Today, a professor friend read my article on salt limitation and asked me, “Even if people know that they should not eat more than 6 grams of salt per day, but who takes a scale to weigh their stir-fry? It’s not enough to know how to limit salt to 6 grams, you have to know how to estimate it. That’s right, and you should also know where the 6 grams of salt per day comes from.
To start with, to estimate the amount of salt, a beer bottle cap filled flat with salt is about 4 grams of salt, and a teaspoon filled flat is about 2.4 grams of salt. In the United States, the daily salt intake for patients with hypertension is even more restrictive, at less than 2.4 grams (that’s as much as a teaspoon of salt). In fact, when we say 6 grams of salt per day, we mean a total of 6 grams, including the salt put in stir-fry and the salt contained in regular food. The total amount of salt put in the stir-fry should not exceed one beer bottle cap. And the remaining 2 grams of salt is hidden in the natural regular diet and does not need to be put in when stir-frying.
In addition many semi-finished products and snacks also contain salt, and some of them are quite high, so when buying food you must pay attention to its salt content. Patients with high blood pressure should also ask for a low salt diet when they go to restaurants.
Finally, I would like to introduce you to the concept of “salt sensitivity”. People with salt sensitivity are especially prone to hypertension when they consume too much salt. It has been found that a quarter of people with normal blood pressure are salt sensitive, and more than half of people with hypertension are salt sensitive. It is not easy to accurately determine if you are salt-sensitive, but there is a rough way to determine if you are salt-sensitive: if your blood pressure rises when you increase your salt intake, you are salt-sensitive. However, it is not recommended to try this method and you should consult your doctor to see if it is necessary.