Read other Low Salt Journey installments: Senior Parents Get Started in Their 80′s: Part I, Hospital Cafeterias With No Low-Sodium Options? Part II, Making Sense of Sodium Labels and Numbers: Part III, and 5 Lessons Learned About Cutting Back on Sodium: Low-Salt Eating: Part IV.
Are you having trouble understanding the various terms and numbers on sodium labels? We are, too. Here’s the best explanation that we’ve found.
From the National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute, one of the National Institutes of Health (NIH)
… stats below are from Deliciously Healthy Recipes Online, pages 136-137 — a publication of the Healthy People 2010 initiative. The recipes in this book are not particularly low sodium, but otherwise healthy (and not that high sodium either). For low-sodium recipes the NHLBI publishes another book about the DASH Eating Plan, which makes specific suggestions and offers eating plans that modify sodium content.
Question: What is the meaning of all the different product nutrient label claims?
- Sodium-free: Less than 5 milligrams (mg) of sodium per serving
- Very low sodium: 35 mg or less of sodium per serving
- Low-sodium: 140 mg or less of sodium per serving
- Low-sodium meal: 140 mg or less of sodium per 3½ ounces
- Light (or lite) in sodium: At least 50 percent less sodium per serving than the regular version
- Reduced or less sodium: At least 25 percent less sodium per serving than the regular version
- Unsalted or no salt added: No salt added to the product during processing, but this is not necessarily a sodium-free food
Check out these other posts about my family’s low-sodium adventure.
Aging Parents, Disease of Aging, and Sodium – Low Sodium Diet: Seniors Get Started in their Eighties – Hospital Cafeteria with No Low Sodium Options – Making Sense of Sodium Labels and Numbers – Five Lessons Learned About Cutting Back on Sodium – Cooking and Eating on Vacation – We Kept to the Program on Vacation! – Figuring Out How to Adjust a Much-Loved Thanksgiving Recipe – Making Choices that Lower the Count – New Research About American Sodium Consumption
As Our Parents Age So Do We 