Children's Salt Intake

It's about the children. The CDC wants parents to make sure they get less salt in their diet for one very good reason... they are simply getting too much of it every day.

Salt is essential for us, but too much can be a bad thing. Extra salt in the diet can lead to conditions like high blood pressure, which can take its toll on the body's health over time. And we have known for decades that adult Americans take in too much salt for our own good.

But no one ever really looked at children's diets to see if they had an issue with this as well, until now. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention found that children tend to get the same amount of sodium every day as adults do. Unfortunately, that's way too much for them. The current recommendation for both children and adults is one teaspoon of salt per day, that's around 2,300 milligrams. Kids in this study ended up taking in 1,000 milligrams more per day than this for a total of 3,300. And the more salt they ate the higher their blood pressure was.

The good news is that cutting back on salt had a big impact on children's blood pressure. This means if you cut back on how much salt your kids, and you for that matter, get every day then you will have a quick and big impact on their blood pressure.