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Posted

I am coming to Thailand for 5 months to check it out for retirement.

I have hypertension and am concerned that it will get worse from eating Thai food. In the US at stores like Whole Foods and Trader Joe's you can get low sodium foods.

Cooking from scratch is an option, but on some posts here I have seen that it is just as cheap to eat at restaurants.

One option is just to up my meds and enjoy the food.

Any suggestions for the hypertensive in LOS?

Posted

You will consume more sodium if you eat out here (and, with respect to street vendors/local type restaurants, it is just as cheap as cooking yourself). On the other hand, you will also lose a lot of sodium as a result of the hot climate (sweating) which will at least partially offset it. And of course it will depend on what you eat and what you put on what you eat..many of the local condiments are loaded with sodium.

People vary in terms of how sensitive their BP is to sodium. If you find that your BP is goes up, or you need higher doses of meds to copntrol it, one option would be to hire a maid/cook to cook for you at home and train her to cook without added salt/fish or soy sauce (fish sauce is used in place of salt in Thailand).

Posted

I don't watch or limit my salt intake at all. I very seldom eat out because my Thai wife is a great cook. We now live up country and my diet is about 95 percent Thai food. A lot of what she cooks is pretty salty. Since I have been up here my blood pressure has dropped and my pulse rate is about ten beats slower than when we lived in Jomtien. The saltiness comes from fish sauce rather than out of a salt shaker, but I wouldn't think that would make any difference. I do take a 20mg ACE inhibitor daily with a 60mg aspirin. I found that I can break the 20's in half and that controls it pretty well. Unfortunately Enaril is only avilable in 20's and 5's. They are cheap so I have continued to take the 20mg.

As a side note, my doctor in the US kept changing my drugs and my blood pressure was NEVER under control. The doctor here advised me to throw away all the drugs that I was using and to take the Enaril and an aspirin. Thailand and Thai food apparently agrees with me. I just checked my blood pressure and it is 124 over 78.

Enjoy the Thai food and wait to see what happens. You may be pleasantly surprised.

Posted

I've recently started taking an anti-hypertensive drug (Plendil; sounds like a character from Lord of the Rings :o ) and am trying to watch my diet and exercise.

Can we buy soy sauce that's low in sodium? Should I keep eating bananas? About the only 'Thai' food that I eat is khaow paht gai and rice, chicken and fresh veggies. I eat about 1.5 kilos per day of watermelon, pineapple, and grapes, and lots of bakery goods.

Now, I need to stop eating popcorn.....

Posted

Those bakery goods could have a lot of sodium. Besides salt, there is sodium in many food preservatives and additives.

For the Thai foods, who cooks them? Because Thai cooks will dump in large amounts of sodium via MSG, fish sauce etc.

Bananas are fine.

There are low sodium soy sauces available n the West, don't know about here -- can anyone advise?

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