How Much Salt Do I Eat?
What is it?
Salt or table salt is comprised of sodium chloride and contains 39.3 percent of sodium by weight (Wikipedia).
Why is over consumption of salt a concern?
A high intake of salt is not recommended as it may lead to high blood pressure in sensitive individuals (Wikipedia).
How much is that?
Similar to my experience with measuring sugar (link to sugar blog), it is easy to not put a great deal of thought into how much salt is in our foods. As I did with sugar, I took out my scales and weighed some salt.
One standard 5 ml teaspoon holds around 5 g of salt, or 1.9 g of sodium.
One standard teaspoon of salt.
The recommended maximum intake of salt for adults is about one teaspoon a day. How do you know you are not exceeding this limit? Well, it gets quite tricky unless you prepare all of your food from scratch and keep track of all the salt you add. If you consume processed foods it becomes even more difficult to work out.
Nutritional labels on processed food will have salt as an ingredient in the ingredients list, if any salt is added, but they don’t tell you how much. Nutritional labels do however tell you how much sodium is in the food per serving size and per 100 g.
Since nutritional labels report the quantity of sodium and sodium only makes up 39.3% of salt, this form of measurement makes it harder to relate back to standard measures such as teaspoons.
The table below is a guideline to salt consumption:
For example bread can have anywhere from 200 to 500 mg of sodium per 100 g and so one or two slices are generally OK for adults to eat in one sitting. However for children, who require less sodium but eat a lot of bread, the impact of the sodium in slices of bread adds up. To help avoid the risk of children over-consuming sodium, check the labels and find bread that has less than 450 mg of sodium per 100 g.
Crackers are often high in salt and consumption should be limited. Sodium in snack bars can vary and it pays to check the labels. Marmite has a whopping 3400 mg of sodium per 100 g, however the nature of marmite is that most people don’t consume it in large quantities. In fact the average serving size of marmite (5 g) contains as much sodium as an average slice of bread. Other foods that are often high in sodium are potato chips, so check the labels on those packets as well. Soya sauces also tend to be high in sodium, but as with marmite are generally not consumed in large amounts.
Some fruits and vegetables contain low amounts of naturally occurring sodium and do not add significantly to the total sodium consumed. Canned vegetables often contain more sodium than fresh vegetables and due to processing, dried fruit tends to be higher in sodium than fresh fruit. However canned vegetables and dried fruits are generally considered to be in the medium range of sodium content and are therefore considered OK to consume. However, the usual recommendation is to check the labels to be sure.
Other names for salt on nutritional labels include baking powder, baking soda, sodium, sodium bicarbonate (500), rock salt, vegetable salt, soy sauce, and monosodium glutamate (621).