Under the catagory of "Right Stuff" the Nutrition Action Healthletter wrote recently of a commercially produced cooking stock that did not contain all the usual additives, like sodium and MSG.
"Kitchen Basics Unsalted Chicken Stock relies on the same ingredients you'd use to make homemade stock, and it has no added salt, and it's the best tasting unsalted cooking stock out there" so they claim. The same company also makes vegetable and beef versions, too. The label reveals an interesting amalgam of ingredients, from chicken stock and flavor, to vegetable stock from carrot, onion, mushroom and celery. Also on the list are honey, bay, thyme and pepper. But the star of the show is, as it should be, the chicken. So much so that each cup of stock contains 5 grams of protein.
It's not sodium free, however, due to the fact that celery and chicken both contain naturally occurring sodium. But at 150 milligrams per cup it has a fraction of the competition. Progresso Chicken Broth, for example, has a whopping 850 mg of sodium per cup, not to mention chicken powder, chicken fat, autolyzed yeast extract and other extraneous ingredients to pump up the flavor.
I've always been an advocate of low sodium brands and was pleased to read about this. But there are also others on the store shelf that can make the same claim and with less added salt. One of my favorites is Pacific Natural Foods Low Sodium. It claims on the label to be "All Natural" and "organic" (whatever that really means. But that's a story for another VinnyPost.) The nutrition facts chart states only 80 mg of sodium per cup. And recently I purchased a case lot of the Whole Food 365 Low Sodium Chicken Broth at an attractive discounted price. It listed some ingredients unfamiliar to me, like gum arabic, but with a caveat that it was less than 2% of the total. The sodium level per cup is 140 mg.
There are healthy food products available. But it still remains "buyer beware!" Read the labels, including the fine print, carefully.
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