The No-Salt, Lowest-Sodium Light Meals Book

I recommend any and all of Mr. Gazzaniga's books if you have been advised by a physician to remove or lower sodium from ones diet. These books are fantastic, I did't know how or where to start learning to re-cook with out salt.

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

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.

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