By Emily Zhang
Salt, a fundamental ingredient in almost all the foods we eat, is also related to high blood pressure, heart disease, and stroke. How much salt should you take per day to keep healthy? CDC, in its dietary guidelines for Americans, recommended less than 2300 mg per day for people over 14 years old. However, based on data that the CDC collected, people in all age groups are taking a much higher amount of salt than they should.
Salt is hard to measure and hidden in food without notice. Even in some sweet foods, there might be added sodium. For example, breakfast cereal may contain 150-300 mg sodium even though it might be sweet. Salt is even added during the baking of a cake. Over the course of a single day, with all the food you eat, sodium can easily add up quickly without your notice.
In a typical daily diet, a person might end up ingesting 3000 mg of sodium without being aware. For example, if you eat cereal with milk for breakfast, a turkey sandwich and soup for lunch, and pizza and salad for dinner, you may easily exceed the recommended daily intake of salt.
There is a sodium calculator you can use to check how much salt you are taking. The result might astonish you. You can play around with it, and see which category you can reduce the salt intake. Might be the time that you should get rid of a salty snack or a canned meat.
Here is a sodium calculator to help you figure out how much sodium you should take daily: https://archive.projectbiglife.ca/sodium/
For more details, you can check out: https://www.cdc.gov/salt/pdfs/sodium_dietary_guidelines.pdf