Ketchup, the sneaky villain?

There is no healthy ketchup

Well, I shouldn't say that since there's always homemade, but here we go...

For most of my life ketchup was ubiquitous..always in stock at home and always the universal flavor complimentor.

It was only after my health kick (and thinking in basic physics and natural vs unnatural terms) about 5 years ago where I began to question if the benefits of ketchup's added flavor outweighed any health cost (how many people even see ketchup as unhealthy?!)

First of all, why is your food not good enough without it? You want fries, sandwiches, hot dogs, meatloaf and the rest to taste all like ketchup? Come to think of it most of the foods ketchup is added to is already relatively unhealthy; unless we're talking potatoes cooked the right way [potentially with an air fryer and no or minimal oil]. Air fryers are wonderful by the way, if you don't know what they are you absolutely NEED to look it up, and if you do know what they are but haven't tried one, TRY ONE. They 'reduce the fat in recipes by 75%'

Now back to ketchup, if you're not much a culinary explorer, you would assume that red tomato ketchup is all the same, unless you think of a specialty barbecue or spicy flavored variety (don't mention the old color dyed ketchup, a quick fad that thankfully ended. Maybe different brands use different tomatoes or ratios of ingredients...okay, yes they do. Let's checkout the nutrition facts, shall we?

Here's good ol' Heinz

15 kCals, 150mg of sodium and 3g of carbs in 1 table spoon...

Not much else in there, unless you want to count that minuscule amount of vitamin c.

So really ketchup is a bunch of salt. That makes it a junk food! No ketchup is not really a vegetable that counts as a serving of healthiness to give you that nutritional credit you're trying to fit into your daily meal plan, despite what the USDA says!

So what? We don't eat ketchup as a meal it's just a condiment for enhancing flavors.

Okay. Maybe. But you know sometimes children have fries with their ketchup and not ketchup with their fries:

If that's just 1 tablespoon per cup (and to me it looks like 2) that's half of an adult's daily sodium intake (1,050mg) in the ketchup alone! And the RDA for sodium is too high if you ask me (and I've been studying nutrition and experimenting on myself for 5 years). In fact Europeans have a much lower recommended intake at X and the World Health Organization states:

"the minimum intake level necessary for proper bodily function is not well defined, it is estimated to be as little as 200–500 mg/day"
SOURCE

In fact the negative effects from salt/sodium like high blood pressure have caused so much problems that Finland took action long ago to reduce their population's salt intake.

Finland began working on salt reduction as early as the 1970s, including significant public awareness campaigns. In 1993, mandatory salt labelling was introduced, and products containing particularly high levels of salt were also required to bear warning labels.
SOURCE

So is salt the problem? And if so what is the solution?

Remember the nutrition facts for the most basic of ketchup brands above? Most ketchup is overloaded with salt to a similar degree, but in addition to that they have added processed sugar! And more often than not, it's the cheap high fructose corn syrup sweetener at that:

To top it all off, who knows all the GMO ingrediets we got going on.

Solutions then:

There are organic ketchups, no sugar added ketchups, no salt ketchups (needed for people diagnosed with high blood pressure) and organic ketchup, oh my! Often times even name brands doll our the "healthy" ketchup varieties.

Good, so problem solved? - NO

Those options mentioned above are all one niche, one solution to rule them all. Join the organic trend, no sugar fad, no salt (wise) choice, but heavens forbid you want a TRULY healthy ketchup with ALL three of these features, they simply don't exist! You will have to go homemade for that one buckaroo

OPTIONS AVAILABLE:

I'd always go with smaller company health-oriented brands like Annie's, Organicville, etc.

Personally I go with Westbrae Natural unsweetened organic ketchup. With only 70mg of sodium per tablespoon that's less than half of the average junky ketchup.

To go better than that though, I get bionaturx's no salt added Organic Strained Tomatoes instead of ketchup altogether. I don't mind the tartness and, (what others who haven't trained their tongue to a low salt diet see as) bland but hearty Real tomato flavor!

Now I sure talked a lot about a simple condiment, so we must wrap this up. (Aren't you glad I didn't use catch-up as a pun here?)

So next time you run out of ketchup and make your way to the condiments aisle..perhaps you'll stop and wonder:

"How could I flavor my food with something better than cheap processed junk food?"