Reducing Sugar or Salt

You can lower your sugar and salt intake by increasing the amount of spice in your recipes.

• Instead of using the amount of sugar called for in a recipe, you can reduce the amount of sugar and try adding one of the sweet spices. This works best with recipes that contain natural sugars from fruit and fruit juices. The spices are not actually sweet, but go well with sweet foods, and that is where they get their name. Cinnamon, cloves, allspice, ginger, cardamom, anise and fennel are the sweet spices.

It may take a little playing around with to get the substitution correct, but typically you can increase the amount of spice in the recipe by 50% and decrease the amount of sugar by the same. Cardamon and cloves tend to be more potent, so they may not need as much. Don’t be afraid to play around with the combination until you get the taste you want.

• To reduce the salt in your recipe without losing flavor, try using black pepper, garlic powder, or curry powder. If you are making a tomato dish, use tarragon or oregano instead of salt.