Lovin' that spoonful

Nutrition Action Healthletter, Nov, 2006 by Jayne Hurley, Bonnie Leibman

But soup is loaded with blood-pressure-boosting salt. And hypertension is no joke. It increases the risk of heart attacks, strokes, and, recent studies suggest, Alzheimer's and other dementias.

Don't have high blood pressure? You probably will. It strikes 25 percent of American adults (including 50 percent of people over 60). And another 30 percent of adults have prehypertension.

Here's how to navigate the soup aisle without sending your blood pressure uptown.

The information for this article was compiled by Danielle Weinberg.

1. Start with the Serving Size

Before you look at the sodium--or anything else--on any Nutrition Facts label, check the serving size. For most soups, it's one cup (8 ounces), which is unrealistically small for many people.

And you may be surprised by the number of "servings per container." For example, follow the instructions and add a can of water to the contents of a can of Campbell's Condensed soup and you end up with about 20 ounces of soup. According to the label, that makes 2 1/2 servings. Sure it does.

If you turn it into two 10-ounce bowls of soup, the sodium in each serving isn't 650 to 1,000 milligrams, as the labels say, but 850 to 1,250 mg, depending on the variety.

Even trickier are the soups that come in containers that anyone would eat at one sitting. For example:

* Healthy Choice's microwaveable bowls appear to have 480 mg of sodium. But a serving is just under 2/3 of the container. Eat it all and you get close to 800 mg of sodium.

* Health Valley Organic microwaveable bowls also seem like a sodium bargain, at 300 to 480 mg in half the container. Make that 600 to 960 mg if you eat the whole thing.

* Thai Kitchen Hot & Sour Rice Noodle Bowl admits to 940 mg of sodium on its Nutrition Facts label. Most people would eat the entire bowl and end up with 1,880 mg.

2. Skimp on Salt

Soups are salty. Campbell, the industry leader, typically loads some 600 to 1,000 milligrams of sodium into each one-cup serving. Progresso, Knorr, Lipton, and most other brands are in the same ballpark.

That's a huge chunk of the daily limit (1,500 mg if you're middle-aged or older; 2,400 mg if you're younger). There's no way you can stay under either number if you blow a third to half your day's max on a food that has fewer than 200 (sometimes fewer than 100) calories.

The best escape route: make your own soup (see p. 12). Or try one of Health Valley's eight Organic No Salt Added soups, Campbell's five Low Sodium soups, or Tabatchnick's three No Salt soups. They all keep sodium under 150 mg per serving. But be warned: it will take only one swallow to know why those lines likely don't sell very well. You could try adding 1/8 level teaspoon of salt, which adds 300 mg of sodium, pumps up the flavor, and keeps the soups in Honorable Mention territory.

Luckily, a growing number of brands offer less-but-not-low-salt soups with roughly 300 to 500 mg of sodium. We tasted dozens of entries from Amy's Organic Light in Sodium, Healthy Choice, Campbell's Healthy Request, Health Valley, Imagine Organic, Progresso 50% Less Sodium, Tabatchnick, Trader Joe's and Pritikin.

The results varied widely, in part because some people love split pea while others fancy tomato, and because some companies are better at lentil while others know how to turn out a mean bean. (Only chicken tasted okay, no matter what brand we tried.) Check the photos for our favorites. A few other pointers:

* Amy's Organic Light in Sodium manages to keep the sodium in the low 300s, considerably below Healthy Choice and Campbell's Healthy Request, which typically hit 480 mg. (That's the maximum allowed in a serving of food that's called "healthy.") Yet most of Amy's soups taste better than her competitors'. Just goes to show that soup makers can trim the salt without sacrificing flavor.

* Healthy Choice is reliable. A random pick off the shelf may or may not thrill you, but you needn't worry about bland or off flavors.

* Progresso has just four 50% Less Sodium soups. Each is as flavorful as its regular (salty) counterpart. The new line (finally) joins Campbell's Healthy Request soups. That's good news for the nation's arteries.

* Imagine Organic makes 11 Creamy soups that taste like their namesakes. Among the six that make an Honorable Mention, two (Butternut Squash and Sweet Corn) are real crowd pleasers.

* Tabatchnick frozen soups are hit or miss, while Pritikin soups are flavor-challenged. Health Valley is a surer bet.

3. Check the Fiber, Protein, Vitamins, etc.

You may be so relieved to find a soup that pleases your taste-buds and your blood pressure that you don't care what else it does or doesn't have. But keep in mind that soups run the gamut from nutrient-packed to one-step-up-from-hot-water.

For example:

* Split pea, lentil, and bean soups have about 10 grams of protein, 5 to 10 grams of fiber, and 10 to 30 percent of a day's iron. Chicken or beef soups typically range from 3 to 10 grams of protein, and deliver little or no fiber or iron.

* Vegetable soups are usually rich in vitamin A (thanks largely to carrots) and vitamin C (thanks largely to tomatoes).