If you’re living with chronic kidney disease (CKD), you’re already aware that managing your blood pressure is vital. One major step in doing that is cutting back on salt. But here’s something you might not have expected: the natural aversion to excessively salty foods may not work the way it should. A recent study reveals that your taste response, especially when salt is paired with sweetness, could be influencing your salt intake more than you realize. Understanding these taste interactions could help you make better dietary choices and protect your kidneys.*

Why Salt Tastes Different When You Have CKD

As a person with CKD, your taste buds don’t work quite the same way as those of someone with healthy kidneys. In this study, researchers tested how 66 CKD patients and 100 healthy people reacted to salty, sour, and bitter tastes, both alone and when sweetened. The surprising finding? Most CKD patients didn’t find even very high salt levels unpleasant. That means you might not get the natural “yuck” signal that helps healthy people avoid salty foods.

Even more striking:

• Nearly 80% of CKD patients didn’t find the highest salt concentrations aversive, versus
• Just 44% of healthy participants. 

That’s a concern because it means you could be eating more salt than your body can handle without realizing it. This reduced aversion is likely tied to changes in your taste recognition, which is common in CKD.

Sweetness Masks Salt, and That’s a Problem

Adding sugar to salty foods made the problem even worse. When researchers combined sweet and salty tastes, they found that nearly 93% of CKD patients no longer had any aversion to high salt. That means sweet flavors can completely override your brain’s warning signals about excessive salt.

This matters because many processed foods mix sweet and salty flavors—think sweetened sauces, salad dressings, and flavored snacks. For someone with CKD, eating these could mean silently increasing your salt intake, which puts added strain on your kidneys and can raise your blood pressure. Even small increases over time can have a big impact on your health.

What You Can Do: Rethink Your Taste Habits

You might be tempted to use sweeteners to make low-salt foods more enjoyable. But this study shows that the strategy could backfire. Adding sweetness may prevent you from realizing just how salty something is. In CKD, your taste sensitivity is already reduced, so masking saltiness further makes it even harder to stick to dietary recommendations.

Instead, focus on enhancing flavor with:

• Herbs,  
• Spices,  
• Lemon juice, or 
• Umami-rich ingredients like mushrooms. 

Avoid foods that combine high salt and high sugar, and be cautious of packaged meals and dressings. If something tastes bland at first, give your taste buds time; they can gradually adjust to lower salt levels.

Your taste perception isn’t just a preference—it’s part of your body’s safety system. When that system is off, as it often is with CKD, you need to be extra mindful about your salt intake. Avoid compensating with sweetness, and try new ways to make your food flavorful and kidney-friendly.

*Natsuko Okuno-Ozeki, N., Kohama, Y., Taguchi, H., Kawate, Y., et al. (2025, July 7). The addition of sweetness reduces aversion to high salt concentrations in patients with chronic kidney disease. Scientific Reports. https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-025-09602-x 

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