Too Much Salt Intake

A while back I talked about the amount of salt in processed food and how the food manufacturing companies have agreed to decrease the amount of salt in their foods over the next 5 years due to the fact that Americans are taking in way to much salt in their daily diet.

The guidelines tell us that we shouldn’t get more than 2,400 milligrams of sodium a day.

I don’t add salt to my foods and I do my best to only eat foods that don’t have any or a very small amount of sodium in them, so I thought.

A couple of weeks ago I sat down and wanted to see how much sodium I was getting in a day. I came up with around 1,200 milligrams. Although I was glad that I was quite a bit below the upper limit, I was still pretty surprised that I was getting that much in on a daily basis.

I bring this up because there’s a new study out there showing that very few Americans are taking in sodium at or below the recommended amount of 2,400 milligrams a day.



First, a breakdown of the upper limit of what people should be taking in:

Health officials currently say no adult should eat more than a teaspoon of salt each day. They go on to advise that 70 percent of adults — including people with high blood pressure, all African-Americans and everyone over 40 — should actually limit their salt intake to a more restrictive two-thirds of a teaspoon.

And what the researchers found:

Overall, only 1 in 10 adults meet the teaspoon standard, said the CDC study. But for those who should be even stingier, only 1 in 18 manage to do it.

Not surprisingly, what the researchers are finding is that people aren’t just dumping a bunch of salt on their food from the saltshaker. The vast majority of the salt intake is coming from processed and restaurant foods. And,

...it concluded that salt was most commonly found in cold cuts and other meats, and in baked goods and other items counted as grain-based products.

I know a lot of people say “I just don’t add extra salt to my food when I’m about to eat it.” My guess is that might have been a good rule of thumb some time ago but, with the amount of sodium being increasingly added to processed food over the years, that rule doesn’t seem to mean much any more.

As I mentioned, I watch my sodium intake closely, but my daily intake is still around 1,200 milligrams a day. Which makes me believe that it’s not that difficult for people who aren’t paying attention to their intake to very easily go over the 2,400 ceiling marker.

I’m glad to see that this issue has been getting quite a bit of attention over the last few months because I don’t think it can be stressed enough as to how we need to get this salt intake under control in this country (and around the world for that matter).

If even 25% more people that are regularly over consuming in their salt intake were able to reduce it to the recommended levels, I think that would go a long way in reducing the various ailments like high blood pressure (which increases the chances of heart disease and stroke) that come from too much salt intake.


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