What the Government Say

Now there's a post title to get you excited.

I really do need to include this as a starting point though, so bear with me. There's an excellent Food Standards Agency salt/sodium site here, which I will leave you to read. Honestly, it's worth a look. There is a lot of useful, well-explained information on there, and also a picture of the wonderful Jenny Eclair.

In summary, you should have no more than 6g of salt a day for a normal diet. That's not a lot - it's about a teaspoon-full, and equates to 2.4g of sodium. Most people eat a lot more than that, on average over 9g. The advice for children varies by age - my 6 year old daughter should be getting half that recommended for an adult, at 1.2g sodium a day. A "low sodium" diet is often referred to as either less than 1.5g or 1g of sodium a day - GPs will give different advice to different people.

Quick Reference:

Salt = Sodium x 2.5

1 to 3 years - 2 g salt a day (0.8g sodium)
4 to 6 years - 3g salt a day (1.2g sodium)
7 to 10 years - 5g salt a day (2g sodium)
11 and over (including adults) - 6g salt a day (2.4g sodium)

On this blog I refer to sodium levels rather than salt, as sodium is the significant bit for health, and can come from sources other than salt (such as sodium bicarbonate in scones). We're aiming for less than 1g sodium a day, to allow us to have the occasional lapse by eating out, and to be low enough so we can eat with the kids (something we don't really do enough of).

The Food Standards Agency categorises foods as follows:

High is more than 1.5g salt per 100g (or 0.6g sodium)
Low is 0.3g salt or less per 100g (or 0.1g sodium)

So that also gives us a "Medium" category with a huge range of 0.1ish to 0.6ish sodium per 100g.

At the risk of stating the obvious, how much salt you actually get depends on how much of that particular food you eat. Naturally, it's more of a concern when things that you eat a lot of (such as bread) are very high in sodium, than things that you only have a small amount of (such as anchovies). Unless of course you eat an awful lot of anchovies.