More on Salt

When you make the decision to start monitoring the sodium level in your diet the task seems rather daunting. Every food we eat has some sodium in it but canned, boxed, or restaurant foods are going to be the main culprits. We can just try and count all the milligrams of sodium in everything we eat and try to stay below 2500 mg. for regular diets or closer to 1500 mg for folks with high blood pressure. These are some pretty high numbers to keep track of so what’s the alternative.

We can take a different approach and compare the calories in our foods to the sodium in our foods and look at the ratio. If you are a women on a low calorie diet to help you shed some pounds you may be trying to maintain a calorie level of say 1200. If you want to stay under 2400 mg. of sodium per day the ration of calories to sodium is 1 to 2. Under this guideline if a food that you choose to eat doesn’t have more than twice as many milligrams of sodium as calories it will not throw the sodium in your diet out of whack. So if a food serving had 200 calories and had less than 400 mg. of sodium you would be alright. If however your were a man on a 2400 calorie diet trying to stay under 2400 mg. of sodium your ratio would be 1 to 1 and a 200 calorie serving would need to be 200 calories or less.

This approach will work under almost any situation but the ratio will change depending how many calorie and how much sodium you want to have in your diet. This little trick of comparing calories to sodium can be very helpful in deciding which foods work for you and which don’t.

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