Celia Atun helps her husband Albert manage his heart condition

"My husband and I are both on the same low-salt diet. I have high blood pressure anyway, and do all of the cooking, so it makes sense for us both to be on it. When he was first diagnosed, we had a nurse come to the house who gave us some low-salt recipes, like for tomato sauce. Since then, I've been experimenting ... using low-salt cookbooks and taking my old recipes and simply cutting out the salt. I buy frozen vegetables instead of canned, and I've found some food brands that are lower in salt. In fact, I just wrote to one food manufacturer because the label wasn't clear about salt content!

"Diet really has been the toughest change for us because it seemed that everything we liked to eat was high in salt ... lox, whitefish, deli meats, what my husband calls 'all the good stuff!' We take a break only once in a while, when we visit our grandchildren in Florida and take them out for pizza or Chinese food. But then it's right back to the diet again. We're constantly watching what comes into the house because we know it's important."