Sodium and Salt Are Not the Same Number

The trap

Table salt is sodium chloride, and only about 40% of its mass is sodium.

5 g of salt = 2,000 mg of sodium salt = sodium × 2.5

What makes this genuinely easy to get wrong isn't the chemistry — it's that labels are inconsistent between countries. Some list sodium in milligrams, others list salt in grams. A guideline written in one unit gets compared against a label written in the other, and the error is two and a half fold in whichever direction you make it.

The limit

WHO recommend adults consume less than 2,000 mg of sodium a day — equivalent to less than 5 g of salt, which they describe as just under a teaspoon.

For children aged 2–15, the advice is to adjust that adult figure downward in line with lower energy requirements, not to apply the adult number directly.

And the number almost nobody is near

The global mean adult intake was 4,278 mg of sodium a day in 2021 — about 11 g of salt. More than twice the recommendation.

So if your tally looks alarming against the guideline, it's probably quite ordinary against the population. That isn't reassurance — it's the actual scale of the problem, which is why the tool shows your figure against both.

Why it matters

The best-established link is raised blood pressure, which increases cardiovascular risk. WHO also list associations with gastric cancer, obesity, osteoporosis, Meniere's disease and kidney disease.

They estimate 1.7 million deaths a year were associated with excess sodium in 2023.

Blood pressure is the mechanism connecting most of it — which is why sodium appears so often in cardiovascular advice, and why people already managing blood pressure usually get a specific target rather than a general one.

⚠️ It is mostly not the salt cellar

This is the single most useful thing to know if you want to reduce it.

In most diets the majority of sodium arrives already inside processed and packaged food — bread, sauces, cured meats, cheese, ready meals, soups, snacks — rather than from anything added at the table.

The tool reports what share came from salt you added yourself for exactly that reason, and it's usually a small fraction.

Which means cutting back is a question of what you buy, not willpower with a shaker. Reading labels achieves far more than moving the cellar.

Two more ways a label misleads you

Beyond the sodium-or-salt question, there are two traps worth knowing before you total anything.

Per 100 g is not per portion. Nutrition panels commonly show both, and the per-100 g column is the one designed for comparing products against each other — not for adding up your day. If the portion is 250 g, the per-100 g figure understates what you ate by a factor of 2.5. Coincidentally the same multiplier as the salt-sodium confusion, which does not help anybody.

Things that don't taste salty still count. Bread is one of the largest single contributors in many diets, and few people think of it as salty. The same goes for breakfast cereal, sweet baked goods and some cheeses. Taste is a poor guide, because sugar, fat and acidity all mask saltiness — which is exactly why totalling from labels tells you something your palate cannot.

The practical consequence: if you're trying to find where your sodium comes from, look first at what you eat most of, not at what tastes strongest.

What a day's tally is actually good for

Not precision. Portion sizes are estimates unless you weigh things, restaurant food rarely carries a label, and label figures have their own tolerances.

What it's genuinely good for is showing the shape of your intake — which items dominate, and whether you're near the guideline or several times it.

That's a different question from knowing your intake to the milligram, and it's the one worth answering.

⚠️ This is a tally, not an assessment

It adds up what you tell it. It knows nothing about your blood pressure, kidney function, medication, or what a clinician has advised — and targets vary in both directions.

Some people are given a considerably lower limit for a specific condition. Some, in particular circumstances involving certain medications or heavy sweating, are advised not to restrict sodium at all.

If sodium matters to your health specifically, the number that applies to you comes from your clinician — not from a guideline written for populations. That's why the limit is an input here rather than fixed.

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Source: WHO salt reduction fact sheet.