About a month ago I had to update our page on Low Sodium Diets (Bite, 03/03/10). Turns out the estimates of how much salt people in the United States were consuming, on average, had gone up: to over 10 GRAMS of salt per day for men and 7.4 grams per day for women. If everyone reduced their salt intake to the recommended maximum of 2.4 grams per day, we could avoid as many as 92,000 deaths every year.
Most of the salt in our diets comes from the processed food we eat. Several countries, including Finland, the United Kingdom and Australia, have instituted government and food-industry-led strategies to reduce the amount of sodium in processed foods, with some success: the UK has managed to reduce their overall average salt intake by about 10% (from 9.5 to 8.6 grams per day). Recently a team in Australia assessed the amount of salt in over 7,000 processed foods sold in Australia as part of their effort to gather information on the current status of their food industry. Assessing the Salt Content of Processed Foods
