Excessive salt is considered harmful for your health and may cause a number of complications like worsening heart health, blood pressure and weight gain. This is why a number of health experts will tell you to keep away from salty foods and snacks or keep their consumption to a minimum. A lot of people opt to go on low-sodium diets to drop the harmful weight and to reduce blood pressure, but they have to compromise on taste and eat no salt foods. Scientists have found a way around that. Researchers at the Washington State University have found a way make food taste salty without adding excessive sodium to it. They have managed to make a salt mixture which tastes salt-like, without using as much sodium chloride as is present in table salt.
According to the study, published in the Journal of Food Science, the researchers created various salt blends using different measures of NaCl and some other elements. "It's a stealth approach, not like buying the 'reduced salt' option, which people generally don't like. If we can stair-step people down, then we increase health while still making food that people want to eat," said Carolyn Ross. The approach took into account salt blends with less sodium and more of salts with other minerals including calcium and potassium. Both these minerals are not harmful for our health and in fact, have some benefits, like potassium can help reduce blood pressure. But both calcium chloride and potassium chloride don't taste good.
Talking about the same Ross said, "Potassium chloride, especially, tastes really bitter and people really don't like it." The researchers made use of an electronic tongue to check how much of these substitute salts can be used in the place of sodium chloride before people object that the food isn't tasty. They finally concluded that using 96.4 per cent of sodium chloride with 1.6 per cent potassium chloride and 2 per cent calcium chloride was the ideal mixture, which can be used in the place of normal table salt. A combination of 78 per cent sodium chloride and 22 per cent calcium chloride was also found to be acceptable.