I took a cooking class once. The instructor’s take on this was that yes, people do have too much sodium. But that is largely because processed food and food at restaurants has crazy amounts of sodium. Salting food that you cook at home is totally fine and is really hard to overdo in terms of health impact.
In fact, she called it out as a common failure mode where home cooks are afraid to use too much salt in their food. Not only is doing so ok, but even if it wasn’t, by making your food taste better, it might motivate you to eat at home more and on balance lower your total sodium intake.
Related to that, I’ve noticed that “external” salt tastes way saltier per mg of sodium than “internal” salt. Taking a sample of two items from my kitchen:
Gardein crispy chick’n has 2.0 mg sodium per calorie, and doesn’t taste salty at all to me
Mission tortilla chips have 0.7 mg sodium per calorie, and taste significantly salty
I took a cooking class once. The instructor’s take on this was that yes, people do have too much sodium. But that is largely because processed food and food at restaurants has crazy amounts of sodium. Salting food that you cook at home is totally fine and is really hard to overdo in terms of health impact.
In fact, she called it out as a common failure mode where home cooks are afraid to use too much salt in their food. Not only is doing so ok, but even if it wasn’t, by making your food taste better, it might motivate you to eat at home more and on balance lower your total sodium intake.
Related to that, I’ve noticed that “external” salt tastes way saltier per mg of sodium than “internal” salt. Taking a sample of two items from my kitchen:
Gardein crispy chick’n has 2.0 mg sodium per calorie, and doesn’t taste salty at all to me
Mission tortilla chips have 0.7 mg sodium per calorie, and taste significantly salty
I generally prefer external salt for that reason.