Identifying basic foods high in potassium, low in sodium and low fat

After my last post, you may be asking, "If a low fat/lean turkey sandwich has 1500 mg of sodium, how can it be possible to create a complete diet with 1000-1500 mg of sodium per day?????" It is actually not that hard: it takes a little planning and a little flexibility. The key is to identify the high potassium, low sodium and low fat basic ingredients that appeal to your tastes and build from these ingredients.

Searching google for "low sodium foods" (or anything similar) will make your head spin - everybody is trying to sell you something, nobody wants to make it easy. After much (painful) investigation, I discovered that all the websites and books giving you sodium and potassium counts are actually just reiterating data readily available from the USDA. So here you go, the 3 places to research your diet and identify the basic ingredients to put to work for you:

1. USDA Nutrition Data: The authority on nutrition counts - available in many different forms to suit your needs (PDF files for each nutrition type, database load files, etc). A great source of "raw data" if you want to build your own database or spreadsheet to analyze foods.
2. Nutrition Data from Self: A searchable interface to the USDA data - just type a food into the search box and get the USDA results. If you do not want to download all the raw data from the USDA, this is a good website to use for searching the USDA data. 
3. The World's Healthiest Foods: A list of the healthiest foods (i.e., base ingredients). Instead of searching the USDA data, this website has preselected some of the foods and enumerated them for you.

These are the starting points - identify high potassium/low sodium/low fat heart healthy ingredients that suit your tastes and start building recipes and meals from these.

I will highlight some of my favorite heart healthy ingredients in future posts...