Sodium and salt on Indian labels: how much is too much

The daily reference is 2,000 mg of sodium, which is about 5 g of salt — roughly one level teaspoon. The average Indian intake is estimated at around double that, and packaged food is where most of the excess arrives without being tasted.

One arithmetic point makes the label readable: divide a pack's sodium figure by 20 and you get the percentage of a day's reference in every 100 g. A snack at 800 mg per 100 g is 40% of a day in 100 g.

Sodium is not salt, and labels use both

Salt is sodium chloride and it is about 40% sodium by weight. To convert: salt in grams = sodium in mg ÷ 400. A pack declaring 800 mg sodium per 100 g contains about 2 g of salt per 100 g.

Indian labels normally declare sodium. Imported packs and some domestic ones declare salt. If you compare two packs and one looks two and a half times worse than the other, check you are not comparing salt against sodium.

What the numbers look like

Sodium per 100 g, from labels we have read, described by category rather than named. Sorted high to low.

The spice mix at the top is the useful outlier. At 12,862 mg it is not comparable to the snacks below it, because nobody eats 100 g of seasoning — it is eaten by the pinch. This is the one place where per 100 g needs a sanity check against how the food is used, and it is why a scoring rubric has to know what category a pack belongs to.

The snacks are the real story. Three savoury snacks in the same aisle range from 600 to 1,950 mg per 100 g — a threefold spread — and nothing on the front of any of them tells you which is which.

Where the sodium is hiding

Salt is the obvious source. These are the ones that surprise people:

• Cheese and processed cheese.A slice can be over 1,000 mg per 100 g. Cheese is preserved with salt, so this is intrinsic rather than careless.
• Bread and bakery. Individually modest, but eaten daily and in quantity.
• Sauces, ketchups and pickles.Eaten in spoonfuls, so the per-100 g figure overstates a single use — but the bottle empties.
• Raising agents. INS 500(ii), sodium bicarbonate, is sodium. Biscuits carry sodium you would never call salty.
• Preservatives and enhancers. INS 211 sodium benzoate, INS 621 monosodium glutamate, INS 627 and 631. What these numbers mean.

How sodium moves a LabelSaaf score

Sodium carries the heaviest penalty of any single nutrient: up to 20 points, one point per 80 mg per 100 g, from 80 mg up to 1,600 mg where it maxes out. Since 80 mg of sodium is 0.2 g of salt, the ladder is effectively one point per fifth of a gram of salt.

That weighting is deliberate. Sodium is the nutrient Indian packaged food is most consistently and least visibly high in, and unlike sugar it is rarely advertised on the front of the pack in any form. The full method.

Common questions

Is rock salt or pink salt lower in sodium?

Not meaningfully. The mineral content differs slightly; the sodium is essentially the same. A label declaring a fashionable salt declares the same sodium.

What about low-sodium salt substitutes?

These replace some sodium chloride with potassium chloride and do lower sodium. They are worth discussing with a doctor if you have kidney disease, because potassium is the thing being added.

Is 2,000 mg a limit or a reference?

It is a labelling reference value for an average adult, used so that a percentage can be printed. It is not a personal limit, and it is not a target to reach.

Figures on this page come from labels we have read and hand-checked. Products are described by category rather than named, and no affiliation with or endorsement by any brand is implied.

Last checked: 2026-09-02

Photograph the nutrition table on a pack and get a score out of 100, with the reason behind every point.