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 Coumadin? 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.

The Health meets Food Team Says...

The 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.

While most recipes on the Web site are low in sodium, for those on very low-sodium diets every recipe 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 substitute a low-sodium recipe by checking our list of low-sodium recipes, or you can reduce the amount of salt that you add to each recipe.

Because our 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 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 each recipe lists the amount of Vitamin K in a serving of each recipe. For foods that are not made using Health meets Food recipes, 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 our recipes with the amounts of Vitamin K listed. You can find those links here:

Basic list:
https://mds.culinarymedicine.org/md/warfarinbrief.pdf

List of foods with relative amounts of Vitamin K:
https://mds.culinarymedicine.org/md/relativewarfarinlist.pdf

Comprehensive list:
https://mds.culinarymedicine.org/md/warfarincomprehensive.pdf

The Ask The Health meets Food Team section on the website has a listing of questions that have been asked by readers like yourself.

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

Reviewed 08/21/2022