LOW SALT DIET IN MENIERE'S DISEASE
Bread separates the sheep from the goats
Bread is often sold without a label, and the taste is so deceptively mild that no one realizes how much salt it contains. The sodium content varies from 240 mg/100g for Pritikin bread to 725 mg/l00g for some bread rolls. Ordinary bread therefore gives you a high-salt diet which won't control the vertigo.
Salt-free' (no-added-salt) bread is on sale in every Australian capital city including Darwin, and there are eight different bread machines on the Australian market. Salt is a dough improver, but there are many others. For a satisfactory result without salt the Sunbeam needs an alternative dough improver, and even the Panasonic (which works well without salt) makes a lighter loaf with dough improver.
At first you miss the salt, just as you miss sugar if you stop taking it in tea. Toasting helps, and jam or mashed banana and cinnamon or a hundred other nice toppings will soon help your taste buds to adapt.
What to do if the vertigo persists
Authors who are disappointed with 'low salt diets' never define the sodium excretion rate at which they fail, and presumably they don't measure it. Doctors who measure sodium excretion find that many patients who think they are avoiding salt excrete as much sodium as everybody else, having bought the wrong groceries.
If the vertigo persists the first question is whether your diet is really low in salt. Your daily sodium excretion can be measured, and your doctor just needs to order a 24-hour urine collection. As this is not a routine test in all medical practices, it is one of the topics covered in the booklet 'Salt in Medical Practice', available in the Salt Skip Program. The urine result shows the amount of sodium and potassium you excrete, expressed in millimoles (abbreviated mmol). You are at risk of vertigo from eating too much salt if your sodium excretion exceeds 50 mmol in 24 hours, and if it is higher than your potassium excretion.
Why does the vertigo improve?
Meniere's disease is attributed to degenerative changes that have no connection with salt, but salt is a well known trigger for the vertigo. Ordinary foods provide a huge daily fluctuation in salt intake, with variable fluid retention from one day to the next, and each peak is a potential trigger. No drug in fixed dosage can remove these peaks, but of course a consistently low salt intake eliminates them.
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