Confusion about Sodium
 

I have to follow a low sodium diet for health reasons, and I'm having a difficult time understanding the sodium levels indicated in FitDay.. Does anyone know why a cooked vegetable would be so much higher in sodium than the same vegetable when it's raw? I do not add salt when I cook vegetables, yet the system shows that most cooked vegetables are over 400 mg of sodium, yet the raw version might be only 20-30 mg. Does anyone understand why?

I'm just hazarding a guess here: a raw vegetable has some sodium (lets' say 30 grams of sodium in a cup).

The nutrition database doesn't break down the method of cooking so that you see 'lightly steamed' or 'roasted.' With a lot of cooking methods, the raw vegetable will shrink when it is cooked.

If the 'cooked' version of the same vegetable has say, 120 grams of sodium, that would mean - because the measurement is the same (1 cup of cooked vegetable) - that the cup is a reduced version of the raw vegetable, which started out 4 cups raw! Easiest example is spinach. It starts out as a big bag of fresh leaves and ends up a soppy puddle when it's boiled.

That's the only thing I can think of.

thanks Kathy--that would especially make sense with something like spinach--or green peppers; but other vegetables like lightly steamed broccoli doesn't change size and shape much (unless you smash them down).... I'm supposed to keep my sodium to 1500mg daily, and if you have two or three cooked veggies during the day, that can put you over 1500 without taking anything else you eat into account... :( Maybe I need to measure and log the raw measure of the veggies I eat...