The Good Neighbor Journal

At home

The salt you didn't add

By Margaret Hayes, Editor · August 2026

The shaker on the kitchen table gets all the blame, and it is the smallest part of the story. In most American households the great majority of the salt eaten in a day was already in the food when it came through the door — put there by somebody else, in a factory, weeks before anybody sat down.

Which is oddly good news, when you think about it. It means the useful work is not a matter of willpower at the table. It is a matter of noticing a few ordinary groceries, and most of it happens once, in the aisle, rather than every evening at dinner.

This is not a diet, and I am not going to tell you what your sodium ought to be. That is a conversation for you and your doctor. This is only about where the stuff hides and how to see it.

Where it actually comes from

Ask most people to name the saltiest thing in their kitchen and they will say the potato chips. The chips are honest about themselves. It is the things that do not taste salty that add up.

• Bread and rolls. Not salty to the tongue, eaten several times a day. In most surveys of the American diet, ordinary bread contributes more sodium over a week than the snack aisle does, purely on volume.
• Deli meat and cold cuts. Salt is doing the curing and the keeping, not just the flavouring. A sandwich is often the largest single item in a day.
• Canned soup, broth and stock. The tin of soup is one of the few groceries where a single serving can carry a substantial share of a whole day's sodium, and where a "serving" is frequently half the tin.
• Sauces, dressings and condiments. Soy sauce, ketchup, bottled dressing, jarred pasta sauce, gravy granules. Small volumes, very concentrated.
• Cheese, and anything with cheese on it.
• Frozen meals and anything breaded. Convenience food is salted for a long shelf life and for a palate that has to be pleased on the first bite.
• Restaurant and takeaway food generally. Kitchens cooking at speed salt for flavour that carries, and nobody is measuring.

Notice what is not on that list: fresh vegetables, fresh fruit, plain meat and fish, eggs, dried beans, rice, oats, plain potatoes. Nearly everything that comes without a label has almost no sodium in it at all. That is the whole principle, and it is simpler than any plan.

Reading the label without your glasses on

The Nutrition Facts panel is printed in a size that seems designed to be unread. You only need two lines of it, and one trick.

Find the line marked Sodium. It is given in milligrams, written mg. That is the number.

Look at the serving size at the very top before you believe it. This is the trick, and it catches everybody. A tin listing 480 mg per serving and 2.5 servings per container is a tin holding 1,200 mg. A "single-serve" frozen dinner is generally one serving; a bag of anything generally is not. Read the top of the panel first and the sodium line second, in that order, every time.

Use the % Daily Value column if the milligrams mean nothing to you. It is a rough guide, but a workable one: 5% or less is a little, 20% or more is a lot. You can compare two tins on the shelf with that alone and be right nearly every time.

Two words on the front of a package are worth knowing, because they are regulated and they mean something specific. "No salt added" and "unsalted" mean none was put in during processing — though the food may contain some naturally. "Low sodium" is a defined threshold per serving, not a mood. "Reduced sodium" means only that it has less than the usual version of the same product, which on a very salty product still leaves a very salty product. Reduced compared to what is the question the phrase avoids answering.

The changes actually worth the bother

I am suspicious of advice that asks a household to rearrange itself. These are the ones I have kept, because they cost nothing and nobody at the table noticed.

• Rinse tinned beans and vegetables in a colander. Half a minute under the cold tap takes off a meaningful share of the sodium sitting in the liquid. Buy the no-salt-added tin where it exists and you have skipped the step entirely.
• Change one bought sauce for one made in the pan. Not all of them. One. A tin of plain chopped tomatoes with garlic and dried oregano is fifteen minutes and it is the single biggest change in this list.
• Buy the bird, not the slices. A chicken roasted on Sunday and sliced cold for sandwiches through the week replaces the saltiest thing in most refrigerators, and it is cheaper.
• Put acid and heat where the salt was. Lemon, vinegar, black pepper, garlic, smoked paprika, dried herbs, a little mustard. Food that tastes flat is usually short of acid, not short of salt, and this is the piece of cooking advice I wish somebody had given me at thirty.
• Compare two brands, once. Stand in the aisle one time with the tinned soups, or the breads, or the crackers, and look at the panel on three of them. The spread between brands of the identical product is often enormous. Choose the lower one and you have made the decision permanently, without ever thinking about it again.
• Taste before you shake. Not a rule, just an order of operations. Most of us salt the plate before the fork.

And keep the shaker. Salt added at the table is a small fraction of the total, it is the part you can actually see, and a house where dinner is grim is a house that goes back to the freezer aisle by Thursday.

One thing to ask a doctor about first

There is a product sold beside the salt called a salt substitute, or "lite salt", and it deserves a paragraph of its own because it is the one item in this article that is not a matter of taste.

Most of those substitutes replace some or all of the sodium with potassium chloride. For a great many people that is unremarkable. But potassium is handled by the kidneys, and there are common situations in which extra potassium is not a small matter — reduced kidney function, and several ordinary prescriptions, including some of the most widely prescribed blood pressure medicines, which are designed to hold potassium in the body rather than let it go. The container does not know which of those apply to you.

So the substitute is not a thing to start on your own because it looked sensible on the shelf. Ask at your next appointment, or ask the pharmacist, who will know every medication on your list and can answer it across the counter in a minute. If the answer is that it is fine for you, it is a genuinely useful swap. It is just not one to make blind.

What is worth raising at an appointment

None of this is urgent, and none of it means anything is wrong. It is the short list of things worth saying out loud at a visit rather than deciding alone in a supermarket.

• Whether sodium is something you should be paying attention to at all, and if so, roughly what figure applies to you. It is not the same number for everybody, and yours depends on things only your doctor can see.
• Any salt substitute or "lite salt" you use or are considering — see above. Bring the container or a photograph of the ingredients.
• Changes you have already made on purpose. If you have cut back noticeably, that belongs in the conversation, because it can change how an existing medication behaves.
• Swelling in the ankles or feet that is new, or a wedding ring that has stopped fitting. Not an emergency. Worth mentioning.
• Whether anything you take should be kept away from certain foods. Several common prescriptions have one, and most people are never told which.

And the plain exception: sudden severe chest pain, sudden breathlessness, a face or arm that droops, speech that comes out wrong, or sudden weakness down one side. Those are not appointment matters. In the United States that is 911, immediately, and it is always better to call and be wrong.

A word about what you read

Salt is a subject that attracts more certainty than it deserves. Every few years a headline announces that the whole thing was overblown, and a few months later another announces the opposite, and somewhere in the middle is a person trying to decide about a tin of soup.

I do not know what your sodium should be, and neither does anybody writing on the internet. What I do know is that the label is public information, that most of it is hiding in six or seven ordinary groceries, and that noticing which ones costs nothing and commits you to nothing.

Take the rest to the person whose name is on your file.

— Margaret Hayes