Recently Popular Science had an article called “Your Sandwich is a Sodium Bomb“. It explains how many take out sandwiches are full of sodium and how in many cases they can exceed the recommended daily allowance of 2300 mg for someone in good health. If you need to restrict your sodium due to a medical condition then it is only 1500 mg. Since I started really watching what I was eating I found the exact same thing. I used to be a big Subway eater. However, I quickly found that many of their sandwiches are full of sodium as well. However, if you look you can find sandwiches that don’t blow your RDA. In the case of Subway their 6″ Oven Roasted Chicken sub only has 610 mg. This is without cheese or dressings. Be careful with those as they can pack on a lot.

Eating out is not the only place you have to watch for too much sodium. It is also in many of the foods we take for granted in the home. Take for instance Progresso Light Beef Pot Roast. At first look it looks like a very healthy alternative with only 80 calories a serving (2 servings per can). However, those 80 calories pack a whopping 470 mg of Sodium. For an average adult that is almost a fifth of their recommended daily allowance of sodium in only 5% of their calories. The numbers just don’t work.

One easy way to address the problem of too much sodium is to cook from scratch. I have found that by making my own soups and stews I can get the sodium way down. I also cut out all processed foods. Now instead of regularly taking in 4000 to 5000 mgs of sodium a day, I barely get 1000 mg. I also feel a lot better. I have also found that I don’t miss the canned and process stuff either. In fact, on the rare occasions I do eat them, I can now taste the abundance of sodium in those foods and they are way too salty for me.