Washington, DC (September 2010) - Adding salt is a traditional and popular way of enhancing the taste of food. Although we need salt in our diet, many of us consume more salty foods than are good for us. Excess sodium is the likely cause of preventable heart attacks and strokes.

A new study¹ shows that, in the United States, approximately 100,000 deaths each year can be attributed to excess salt intake. It also suggests that a decrease of 9.5% in sodium intake (as has taken place in the UK in recent years) would prevent thousands of strokes and heart attacks in adults aged 40-85 years. It would also save more than $32 billion in medical costs. Many doctors and nutritionists recommend that we reduce our salt intake, but maintaining palatability in some foods can be difficult since reducing the salt can make them taste bland.

Some people believe that by using monosodium glutamate in food, the sodium content of foods will be increased. However, that is not the case! Using glutamate to season food can help to reduce the sodium content of recipes while increasing the savory umami taste. Here are three good reasons to choose glutamate to reduce the level of sodium in your products:

• Replacing table salt with glutamate reduces the sodium content of recipes by up to 40% with no loss in palatability, as gram-for-gram glutamate contains only one third of the amount of sodium.
• Glutamate is used at far lower levels than salt. Glutamate contributes only 1-2 percent of the total sodium contained in the average diet, even where it is used widely in food preparation.
• Using a small amount of glutamate in a low sodium product can make it taste as good as its high salt counterpart.

The chart shows results from taste tests which demonstrate that people find food with low levels of salt significantly more acceptable when a small amount of MSG is added. The study evaluated people's responses to different versions of a clear soup, with and without MSG and with different levels of salt. The broken horizontal line shows the threshold level below which the participants found the dish unpalatable.

Monosodium glutamate is the sodium salt of glutamic acid, an amino acid which occurs naturally in protein-containing foods such as meat, vegetables and dairy products. Glutamate brings nothing new to the diet - the glutamate naturally present in food and the glutamate derived from MSG are identical and the body treats them in exactly the same way.

We don't just eat to live, we get pleasure from eating. The savory foods that we enjoy have a balanced, rounded flavor. Often this satisfying taste is due to the fat and salt content of the food. Adding glutamate to recipes results in salt and fat-reduced foods that still taste satisfying.