Sodium ALWAYS to low?? Help!!

carlyjaner

Hi,

I've been on MFP for about 2 weeks now consistently, sometimes missing a day but filling it in the day after or so to try and keep track and I've noticed that every day I have been well under my sodium goal level sometimes over 1000mg less than they recommend

My diet mainly consists of fruit and yoghurt for breakfast and lunch then with a reasonable dinner. With most of my food entries the weight is an estimate as I don't have scales yet I have ordered some and will be picking them up the next few days but I don't think that is going to increase my sodium levels that much just my calories overall.

Is it bad for me to not be having as much sodium as they recommend if so what can I add to my diet to increase these levels?

bcattoes

The sodium 'goal' on MFP is a maximum that you should strive not to exceed, not a goal you should try to hit. There is much debate in the world of nutrition medicine over whether the goal should be lowered.

Low blood sodium is dangerous, but it's rare unless you have a medical condition or are on meds that reduce sodium (such as a diuretic) or undereat. Our bodies are very efficient at using sodium so we actually need very little.

257_Lag

Being that far under is REALLY hard to achieve even if you are trying!

Note that the database is made up of other users input and a lot of people do not bother to enter sodium data. If you see 0 sodium be very suspect of the entry. One stalk of celery straight from the ground has 50 mg of sodium.

tedrickp

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/24651634

This was an interesting meta-analysis of the current research on sodium intake and morbidity/mortality.

http://weightology.net/weightologyweekly/?page_id=5616

Breaks the study into laymen terms (weightology is a paid service though so you probably can't access it)

The conclusion is basically that both low (less than 2,645mg) and high (more than 4,945) intake of sodium are associated with negative health outcomes.

That said - not all the MFP entries here have proper sodium on it so you may be ingesting more than you think. Also most of the studies in the meta analysis were observational - so you can only draw associations not causation (the randomized controlled studies seem to support the observational data though).

I dunno if I would increase my sodium to reach a certain level - unless I was way way low - but the easiest way would be to add salt to things if you felt like you needed to increase it.

Dairy like feta, cottage cheese, other cheese would be decently nutritionally dense foods to get sodium from as well.

karlospiklington

Check the info on the foods you log. Sometimes people log foods onto the database without all the information. You might not actually be recording all the salt you take in if the records on the database are incomplete. But really I wouldn't worry about it, a low salt diet is usually a good thing!

marissanik

My sodium is always lower than MFP numbers, with the exception of my cheat day being higher. Low is good for sodium. Don't worry too much about it.

NCDJ2013

You don't say what kind of yogurt but I would be a little more concerned about having 2/3 of my meals consisting of fruit & yogurt.