Which foods have the most sodium, and how much is too much?

1 cup of Sunflower seed kernels from shell, dry roasted carries 7690.2 mg of sodium, which is 334% of a whole day's limit in one portion. Read this table backwards: here the Daily Value is a ceiling to stay under rather than a target to reach.

This ranking is per typical portion rather than per 100 g. Lists built per 100 g end up full of dried herbs and fortified bars, which is technically correct and practically useless, because nobody sits down to 100 g of thyme. Items marked fortified rank where they do because nutrients were added during manufacture, not because the food itself is rich in them.

How to read this list

This is the one ranking on the site you read backwards. A high percentage here is a warning rather than a recommendation, because almost everyone already eats more sodium than the 2,300 mg label figure rather than less.

Notice what fills the table: salted seeds, cured fish, processed cheese, and anything preserved. That is the shape of sodium in a modern diet. The salt added at the table is a small part of the total compared with what arrives already in the food.

Established. Eating less of it does lower blood pressure. Across 56 systematic reviews, lower sodium intake reduced systolic pressure by between 2 and 8.7 mmHg, with the biggest effects in people who already have hypertension.

A more useful way to read the table is per gram, because that is the unit a label gives you. Pooling 21 meta-analyses, each extra gram of sodium a day goes with 0.6 mmHg higher systolic pressure and 4 per cent more cardiovascular disease. In cohort data, death rates start to climb above 2,000 mg a day, and the excess for cardiovascular death is larger in women than in men. So one ready meal at a gram of sodium is a small move in the wrong direction repeated as often as you eat it.

The flip side belongs here too, because this list makes it easy to frighten yourself. If your blood pressure is already normal, a big cut in sodium moves systolic pressure by about one millimetre of mercury and leaves diastolic pressure where it was. Reading labels on the few packaged things you eat most often is a sensible habit. Rebuilding your whole diet around this table is not what the numbers ask of you.

It is the sodium, and it shows up fast

One trial was built to answer exactly that. Ninety people being treated for high blood pressure were given sodium chloride, potassium chloride and beetroot juice for its nitrate, each against a matching dummy, in all eight combinations, with nobody knowing who had what. After a week, systolic pressure in the low sodium groups was 7 mmHg lower, and in the high sodium groups it had not moved.

Unsettled. The other two arms of that trial came out at nothing. Neither the potassium nor the nitrate was related to the change in pressure, and for the nitrate the figure was p = 0.31. One week in 90 people is too small a test to call that a true zero, so the fair reading is nothing detectable in seven days. It was also a single centre, and everyone in it was already being treated for high blood pressure.

For this table that means the sodium column is the one doing the work, and a week of eating less of it was enough to show on a blood pressure cuff.

The practical move is not to hunt this list for foods to ban. It is to read labels on the three or four packaged things you eat most often, because one ready meal can carry half a day's sodium and one loaf of bread can carry a quarter.

Cutting sodium is usually part of a bigger change rather than a single swap, and that is how it has been tested. The DASH diet raises potassium, calcium, magnesium and fibre while lowering sodium, and the 2025 Cochrane review found it lowers blood pressure, total cholesterol and triglycerides and raises HDL. What it has never been shown to do is prevent heart attacks or strokes, because no trial ran long enough to find out.

Two slices of bread and a bowl of soup

The table above is full of obviously salty things. The reason sodium is hard to cut is the food that never makes a list like this.

Two slices of ordinary white bread carry about 252 mg of sodium, which is 11 per cent of the 2,300 mg daily ceiling. One thick slice on its own is 194 mg. A cup of chicken noodle soup is 608 mg, over a quarter of the ceiling, and the canned version is 654 mg a cup. Bread and soup, before anything anyone would describe as salty, and that is why moving the salt cellar off the table changes less than people expect.

The bread figures also show how much slack there is in these numbers. British white bread is 400 mg of sodium per 100 g and the American equivalent is 450, about a tenth apart for the same product. And British toasted white bread reads 490 mg per 100 g against 400 for the same loaf untoasted. Toasting does not add salt. It drives off water, so the same sodium sits in fewer grams.

Cooking will not help you here

For most nutrients there is a cooking method that saves some. Sodium has none, and the reason is worth saying clearly. The USDA retention table tracks what survives cooking, so for sodium it is answering the wrong question, because cooking mostly adds sodium rather than removing it. Where the table does record a loss it is leaching into water you throw away, simmered organ meats at 45 per cent and boiled drained pasta at 50, and even that only applies to the sodium the food already held.

Which puts most of the work with the people who make the food. A review of how the industry cuts sodium sorts the available methods into five groups: taking the salt out, replacing it, changing the flavour around it, changing what the salt was doing structurally, and changing the physical form of the product. Removal and replacement account for most of what has been tried, and the reviewers argue the remaining progress lies in the other three. None of that happens in your kitchen.

Your side of it stays simple. About two thirds of American adults are above the ceiling, 77.8 per cent of men and 59.0 per cent of women, and the median is 2,884 mg a day. Most of that arrives inside bread, processed meat, cheese, sauces, soups and ready meals. Buying slightly less of those moves more sodium than anything you do with a salt cellar.

Written from the evidence cards and the data on this page, then checked back against the sources. Bioma Learn has no human medical reviewer at this time and we say so rather than invent one. Information, not medical advice. How we verify.

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Full guide: Sodium: what lowering it actually does to blood pressure and to death rates

Data: USDA FoodData Central. % Daily Value against the FDA DV of 2300 mg. Checked 2026-09-15.