Can You Believe How Much Sodium We Consume?

Last week I seem to have dejected a lot of you with my Chipotle article. That wasn't the intention. I was actually just trying to make you aware of how to eat healthy at the restaurant. I was also given a website by a few of you about where you can figure out exactly how many calories you are eating for your Chipotle meals. I'll have to share that with you sometime.

One of the points of the article was to show you how much sodium is in some of the foods at Chipotle. I told you that researchers vary in how much sodium they think you should have, but it ranges from 1500 - 2400 milligrams or 1.5 to 2.4 grams.

So how much sodium is a gram? A teaspoon of salt is approximately 1.5 grams. Just a teaspoon.

Now think about how much salt you add to foods. Then think about possibly how much salt is in a lot of the foods Americans consume on a daily basis. The average male consumes 10 grams of salt daily, while the average female consumes 7 grams of salt. So that is roughly 5-7 teaspoons of salt a day. About 8 pounds of salt a year.

This past week, researchers came out suggesting that a modest reduction in your sodium intake could lead to fewer heart attacks and strokes each year. The benefit of this would be that your blood pressure would decrease, thus reducing the chances of you getting a heart attack or stroke.

You have probably heard this before, but it doesn't mean you can't hear it again. 80 percent of the salt Americans consume comes from processed or prepared foods. The salt is used to increase the shelf life of these foods. So trying to avoid a lot of these foods and preparing your own would be the BIG first step.

So keep this in mind next time you want to add more salt to your next meal. This isn't glamorous information, but it is very important.