sodium or salt equivalent what does this mean?

vicky1

Hi

what is the difference I have to manually enter a lot of foods as I am in the UK and occasionally on the labels there is sodium and then salt equivalent I enter the sodium but does anyone know what the difference is?

I am just curious as I am well under on sodium on a daily basis.

Any thoughts.

vicky1

Hi

what is the difference I have to manually enter a lot of foods as I am in the UK and occasionally on the labels there is sodium and then salt equivalent I enter the sodium but does anyone know what the difference is?

I am just curious as I am well under on sodium on a daily basis.

Any thoughts.

rheston

This is about all that I know:

Salt is also known as sodium chloride - 1g of sodium is equivalent to about 2.5g of salt. It's the sodium in salt that can lead to health problems. Adults should have no more than 6g of salt a day, which is about 2.5g of sodium. And children should have even less.

On average, people are actually having about 9g of salt a day. This means we are eating about 50% more salt than we should. It's a good idea for everyone to try to cut down on the salt they are eating. To work out if a food is high in salt, check the label.

High is more than 1.5g salt per 100g (or 0.6g sodium)
Low is 0.3g salt or less per 100g (or 0.1g sodium)

If the amount of salt per 100g is in between these figures, then that is a medium level of salt.

Remember that the amount you eat of a particular food affects how much salt you will get from it.

SETTEESPUD

Agree with all above. Shame though that so many people seem not to know how to calculate. The number of people who appear to simply multiply the salt by 10 or 100 to get the sodium is amazing. Not helped I think by most of the values being in grams but the sodium is in milligrams.