Using table salt as a vehicle to deliver iodine in communities makes sense, but now the conundrum is: eating too much table salt is not good for me, but I still need the iodine to fight disease. The answer may lie in a natural salt that professional chefs have been using for decades — mineral sea salt.
Is sea salt any better?
Unrefined and unadulterated sea salt like Pink Himalaya or Cyprus Black Lava are prized seasonings in the health-conscious kitchen as they are not only rich in medicinal minerals, they can impart subtle flavours of their seas.
Its benefits over table salt contrasts the immense differences between nature-made and factory-made. Natural sea salts can turn the body into a hostile environment for pathogens such as bacteria and parasites. Its toxicity to pathogenic life forms is why salt is such an excellent preservative for curing, while leaving the healthy foods completely intact. Sea salt naturally contains selenium, another vital mineral which helps to destroy toxic heavy metals from the body.
It also contains boron, which helps prevent osteoporosis, and chromium which regulates blood sugar levels. Sea salt is one of the few sources for safe copper ingestion, and copper helps the body to form new arteries whenever the main arteries become too clogged.
So why aren’t we using it more?
Two problems: one, sea salt is considerably more expensive than table salt, and secondly, sea salt doesn’t contain enough iodine to meet minimum government requirements for salt is not so widely available in Fiji.
The answer to getting the best of a medicinal salt, less additives from the table salt and daily allowance of iodine may lie in a slight tweak to our island diet and a relook at our own natural salt resources in Fiji.
Smarter Pacific diet
Lomawai Village between Nadi and Sigatoka is possibly the only place in Fiji where natural sea salt (mahima) is still being created in the traditional way and its customers claim it is one of most natural tasting salts on par with the expensive sea salts of the Himalayas. We also have sea salt lakes on Vanua Levu.
So in theory, Fiji could commercially produce its own natural sea salt but where will the increased iodine come from? A change in diet is needed to get more regular supply of iodine and Fiji is blessed with two sources that ironically we sell but do not eat regularly. Asia has a ferocious appetite for our red and brown seaweed and sea cucumber (beche-de-mer) because of their medicinal properties and iodine. And while some of us may regularly eat nama sea grapes, not all of us do.
Another adjustment we urgently need to make is to reduce our taste for salt, especially in young children. Just as the Ministry of Health recommended a few years back, hide the salt! Learn to cook with salt on the stove or marinate meats before they go into the lovo, so that no one needs to add it at the table.
A lack of cooking and nutritional knowledge at home is to blame. One of my chefs once explained the reason he doesn’t add salt to his cooking is because there’s salt on the table! This habit he learned at home.
In this new generation of technology, cooking shows on television and YouTube will help facilitate more education that the older generation never had, and Mr Google is a wonderful and instant way to learn about nutrition and how to cook more healthy foods with flavour.
Adding more flavour to your cooking lessens the need for too much salt to create flavour. Whether it is sweet, sour, hot, aromatic, spicy, sour or bitter, add more herbs, vinegars, citrus and spices to your cooking — and season with salt on the stove; not the table.
Prevention and early detection of non-communicable disease may save your life or that of a loved one. It is good to see your doctor regularly for a full medical assessment and dietary advice.
