good | The No-Salt, Lowest-Sodium Light Meals Book | Donald A. Gazzaniga, Maureen A. Gazzaniga

Good recipes; good ideas | The No-Salt, Lowest-Sodium Light Meals Book | Donald A. Gazzaniga, Maureen A. Gazzaniga

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	• The No-Salt, Lowest-Sodium Light Meals Book Donald A. Gazzaniga, Maureen A. Gazzaniga Thomas Dunne Books, 2005 - 272 pages average customer review:based on 4 reviews view larger image
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Wonderful Life Saver!

Excellent, tasty recipes and great tips and information for those needing a no salt or lowest sodium alternative to regular recipes. My husband was diagnosed with Meneire's disease and needs to stay around 300 mg or less of sodium a day. I was having a difficult time finding recipes to suit this need until I found Don Gazzaniga's books and website. The soups and salads in this particular cookbook are even easy enough for my husband (a non cook) to handle.

good

Good info about coooking a whole meal. Frustrated that it was referring to pages/recipes in prior book. If it was important to mention I WANTED RECIPE REPEATED IN THIS BOOK. I was grateful I had the book prior.

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Good recipes; good ideas

The No-Salt, Lowest-Sodium Cookbook has some really good recipes, but it's just as important that you read the Introductory information;"Straight Talk from A Cardiologist", "The importance of good nutrition for a Healthy Heart", and all the other pages of information. You may learn something you didn't know, or just be reminded of something you did know but hadn't thought about recently.

The recipes tell you how much sodium you're actually adding with each ingredient by showing the information in parenthesis. Example: '1 cup fresh basil leaves (1.696 mg)'or '1/3 cup extra-virgin olive oil (trace)'

At the end of each recipe, the calories, sodium, fiber, etc., are all listed per serving.

The authors use brand names, not for advertising, but to make it easier to find appropriately low-sodium ingredients. One drawback: in some cases, the brand named ingredient is no longer available

I am what some people call a "scratch" cook, meaning (I hope) that I rarely purchase prepared foods, and so, although the recipes are excellent, sometimes I just like to scan through the book to get ideas for preparing the winter squash I found on sale, or what to do with all those walnuts I still have in the freezer.

All in all, I would recommend the book to everyone, but especially to those with health problems

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Salt is the Cause; Not the Solution

There's an old Texan story about a Texican who goes into a general store that is having a closing sale. He sees that a whole wall of the store is stacked with nothing but buffalo pucky and salt: bags of buffalo pucky and bags of salt, blocks of buffalo pucky and blocks of salt, shakers of buffalo pucky and shakers of salt. Just buffalo pucky and salt from floor to ceiling (everything's big in Texas). So he says to the store clerk, "Dude, you sure sell a lot of buffalo pucky and salt!" The store clerk replies, "I wish that were the case. The only one selling a lot of buffalo pucky and salt is the salesman that talked me into buying all this."

Like the storekeeper, two things that Americans consume far too much of are buffalo pucky and salt - nearly as much as is consumed by the British [...] Thanks to processed foods, Americans consume 20 to 30 times their recommended daily allowance of salt. And thanks to Bush, Blair, and their friends in the corporatist media who feed a steady diet of buffalo pucky to gullible Americans - greasy morsels such as: the Iraqi people want us in Iraq and the Afghans want us in Afghanistan; that we are rebuilding their countries; that we are helping the Iraqi and Afghan peoples; that the new Iraqi government is a democracy and former Soviet drug lord Hamid Karzai of Afghanistan is not a dictator; and the list goes on and on - 80,000 gullible kids join the U.S. military each year and many end up in Afghanistan, Iraq, injured or in a body bag. Both buffalo pucky and salt are detrimental to one's health, financial and otherwise, often giving rise to high blood pressure.

The Gazzaniga family - Donald, Maureen, and Jeannie, do not address the buffalo pucky that serves to camouflage America's slide down the slippery slope to Nazi Germany nor do they address the rapid rise of heart disease by distressed percipient veterans who are in a turmoil over the Hitlerite fascism that has gripped America and is now plaguing the world. Instead they have put together a cookbook full of recipes that tell readers how to skip salt rather than buffalo pucky.

Their book is divided into 8 sections for recipes: Soups, Stocks and Broths, Wild Game Soups, Sandwiches, Sandwich Breads, Salads, Special Salad Dressings, and Spice and Herb Mixes. The recipes sections are followed by a glossary, conversion tables showing the metric units for English measurements (which were banned in England in 1999), a table of ingredients used in this book, and an index.

Most illuminating is a 3 and a half page foreward written by Dr Michael Fowler, Director of Stanford Heart Transplant Program. He says that many people suffering from hypertension (i.e. high blood pressure) are actually suffering from salt poisoning, which in turn contributes to hypertension. For many people, a hormone is doing a Bush-n-Blair to their kidneys, lying and telling the kidneys that the body is dehydrated. If your kidneys believe that you are dehydrated, then they will not release sodium. Sodium then builds up inside you and you begin to feel the effects of salt poisoning. Dr Fowler says "When the heart begins to fail, the kidneys are `signaled' by hormones and nerves to adjust the kidneys to retain sodium, and consequently water. . . the kidney and hormonal systems have incorrectly assumed that the changes detected around the body and especially by the kidneys are the result of the individual being dehydrated" (pp xiii-xiv). Although he doesn't mention having a VQ scan, he does recommend an echo-Doppler examination and a BNP test, "which measures a hormone provided by the failure of the heart that reflects the elevation of pressure caused by salt and secondary fluid retention" (pxiv).

Beginning on page 1 is the section on low-sodium soups. The recipes range from one for apple and cauliflower soup with curry followed by 34 more recipes ending with one for turkey tortilla soup. Section 2 contains 6 stock and broth recipes. Section 3 has 7 wild game soup recipes. Section 4 has 31 scrumpcious sandwich recipes including one for a vegetable calzone. Section 5 contains 19 recipes for no-salt breads, which I can personally testify that light, fluffy bread can be baked without any sodium. Section 6 has 30 salad recipes ranging from Asian chicken salad to Summer cucumber tomato salad. Section 7 has 8 salad dressing recipes. The last section has 12 recipes for spice and herb mixes.

The thing that is most troubling to me about what is going on with out-of-control salt usage and resulting salt-poisoning is the public's reaction, or lack thereof, to it. It seems to me that the public is a little too accepting of whatever advertisers and corporatist media feed them and is too unwilling to research things for themselves. I think the misconceptions harbored by the public about the necessity to use salt are dangerous to their health.

Just as too many of the American public still harbors troubling ideas about soldiers in Afghanistan and Iraq, so does the public have misconceptions about salt. A huge one is that we need salt so then we grab the shaker and pour it on our food. The truth is that the average American consumer cannot avoid salt - a cup of milk has 80 mg and a slice of bread has 150 mg. In one meal, they surpass 500 mg.

In short, to remain healthy we need less salt and less government intervention! Maybe the Gazzanigas will write a recipe for less government - something like the skip-government recipe book for living a healthy life!

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Perhaps heartbreaking is the wrong word for a very happy event, one that brings tears to your eyes because you know what the alternative would have been. But however you describe it, the letters that Don Gazzaniga finds on his web site ever since his first cookbook was published easily bring tears to the reader's eyes.

"The doctor told him that the very low-sodium diet is the main thing responsible for this success and I couldn't wait to share it with you."

"When I said that your book saved [my husband's] life, I meant it."

That first cookbook was a surprise to medical professionals and their patients alike. Doctors have always believed that no one could ever get below 1500 milligrams of sodium a daily diet.
"Keep it at that level," Don's doctor told the sixty-three-year-old Gazzaniga in 1997. He had diagnosed his patient's problem as congestive heart failure and was about to sign him up for the only solution believed possible, a heart transplant.

To Don, this was a challenge. After a lot of research, the help of nutritionist daughter, Jeannie, familiarity with the cuisines of many different countries, and hours in the kitchen, Don came up with a large selection of recipes and a twenty-eight-day menu that never went above five hundred milligrams of sodium a day! Yep! That's five hundred. And the food was delicious.
The recipes in that first diet were gathered in a general cookbook that told readers just about everything they needed to know: where to find the right ingredients, how to make tasty substitutions that did not raise the sodium level, and more, with the sodium count given for each ingredient and each recipe.

That was The No-Salt, Lowest-Sodium Cookbook. Don decided to embellish the general work with some specialties and, with his wife, Maureen, created The No-Salt, Lowest-Sodium Baking Book. If anyone thinks that you can't make delicious bread and pies and cookies and other baked goodies with very little or no sodium, try a few of Don's recipes.
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But suppose you want to celebrate your grandson's third birthday, or your doctor's latest green light, with a party and need delicious tidbits for the guests. Here they are in their new book. Sometimes you feel like a light lunch---a salad, a sandwich, a bowl of soup. Here they are. There are sections explaining where to buy special flavorings and the like, how to substitute low-sodium or sodium-free ingredients, and a foreword by Dr. Michael Fowler, director of the Stanford Heart Transplant Program and medical director of the Stanford Cardiomyopathy Center.

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