OCD About NaCl

Patrick's been advising us to look for low-salt foods, but while I have an idea of normal/good amounts of protein, fat and carbs to eat daily, I realised I never really paid attention to salt. I don't seek out salt, don't add it to my food ever, but Patrick's convinced they're hiding it everywhere. Luckily he pointed me to this article as I had no idea what a large or small amount of sodium in food was. Turns out, 1,000mg a day is right (or 920 - 2,300mg according to the Australian government - I wonder why so wide a range and why so specific the lower number).

So having ignored that ingredient on most foods, I became a bit obsessed about it in the supermarket. Obviously, veggies have whatever salt they have (a carrot = 42mg, squash and zucchini/courgette cooked = 6mg).

However, in basic packaged and prepared (though unprocessed) food the amounts vary widely. Even in fancy swiss-bakery bread, there's a lot of salt - usually between 400-600mg per 100g. The lowest I could find was 195mg.

What about whole-grain pasta versus normal? Surprisingly, though wholegrain is better for you in terms of fibre content, it has more salt than the plain variety. By a factor of 4 (though still quite low compared to bread). Couscous is worse than both of these and brown rice has almost none.

Frozen green peas varies by a factor of 2 between brands with no other obvious difference.

And you think all tuna is equal? No? Well, how about all tinned tuna in spring-water - surely they must be about equal. John West sets the benchmark at 400mg per 100g but an obsessive monomanical search (call me Ahab) revealed a rare beast from beneath the seas, caught, trapped and tinned for Aldi and with only 114mg per 100g. Quite a catch, so I bought 10 to see me through the next few weeks.

Let the hunt continue!