The condition of when the heart get inability to pump blood effectively (unable to circulate adequate O2 to the body) is familiar known as ‘congestive heart failure (CHF)’! And there are a lot of possible causes and diseases that can lead to CHF. One of important treatments is changes in lifestyle, including ‘how & what’ to eat or familiar known as congestive heart failure diet!
This diet is purposed to maintain the blood pressure levels, cholesterol levels, fluid balance, weight of the body, and so on. Whatever the treatments that your doctor recommend, they are expected to help relieving the symptoms and complications of CHF.
The following are common helpful tips in congestive heart failure diet, but don’t forget to discuss more with your dietitian to get more advices!
Limit the intake of salt in your congestive heart failure diet!
It is so important to make sure that you can enjoy to what you eat! Without it, you will feel more difficult to do all instructions in your CHF diet, which eventually will reduce the chance of the successful diet and treatment.
One of major issues is limiting the intake of salt, because salt can worse your blood pressure. For the solution, you can choose foods are lower in salt. You can try the following suggestions to reduce or limit the salt content in the diet:
- Much recommended to eat more fresh vegetables & fruits. They are not only rich in fiber but also low in salt.
- Other foods that have small amounts of salts are fresh fish, fresh legumes, yogurt, eggs, and fresh meats. Moreover, you can also choose oatmeal, pasta, or plain rice for your low-sodium options. Be careful also to other high-salt ingredients that are added in the process of cooking of the foods.
- Then much recommended to avoid spice mixtures that have sodium or salt. For natural flavors, you can also try with fresh ground pepper or lemon juice. For meat marinades, you can consider pineapple or orange juice.
- Don’t forget also to check the labels of the packaged foods that you want to buy! Each packaged foods usually have the lists of nutrient facts (including for each serving of sodium content). After knowing the sodium content /serving then you can compare to the safely total amounts of sodium /day as recommended by your dietitian.
What you should consider when reading the labels?
Once again, it is important to check first the labels of the nutrition information of a packaged food before buying, particularly for the number of servings /container. What else you need to know?
- Check the list of nutrient! This covers all nutrients of the packaged foods, which is the most important to the health of your body.
- Check the percentage of daily value! This indicates how the foods meet the suggested levels of nutrient intake for 2,000 calorie reference diet. You should eat less than 100 % of total fat, sodium, and cholesterol!
- Check daily values footnote! There are several foods that list daily values about 2,500 and 2,000 calorie daily diets.
- Footnote of calories /gram! There are also some foods that list the number of calories (in the amounts of gram which can include protein, carbohydrate, and fat).
- And don’t forget to check the amounts of salt or sodium! Choose foods that have lower in sodium (less than 350 mg /serving).
Preparing or cooking food!
And what you should notice when preparing or cooking your foods?
- Change your habit! If there is a salt shaker in your kitchen counter, then you should remove it!
- You can try with garlic, onions, or herb to replace the flavor of salt.
- Avoid cooking high-sodium foods or meals, but it is much better to keep close with a low-salt cooking. There are a lot of ‘low-salt recipes’ that you can find easily on internet.
- Consider your condiments as well! There are some condiments that have high sodium content, like catsup, soy sauce, onion salt, flavor enhancers, mustard, bouillon cubes, garlic salt, steak sauce, and so on! Be careful also from hidden salt, particularly such as; instant cereal, packaged potato & noodles mixes, cheeses, pickles, bacon, salty snacks etc.
- And always prioritize fresh foods instead of choosing frozen foods or fast foods! Foods with MSG also should be avoided in your congestive heart failure diet.
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