How to read salt on an Indian snack label

Salt is the easiest thing on a label to overlook. It's listed as sodium, in milligrams, near the bottom of the nutrition panel. Here's how to make sense of it in five seconds.

Sodium isn't salt

Indian nutrition panels show sodium, not salt. To turn sodium into salt, multiply by 2.5. So 600 mg of sodium is 1.5 g of salt.

What counts as high?

India doesn't yet have a front-of-pack traffic-light system, so we borrow the UK's well-tested front-of-pack thresholds. Per 100 g of food:

• Low: 0.3 g salt or less (120 mg sodium)
• High: more than 1.5 g salt (more than 600 mg sodium)

Everything in between is medium. Everykind's amber "High salt" tag uses that 600 mg line, so it means the same thing on every product.

How much is too much?

The WHO recommends less than 5 g of salt a day for adults, about one level teaspoon, from all sources. Most of us eat more. ICMR's national survey estimated that Indian adults eat about 8 g a day on average. Globally, the WHO's 2023 report found average intake is about double the recommendation.

In India, a lot of that salt comes from home cooking, pickles and papad, not only packaged food. But snacks add up quickly, because they're easy to eat a lot of.

A real example

Two makhana packs in our catalog:

• Plain roasted makhana: 7 mg sodium per 100 g. Basically no salt.
• A flavoured makhana: 1,866 mg sodium per 100 g. That's about 4.7 g of salt in a 100 g pack, close to a full day's limit.

Same base ingredient, very different snack. The seasoning makes the difference.

"Rock salt," "pink salt," "sendha namak"

These are popular on cleaner snack packs. They're still mostly sodium chloride. The trace minerals are tiny, and they count as salt in exactly the same way. Most also aren't iodised, which matters if they become your main salt at home.

Where the salt hides

Some snacks taste less salty than they are, especially sweet-and-salty mixes, seasoned makhana and masala nuts. Sugar, spice and sourness can mask salt. The number on the label is a better guide than your tongue.

It also helps to think in portions. Most nutrition panels show per 100 g and per serving. If a pack is 70 g and you finish it, you've eaten 70% of the "per 100 g" figure. A 100 g pack at 800 mg sodium per 100 g is 2 g of salt, about 40% of the WHO's daily limit, before any meal.

Small swaps that add up

• Choose plain or lightly salted versions and add your own spices.
• Balance a salty snack day with less pickle and papad at meals.
• Check sodium on millet and makhana packs too. They can be just as salty as regular chips.

What Everykind does

• We show sodium from the pack's nutrition panel wherever we have it.
• We add an amber "High salt" tag when it's above 600 mg per 100 g.
• Some products don't publish sodium yet, so we can't tag them either way. We'd rather leave it blank than guess.

Sources

• UK front-of-pack nutrition labelling guidance: gov.uk
• WHO sodium guideline 2012: who.int
• WHO global sodium report 2023: who.int
• ICMR National NCD Monitoring Survey, salt intake (Scientific Reports 2023): nature.com