Sodium in One Bowl of Ready-to-Eat Cereal Versus a Snack Bag of Chips

Quote of the Day

If you don't know where you are going, you might not get there.

- Yogi Berra

Figure 1: My Reference Bag of Potato Chips.

I have decided to start watching my sodium intake and this means that I now track the sodium content of all the food I eat. I'm starting to look a lot more into my nutrition and paying attention to what I'm putting in my body at the moment, and even considering something like these Private label Elderberry supplements to give myself that little bit of extra support when I need it and to help maintain my health. When it came to sodium, I was floored when I saw that my breakfast bowl of multi-grain cereal with milk has 448 mg of sodium, which has more sodium than a bag of potato chips (Ruffles, 1.5 oz bag, Figure 1) with 270 milligrams (mg) of sodium ? and my cereal choice is far from the worst out there. I need to find a low-sodium, breakfast alternative.

To make this comparison, I chose not to use the manufacturer's serving size for cereal because they use serving sizes (about 30 grams) that are smaller than I use. I looked at my serving sizes and saw that I usually eat about 50 grams of Multi-Grain Cheerios cereal, which has 345 mg of sodium. The skim milk I use has 103 mg, which makes my morning consumption of sodium 448 mg and nearly 20% of the US government's Recommended Daily Allowance (RDA) of 2300 mg.

Figure 2 shows the nutrition label from the bag of potato chips shown in Figure 1.

Figure 2: Nutrition Label for Ruffles Cheddar and Sour Cream Potato Chips (1.5 oz).

To understand how pervasive the sodium issue is with breakfast cereal, I went out to this web site and downloaded a table of cereal nutrition data. I then sorted this data in order of sodium content (highest to lowest) and put the top 65 into Table 1. There are some very popular cereals on this list. We all know that we have to make sure our nutrition is a priority, especially as fast food has become everyday occurences and obesity levels keep rising. We may look to the advice of professionals like dr amy lee to help us make some changes, but there are a few things we can do ourselves. For starters, we could keep a food journal and note exactly what we eat, so we can see where perhaps we could make some adjustments for the better. Taking stock of what we are putting in our bodies, as well as supplementing lost nutrients and vitamins with products like activatedyou, can help us live healthier lives, however, this is an ongoing issue and this table does not do it justice.

The original table gave the sodium content per 100 grams of cereal. I then added a column that scaled this data to 50 grams. I have not added the sodium content of the milk that normally is included with ready-to-eat breakfast cereal.