Low salt diet

so two words often get thrown around and confused for one another and I thought we would take a few minutes to clarify the differences between salts and sodium now we know they're related but I wanted to get it exactly what the differences are and how to kind of make sense of all the different numbers I hear around how much I'm supposed to get every day so I always think for salt of my salt shaker at home it sits right next to my pepper shaker and whenever I have dinner I often reach for it and sometimes I think you know my eating too much of it or am i putting on more than I should and so I was thinking about this in terms of a spoon so if you have a spoon let's say a teaspoon of salt and let's say I took this teaspoon of salt here it is and I weighed it on a scale I would find that one teaspoon of salt weighs about 6 grams let me write that here so it's about 6 grams and 6 grams is the same as 6,000 milligrams so that's the weight of 1 teaspoon of salt now the question comes up how much of that is from sodium so to answer that we know that sodium chloride NaCl is salt that is what salt is made of and if I imagine there's nothing in my salt shaker except for sodium chloride no no ants have gotten in there you know no other stuff besides the sodium chloride then I can assume that all 6,000 milligrams of salt is going to be either from the sodium or from the chloride okay now the NA just to be totally clear is the sodium part and the CL is the chloride part that's what that means and they actually all atoms have a certain attemp atomic mass unit so you can actually weigh the the atoms and line them up by size and you know which is the largest in weight and which is the smallest in weight and sodium weighs out at about 23 units and chloride is about 35 units so this is chloride right here and this is sodium right here and so if I was to sum it up I'd get 23 plus 35 is 58 units and units just to say the in order to write it out rather is atomic mass units so now that I have the total atomic mass units I can try to figure out what proportion is from the sodium and what proportion is from the chloride so for the first part the sodium I can simply take the 23 units over the 58 unit total and the units cancel out and that works out to about 40% so that means about 40% of the weight of salt is actually coming from the sodium part and the chloride part is the rest of it so I've got 35 units over 58 units and that is about 60% and again the units cancel out 60% so I know that in salt 40% of the weight is coming from the sodium 60% from the chloride got it now I have to go back to my teaspoon in my TSP I had 6 grams or 6,000 milligrams so in that teaspoon I can just multiply it by these numbers to figure out how much of the weight comes from the sodium and how much comes from the chloride so the sodium gives me 40% of 6,000 which when you multiply those two numbers you get 2,400 milligrams of sodium and 60% times 6,000 is 3,600 milligrams of chloride so now I know in each teaspoon I have 2,400 milligrams of sodium and now I've actually looked and I've seen that there are recommendations on how much sodium you should get in your diet if you're not having any met problems in general so I'll call that a normal daily salt amount or normal amount and this is a regular this would be a regular amount of salt and then there's like a low salt amount so this would be like a low salt amount so if you're on a low salt diet we'll figure out how much salt you're supposed to take in or how much sodium you're supposed to take in and same for regular how much you should be taking if you're on a regular diet and I'm going to do it both from a salt perspective and also from a sodium perspective so let's do the sodium perspective first so don't will amount you should get actually let me write per day and let's do of sodium and over here we'll do salt so regular amount of sodium you should get per day is about 2,300 milligrams so 2,300 milligrams and on a low salt diet you should get about 1,500 milligrams now we know that 1 teaspoon has 2,400 milligrams and 24 and 2,300 I think are pretty close so in my conversion I'm going to assume that that means I can have about one teaspoon per day of salt and on a low salt diet you're recommended to have no more than about 1500 milligrams of sodium and if one teaspoon equals 2,400 milligrams of sodium then 1500 is about 2/3 of it so that's about 2/3 of a teaspoon of salt so when I look at a teaspoon of salt now I just remember that if this is my teaspoon that if I'm on a regular diet I can basically take one of them each day not each meal but each day and if I'm on a low salt diet I can only fill it up about two-thirds of the way and I'd have to stop there because that's the limit of sodium that I'm recommended