See Sodium: When you make a home cooked dinner for your family, you want it to be nutritious, tasty, and healthy. You can do this easily by starting from scratch and being careful what you add in the way of ingredients. One ingredient you want to watch out for is table salt and other substances that contain sodium, such as monosodium glutamate (MSG).
Can’t have home cooked? Need a conversion formula!
Since most people don’t always eat home-cooked meals, but rely on store-bought pre-processed foods, and the sodium content isn’t exactly listed in a user-friendly way, here I provide a conversion calculator that will convert milligrams of sodium into their own. equivalent to teaspoons of salt.
If you don’t want to see how I arrived at the correct equation, but just want to know the conversion, please skip now to the last subheading of this article.
Sodium in the periodic table of chemical elements has a molecular weight of 23.0. I don’t need to go into the details of what this is. It is enough to mention the present number.
And the kind of salt they eat in food, also called sodium chloride or table salt, is a chlorine compound. An atom for each sodium atom is NaCl, where Na is sodium and Cl is chlorine. The molecular weight of chlorine is 34.5. So salt, sodium chloride has a molecular weight of (1) sodium + (1) chlorine = 23.0 + 34.5 = 57.5.
Let’s try a simple conversion. Say a serving of corn contains 500 mg (1 milligram = 0.001 gram1) of sodium. If all the sodium in wheat is from sodium chloride, how much sodium chloride is in wheat? We put the equation;
> 500 mg sodium x 57.5/23.0 = 1250 mg salt (which was in the food).
good! But how many teaspoons of salt is 1250 mg? A teaspoon is not a unit of weight, but of volume. A teaspoon holds a certain volume of whatever is put into it. An official teaspoon holds 5 ml (1 milliliter = 0.001 liter) of liquid. The equation for density says;
> ml of granulated salt = (Mass in P./Density in g/ml)
Finally, the density of granulated salt in P./milliliter is about 1.25. So,
> milliliters of salt = (1.25/1.25) = 1.0 milliliters
Since there are 5 milliliters per teaspoon,
> teaspoons of salt = 1.0/5 = 0.2 teaspoons
This is a fifth of a gram of salt in a serving of corn. If you eat more than a serving, just increase the amount of salt in your caloric intake. So, if he eats three servings of corn, he will eat about 3/5 of a teaspoon of salt.
The final formula!
In closing remember: Number of Teaspoons of Salt = (milligrams of sodium x 0.0005
Don’t forget that if you’re calculating the milligrams of sodium per serving, you need to take into account how many servings you’re consuming to get an accurate figure.
Finally, it should be noted that the American Heart Association states that healthy individuals can achieve well under a gram of salt a day.
1 gram unit abbreviation “g.”
