Salt 1- Easy Does It

Everyone has heard the concerns over salt. The health community has generally recommended that daily salt intake be restricted to 1500mg.   This is enough to cover all of our basic needs for sodium. The USDA states that even if we exceed that amount, we really should not go any higher than 2300mg daily (tolerable upper limit);  this is about 1 teaspoon of salt.   The average American consumes 3,436 mg of salt a day with the vast majority consumed through processed foods or restaurant foods. 

To give you some sense of what these numbers mean:

• 1 Big Mac and medium fries alone contain 1310 mg of sodium.
• Two slices of Pizza Hut's pepperoni pizza have 1220 mg
• 6 inch turkey sandwich at Subway has 810mg of sodium.
• One Footlong Italian Sub at Subway has a whopping 3,440 mg of sodium!   That's more than twice the sodium we need in an entire day! 

It's probably an understatement to say the American's consume too much salt.  In fact, the Centers for Disease Control estimates that thousands of lives could be saved each year if we simply cut down our salt consumption.

In the next few posts, we'll take a look at salt and whether there's enough evidence to scare us away from that shaker.