Q: Is there a low-sodium diet plan for those on Coumadin®?

Is there a diet plan for a person that needs both low sodium and is on cumadin? I am finding it very hard to cook for my husband with these restrictions. He has a water retention problem that is quite severe and everything seems to have sodium in it.

Q: Dr. Gourmet Says...

The Dr. Gourmet web site provides a number of resources for you to help your husband eat healthy and watch the amounts of Vitamin K that you are feeding him. There is now an eatTHISdiet plan just for those on Coumadin. This version of eatTHISdiet works just like the Original and Comfort Food Diet plans but it has foods on the menu that are low in Vitamin K.

While most recipes on the Dr. Gourmet web site are low in sodium, for those on very low-sodium diets every recipe now has a listing in the Special Diet Information section to help you determine if a recipe might be safe for his low-sodium diet. If it is not, there are two alternatives. You can follow the instructions in the eatTHISdiet plan on how to substitute recipes. Alternatively, you can reduce the amount of salt that you add to each recipe.

Because Dr. Gourmet recipes use fresh ingredients that are low in sodium, often simply reducing the amount of salt that is called for by 1/2 or eliminating it altogether can help you with eating less sodium.

Every teaspoon of salt has about 2,300 mg of sodium in it. As a rule of thumb, adding 1/4 teaspoon of salt will add about 575 mg of sodium to a recipe. Because the amount of sodium is reported for every Dr. Gourmet recipe you can easily decide how much salt to leave out and still meet your husband's targets set by his physician.

The other issue you face is that of the amount of Vitamin K, and the eatTHISdiet plan is designed to be low in Vitamin K and safe for Coumadin® (warfarin) users. The Dr. Gourmet web site provides other information for eating healthy and watching the amounts of Vitamin K in your foods. For instance, there are three lists that you can download in PDF form. They range from a very simple list of foods that have a high or moderate amount of Vitamin K to a complete listing of all ingredients used in Dr. Gourmet recipes with the amounts of Vitamin K listed. You can find those links here:

Basic list:
http://www.drgourmet.com/md/warfarinbrief.pdf

List of foods with relative amounts of Vitamin K:
http://www.drgourmet.com/md/relativewarfarinlist.pdf

Comprehensive list:
http://www.drgourmet.com/md/warfarincomprehensive.pdf

The Ask Dr. Gourmet section on the website has a listing of questions that have been asked by readers like yourself.

In addition, there is an easy way to find out about the nutrition content of any food. The USDA National Nutrient Database is at this link:

http://www.nal.usda.gov/fnic/foodcomp/search/

By entering an ingredient and following the steps, this website will report the complete nutritional values of any ingredient and many prepared foods. The Vitamin K content is the last listing at the bottom of the Vitamins section. If it is not there, the food or ingredient that you searched on doesn't contain enough Vitamin K to be reported.

You can see that there's a host of information available to you on the Dr. Gourmet website for eating healthy while taking Coumadin.

Thanks for writing,

Dr. Gourmet
Eat well, eat healthy, enjoy life!