What to put in each column

You can rule this on a sheet of paper, set it up in a phone note, or build it in a spreadsheet. The columns matter more than the format.

1. 1 Category. Write the shelf, not the brand: canned soup, sliced bread, deli turkey, frozen entree, tortilla chips, pasta sauce, salad dressing, breakfast cereal. You compare within a category, so the category is the organizing unit of the whole sheet.
2. 2 What the product is. Describe it well enough that you or someone else can find it again: the store, the aisle, the variety, the container size. This is your own private record, so use whatever description actually works for you.
3. 3 Serving size, including the gram weight. The label prints a household measure first, such as 1 cup or 2 slices or 1 container, then the metric amount in grams. Copy both numbers. The grams are the part that makes cross brand comparison honest.
4. 4 Servings per container. This is the first thing the FDA tells shoppers to look at, before calories and before any nutrient.
5. 5 Sodium in milligrams per serving.
6. 6 Percent Daily Value for sodium, which the label prints as %DV. From here on, percent DV.
7. 7 Sodium per container, which is column 5 multiplied by column 4. For a single serve package the two are the same, and writing the number twice is better than leaving the box blank.
8. 8 The claim wording on the front of the package, copied exactly: reduced sodium, no salt added, light in sodium, lightly salted, low sodium, or nothing at all. These phrases have legal definitions in federal regulation, and a separate article in this series explains what each one requires. On the worksheet you are recording them for a different reason: if the wording changes later, the recipe probably changed too.
9. 9 The date you checked.

An optional tenth column, sodium per 100 grams, is the most useful column on the sheet for anyone who shops across different stores or buys store brands in odd package sizes. It is milligrams divided by the serving weight in grams, times 100. More on that below.

Filling in one row from start to finish

Suppose you are comparing two canned soups of the same style.

The first can says 2 servings per container, serving size 1 cup (245 g), sodium 690 mg, 30 percent DV. The second says 1 serving per container, serving size 1 container (425 g), sodium 810 mg, 35 percent DV.

At a glance the first looks better: 690 is less than 810. But the first can holds two labeled servings, so finishing it means 1,380 mg, while finishing the second means 810 mg. The per container column is what catches this, which is why it belongs on the sheet.

Now the per 100 gram column settles it properly. The first soup is 690 divided by 245, times 100, which is about 282 mg per 100 g. The second is 810 divided by 425, times 100, or about 191 mg per 100 g. Gram for gram, the second soup is roughly a third lower in sodium. Whether you eat a cup or the whole can, it is the lower sodium choice.

Write both rows, not just the winner. A year from now the row you rejected tells you what you compared against, and whether it is worth rechecking.

Why the gram figure does the real work

Serving sizes on the Nutrition Facts label are set by law, and the law is specific about what they represent. The FDA states that serving sizes must be based on the amount of food people typically consume, not how much they should consume, and that the serving size is not a recommendation. The label shows a household measure appropriate to the food, such as a cup, a tablespoon, a slice, or a jar, followed by the amount in grams.

Two products in the same category usually share the same underlying reference amount, which is why the label lets you compare them at all. What can still differ is the household measure and the weight. One bread lists 1 slice at 28 g and another lists 2 slices at 56 g. One pasta sauce lists half a cup at 125 g and another lists half a cup at 132 g. When the household measures do not line up, the gram figure does.

There is a second reason the gram column earns its place. Some containers are labeled as a single serving by rule. A product packaged and sold individually that holds less than 200 percent of the applicable reference amount must be labeled as one serving, with the whole contents counted on the label. That is why a 15 ounce soup can or a 20 ounce soda can appear as one serving while a larger package of the same food does not. Packages that sit in between sometimes carry two columns, one per serving and one per package. Copying the grams keeps all of these on the same footing on your sheet.

When two numbers are close enough to call a tie

Sodium figures on the label are rounded before they are printed. Federal regulation requires sodium to be expressed as zero when a serving contains less than 5 mg, to the nearest 5 mg increment between 5 and 140 mg, and to the nearest 10 mg increment above 140 mg.

The practical consequence is simple. A label reading 0 mg may contain up to 4 mg. A label reading 140 mg represents something between about 138 and 142. A label reading 850 mg represents something between about 845 and 854. So when two products in the same category differ by 10 mg per serving, they are effectively the same product as far as sodium goes, and you should choose on taste, texture, price, or whatever else matters to you.

Put that rule in a corner of the sheet. It keeps the worksheet from becoming a hunt for trivial differences. A 200 mg gap on something you eat four times a week is worth recording. A 10 mg gap is noise.

Percent DV has a matching rule of thumb from the FDA: 5 percent DV or less of sodium per serving is considered low, and 20 percent DV or more per serving is considered high. Those percentages are figured against 2,300 mg. Anyone working toward the American Heart Association's 1,500 mg optimal goal can scale in their head. A serving at 20 percent DV, which is 460 mg, is closer to 31 percent of 1,500.

A swap row for the products you already buy

The most useful line on the whole sheet is not a product row. It is a swap row, and it has four entries: what you buy now, the lower sodium option you found, the difference in milligrams per serving, and how many servings your household eats in a typical week.

Suppose the bread you have always bought lists 230 mg per 2 slices and the one you found lists 140 mg. The difference is 90 mg per sandwich. If two people in the house eat a sandwich five days a week, that is 900 mg a week that never has to be thought about again.

Writing the weekly figure down does something the per serving figure does not. It tells you which swaps are worth the trouble and which are not. A 40 mg improvement on a condiment used twice a month is not where your effort belongs. A 300 mg improvement on the soup two people eat three times a week is. When you can only be bothered to change a few things, the swap rows tell you which few.

The AHA notes that for most people, cutting back by 1,000 mg a day can improve blood pressure. That is the organization's general statement about sodium intake, not a promise about any individual food or any individual person, but it gives you a sense of the scale at which changes start to register. Several swap rows added together get closer to that scale than any single product does.

Where to keep the sheet so it gets used

A worksheet that lives at home in a drawer does nothing at the store. Three formats tend to survive.

1. 1 A phone note or spreadsheet, sorted by category. Searchable, always with you, easy to hand to a family member as a screenshot.
2. 2 An index card per aisle, kept with the reusable bags. Some people find paper faster than scrolling with a cart in one hand.
3. 3 Photographs of the labels themselves, named by category. This is the easiest to capture and the hardest to search, so it works best paired with a short written list of the decisions.

Share it with whoever else shops. If an adult child, a neighbor, or a home care aide picks up groceries, a list that says the category, the description, and the sodium figure lets them substitute sensibly when the shelf is empty. A person who knows you want a canned soup under about 500 mg per cup can make a reasonable choice without calling you. A person who only has a product name cannot.

If reading small print in a store is difficult, the photograph approach helps twice: you can enlarge the image at home, and the grams on the label let you compare across stores without standing anywhere.

Which aisles to work through first, and when to check them again

Do not try to sheet the whole store. The FDA identifies nine categories that together account for about 40 percent of the sodium Americans eat: deli meat sandwiches, pizza, burritos and tacos, soups, savory snacks such as chips, popcorn, pretzels and crackers, poultry, pasta dishes, burgers, and egg dishes and omelets. Start where your own household overlaps that list, then add anything you eat daily.

Daily foods deserve a row even when the per serving number looks unremarkable. The FDA makes the point plainly: foods eaten several times a day, such as breads, can add up to a lot of sodium over a day even though a single serving is not high in sodium. Two slices at 230 mg twice a day is 920 mg before anything is put between them.

Then date every row, and recheck once a year. Recipes change. Since 2021 the FDA has published voluntary sodium reduction targets for 163 categories of packaged and restaurant food. The first phase became final guidance in October 2021, and a second phase was issued as draft guidance on August 15, 2024, with comments accepted through January 13, 2025. Using 2022 data, the FDA reported that about 40 percent of the 2021 targets had already been reached or were within 10 percent of being reached. Together the two phases are intended to move average intake toward roughly 2,750 mg a day.

For a shopper, the takeaway is that the product you rejected two years ago may not be the same product today, and the one you chose may have drifted in either direction. An annual pass through the sheet takes a fraction of the time the first pass did, because you are checking numbers rather than discovering them.

Claim wording is shifting too. The FDA's updated definition of the term healthy, published in December 2024, sets sodium caps for foods that carry that word, and manufacturers have until February 25, 2028 to comply. That is another reason to copy the front of package wording into column 8 and note the date beside it.

What the sheet cannot tell you

Taste is not on the worksheet, and it should not be. The FDA puts it directly: some foods that do not taste salty can still be high in sodium, which is why taste alone is not an accurate way to judge. A separate article in this series covers why that happens. On the sheet, the milligrams are the only evidence.

Restaurant and takeout meals mostly fall outside this system, since Nutrition Facts labels are not on the tray. The worksheet covers the packaged part of your diet, which for most people is the larger part.

Some nonprescription medicines, including certain antacids and effervescent tablets, contain sodium, and the AHA now lists them among its major sodium sources. A pharmacist can tell you how much is in the ones you use and whether a different form is available. That is a conversation to have rather than a change to make on your own.

One last boundary. The 2,300 mg on the Nutrition Facts label is a labeling reference value used to calculate percent DV for the general population. It is not an individual target. If you have kidney disease or heart failure, or you take a diuretic or another medicine that affects sodium and potassium, ask your health care professional what number fits you before you set one for yourself. The same goes for potassium based salt substitutes, which are not right for everyone. The worksheet is a tool for seeing what is in the package. What to do with that information is a conversation worth having with your care team.