Salt is essential to life, but bad for you if you get too much of it. Just like beer.

In general terms, we could all do with less salt in our diets. And it’s not just the sprinkling of salt you put on your morning eggs or your evening margarita glass. Self-serve sodium is responsible for only 20 per cent of the sodium a typical Canadian ingests; the other 80 per cent comes from packaged foods. In truth, sodium is in damn near everything you eat, and while it is flavourful, excess sodium is a leading cause of high blood pressure and cardiovascular disease. 

Why am I writing about salt this week? Well, aside from this being an extremely slow time in politics, a report issued last week revealed some startling numbers about salt in the Canadian diet. Turns out that we are among the saltiest people on the planet. According to a shocking report from a group called World Action on Salt and Health (WASH), Canadian foods have significantly higher levels of sodium than the same products sold in other countries.

Take Kellogg’s All-Bran, for example. All-Bran has been around for decades. My dad ate it regularly to keep regular, and still does. It’s one of those cereals that you eat not because you particularly like the taste (I’m reasonably sure it is made up of recycled cereal boxes and Elmer’s paste, which is then formed into unappealing pellets) but because it is good for you. And as lousy as All-Bran is, it’s still superior to Bran Buds, which in high doses can actually cause your colon to explode.

All-Bran is sold as a healthy cereal, and overall it is. But get this: a single bowl of All-Bran contains a staggering 620 mg of of sodium per 100 grams. How much is 620 mg? That’s about one-third of the daily recommended intake for people aged nine to 50. You’ve barely gotten up in the morning, and already you’re a third of the way through your recommended salt intake.

It gets worse, and weirder. A bowl of All-Bran manufactured in the United States contains just 160 mg of sodium. Same company, same cereal, two vastly different sodium contents in two countries that are, in most other matters, identical.

Here’s another example from the cereal aisle. Special K has 931 mg of sodium per 100 g portion in Canada, but just 450 mg in France, Norway and Britain, and 400 mg in Turkey. What’s really surprising to me is that they sell Special K in France.

The survey also found that Burger King onion rings in Canada have 681 mg of sodium (highest in the world), while in Britain, which has been on a government-sponsored low-sodium kick, it’s just 159 mg. When British food is healthier than yours, you know you’ve got trouble.

I almost wish I hadn’t heard about the excess salt in my food. Reading the nutrition labels is complicated enough without adding salt to the menu. I have in front of me seven different types of cereal, and no, I don’t know why we have seven different types of cereal in our house. The numbers should be straightforward, but they don’t start with the same size serving. Cheerios is based on one cup, Special K is based on 1 1/4 cup, Frosted Flakes is based on three-quarters of a cup, while something called High Fibre Crisp uses half a cup. Mini-Wheats employs the rarely used “25 biscuits” measurement.

Cheerios seem like a good, healthy choice, but it still gives you 250 mg of sodium. The so-called diet cereal, Special K, contains only 110 calories (good) but 270 g of sodium (not so good), and zero fibre (which may explain why Special K is the Chinese food of cereals; an hour after eating it, you’re hungry again). I’m a big fan of Shreddies, both original and diamond-shaped, but its calorie count is higher than Frosted Flakes, and its sodium content is an off-the-charts 340 mg, 14 per cent of your daily intake. (I also discovered that Shreddies has 5 g of fibre, 20 per cent of your RDA, which explains why Shreddies is a good description of what it does to my colon.)

Canned soup is essentially liquid sodium. Campbell’s tomato soup has 640 mg of sodium per serving, 27 per cent of your recommended daily intake, while cream of mushroom has 850 mg, a staggering 35 per cent of your daily total. I could go on, but labels make really boring reading.

This is wonderful, isn’t it? As I’ve aged, I’ve become more concerned about my weight and my blood pressure and my cholesterol intake and my fat intake and my carbohydrates and my fibre ... pretty much everything I eat or even think about eating. Now I have to add sodium to the list? I may just give up eating.

Statistics Canada says Canadians consume 3,100 mg of sodium a day, double the recommended amount for adults. That’s flat-out bad for you, and regulating the amount of sodium should be a public health issue of concern to the national government. Except, of course, it isn’t. That would require someone to take action, and Stephen Harper is not one to use the power of government for such trivial things as public health.

Maurice Tougas is the former Liberal MLA for Edmonton-Meadowlark.

mauricetougas@live.com