How much salt per day: the WHO limit, how to convert sodium to salt and the salt in 27 foods per serving

How much salt you can have per day

The World Health Organization recommends that adults have less than 5 g of salt a day, meaning less than 2,000 mg of sodium: just under a teaspoon, counting the salt that food already contains. The European Food Safety Authority (EFSA) reviewed the evidence in 2019 and reached the same figure by another route: it considers 2.0 g of sodium a day (5 g of salt) a “safe and adequate” intake for adults, including during pregnancy and breastfeeding, and gives lower values for children, scaled to their energy needs. The UK NHS uses a slightly higher cap for adults, 6 g. Real intake is far off: the WHO estimates a global mean of 4,278 mg of sodium a day in adults (about 11 g of salt, 2021 data), and in Spain a study of 418 adults aged 18 to 60 measured 9.8 g a day from 24-hour urine sodium, with 88.2% above 5 g (Ortega and colleagues, 2011). If you have high blood pressure or kidney disease, or take medication, your specific target is up to your doctor.

Salt or sodium: how to convert one into the other

Table salt is sodium chloride, and roughly 40% of its weight is sodium. That is why the EU food information regulation defines the salt on the label with a fixed formula: salt = sodium × 2.5. To go the other way, divide by 2.5 (or multiply by 0.4). In the European Union the mandatory nutrition table already shows SALT, but on US products, in many apps and in food databases you will see SODIUM in milligrams. Mixing them up is the most common mistake: 2 g of sodium is not 2 g of salt, it is 5 g.

How much salt each food has: table per 100 g and per serving

The table brings together 27 everyday foods, grouped: sauces and stock, ham and cured meats, cheeses, bread and cereals, canned and jarred foods, ready meals and snacks. The values for 21 of them come from FoodData Central, the food composition database of the US Department of Agriculture (USDA, SR Legacy edition), and the serving is one the USDA itself records for that food. For six typically Spanish products that are not in the USDA data (Serrano ham, Ibérico de bellota ham, chorizo, cooked ham, Manchego cheese and white bread from a Spanish loaf) we use BEDCA, the Spanish Food Composition Database, and the serving is given in grams. In every case, salt is sodium multiplied by 2.5. These are reference values: your brand may contain quite a lot more or quite a lot less, and your label has the final say. For the calories of these same foods, use the food calorie lookup.

Where the salt you cannot see is hiding

The WHO notes that in many high-income countries a large share of dietary sodium comes from processed foods such as bread, processed meat and snacks. The NHS estimates that in the UK around three quarters of the salt people eat is already in the food they buy, and it names bread, breakfast cereals, meat products, ready meals and sauces such as soy sauce, ketchup, mustard or mayonnaise. The most detailed measurement is the one by Harnack and colleagues (2017): 450 adults from three US regions, with duplicate samples of the salt they added at the table and in home cooking.

• 70.9% of sodium came from what was added to food outside the home: processed products and restaurant food.
• 14.2% was sodium naturally present in unprocessed foods.
• Salt used in home cooking contributed 5.6%, and the shaker at the table 4.9%.
• There is no equivalent figure measured this way for Spain or other European countries, but the pattern is the same: what weighs most is what arrives already made.

Salt and blood pressure: what the trials show

For the WHO, too much sodium raises blood pressure and with it the risk of cardiovascular disease, and it also links it with gastric cancer, obesity, osteoporosis, Ménière’s disease and kidney disease. It estimates that 1.7 million deaths a year were associated with excess sodium intake in 2023. (If what worries you is bloating, that is a different topic: there is a separate guide on water retention.) The intervention evidence is solid:

• A Cochrane review published in the BMJ (He and colleagues, 2013) pooled 34 trials with 3,230 participants: eating on average 4.4 g less salt a day for at least four weeks lowered systolic blood pressure by 5.4 mmHg in people with hypertension and by 2.4 mmHg in people with normal blood pressure. The bigger the salt cut, the bigger the drop: 6 g less a day was associated with 5.8 mmHg lower systolic pressure.
• In the DASH-Sodium trial (Sacks and colleagues, 2001), with 412 participants, eating low sodium on top of the DASH diet left systolic pressure 7.1 mmHg below the usual high-sodium diet in people without hypertension, and 11.5 mmHg below in those with hypertension.
• Cutting salt adds to the rest of the diet: that is why a pattern like the DASH diet combines less salt with more fruit, vegetables and dairy.

How to read salt on a European label

In the European Union the mandatory nutrition table does not give sodium but SALT, already calculated (sodium × 2.5), so you do not have to convert anything: compare grams of salt. Always look at the figure per 100 g, not only the one per serving, which depends on the serving the manufacturer chooses. And watch the percentage: if the label shows the percentage of the reference intake, the one for salt is based on 6 g, the reference in the EU regulation, not on the WHO’s 5 g. To classify a product, the NHS gives a simple rule: more than 1.5 g of salt per 100 g is HIGH and 0.3 g or less is LOW. The full method is in the guide on how to read nutrition labels.

“Low salt”, “reduced salt” and bread: what each claim means

The wording on the pack is not free: the EU regulation on nutrition claims sets how much salt a product may contain to use it, and in Spain bread also has a cap of its own.

• “Low salt”: no more than 0.12 g of sodium per 100 g, which is 0.3 g of salt (EU regulation on nutrition claims).
• “Very low salt”: no more than 0.04 g of sodium per 100 g, 0.1 g of salt.
• “Salt-free”: no more than 0.005 g of sodium per 100 g.
• “Reduced salt”: at least 25% less than a similar product. It does not mean low in salt: a cured meat with 25% less can still be HIGH.
• In Spain, since 1 April 2022, ordinary bread may not exceed 1.31 g of salt per 100 g measured as chloride, or 1.66 g if total sodium is measured (Royal Decree 308/2019).

How to cut back without food tasting of nothing

Putting the shaker away and changing nothing else tackles the small part of the problem. What works is changing the basis of your shopping and letting your palate adapt. There is an old but very clear finding: in a trial with 11 students who ate all their meals for 13 weeks at a research centre (Beauchamp and colleagues, 1987), when their food switched to roughly half the sodium, they made up less than 20% of the difference with the shaker they had at hand.

1. 1

   Change the basis, not just the shaker

   Choose the lower-salt version of what you eat every day: bread, cured meats, cheese, sauces and canned foods. Compare brands per 100 g with the 0.3 and 1.5 g traffic light. In the table, 30 g of Serrano ham carries 1.6 g of salt and 30 g of Manchego, 0.5 g: changing one ingredient shows in the total.

2. 2

   Boost flavour with acid and aromatics

   Lemon, vinegar, garlic, onion, paprika, cumin, fresh herbs and pepper add intensity without adding sodium. It is a cooking technique, not a trick: the dish gains flavour another way.

3. 3

   Lower the salt gradually

   Your taste for salt adapts. In a classic study (Bertino and colleagues, 1982), people who followed a low-sodium diet for 5 months came to prefer less salt in soup and crackers; the group that did not change its diet did not. Going step by step makes the change easier.

4. 4

   Drain and rinse canned foods

   In the USDA entries, canned chickpeas go from 278 mg of sodium per 100 g with their liquid to 246 mg drained and 212 mg drained and rinsed under tap water: 24% less without removing any food. Canned sweetcorn drops from 205 to 163 mg when rinsed. Still, compare labels: there are no-added-salt versions.

5. 5

   Cook more at home

   Not because cooking is magic, but because then you decide how much salt goes in. In a ready meal or restaurant dish the salt is already decided: in the table, a portion of frozen lasagna carries 2.4 g. Reducing the share of ultra-processed foods in your diet is usually the most direct way to lower your total salt.

Potassium and salt substitutes: they work, but not for everyone

Potassium is the other half of the equation. The systematic review and meta-analysis by Aburto and colleagues (BMJ, 2013) found that increasing potassium lowered systolic blood pressure by 3.5 mmHg on average in adults, with an effect in people with hypertension and not in those with normal blood pressure, and that a higher intake was associated with a 24% lower risk of stroke in cohort studies. Fruit, vegetables, pulses and potatoes are good sources; the details are in the guide on potassium and blood pressure. Salt substitutes swap part of the sodium chloride for potassium chloride, and the largest trial is SSaSS (Neal and colleagues, 2021): 20,995 people from 600 rural villages in China, all with a previous stroke or aged 60 or over with high blood pressure. With a substitute of 75% sodium chloride and 25% potassium chloride, over a mean of 4.74 years, they had fewer strokes (29.1 vs 33.7 per 1,000 person-years), fewer major cardiovascular events and fewer deaths than with regular salt, with no more serious adverse events attributed to high potassium.

What if I do a lot of sport or sweat a lot?

Sodium is not a poison: the WHO describes it as an essential nutrient needed to maintain plasma volume, acid-base balance, nerve impulse transmission and normal cell function. You lose sodium in sweat, and the amount varies widely between people and situations. That is why there is no single figure for athletes: anyone who trains for many hours in the heat should adjust their fluids and sodium with a health professional or a sports dietitian. For most people, who are not very active, the problem is still the opposite: eating too much salt.

In short: less than 5 g of salt a day (2,000 mg of sodium) for an adult, sodium × 2.5 = salt, and a level teaspoon is already 6 g. Most salt does not come from the shaker but from bread, cured meats, cheese, sauces and ready meals, so the most useful step is knowing how much you really eat. If you photograph your meals with Renzy, you get an estimate of the sodium in each dish and of the day’s salt alongside calories and macros, and you see which everyday dish pushes the total up the most.