Alan kept eating all my bananas!!!! Last week, we bought some bananas. Instead of eating my bananas, I set them aside so I could make Almond Banana Bread. The recipe calls for overly ripe bananas. But every time Alan saw a ripe banana, he would eat it. So...I didn't have enough ingredients today to make my Almond Banana Bread! This was not an isolated incident, it happens all the time. Well, I can't get mad at Alan for eating my bananas, after all bananas are a good source of potassium and potassium is a mineral that counteracts the effects of too much sodium in your diet. Looks like I'll have to hide my bananas if I want to bake some banana bread or buy more bananas. Alan's doing everything he can to keep his sodium at the right level. A ripe banana lying there is asking to be eaten by Alan.

An adequate amount of sodium is very important to sustain a healthy body. We need to eat food that is high in potassium and calcium and low in sodium. To add to this confusion of how much sodium is too much or how little sodium is too little; we also need to be smart about where our sodium come from. As you may or may not know there is such a thing as good sodium and bad sodium. The goal is to sustain a healthy body with good sodium. Good sodium occurs naturally and is not refined. Try to stay away from refined sources of sodium such as commercial table salt or products (processed food) that use table salt whenever possible. Table salt is stripped of most of its minerals and is chemically cleaned, bleached, and treated with anticaking agents. How disgusting is that? And when we consume it, it collects and builds up in our body causing problems.

Here is a shortened list of healthier salts and alternatives from Anne Louise Gittleman's "Get The Salt Out - 501 Simple Ways To Cut The Salt Out Of Any Diet."

Instead of commercial table salt, use the following instead:

· Commercial sea salt

· Unrefined sea salt

· Unrefined rock salt (Real Salt)

· Seasame salt

· Herbal salt

· Kelp

· Kombu

· Lite-sodium soy sauce or tamari sauce