Topic: Processed

Processed is the least useful word in nutrition writing. Frozen peas are processed. So are plain yogurt, canned no-salt-added beans and a bag of pre-washed spinach. None of them has a sodium problem. Meanwhile the items that do have one are rarely described as processed at all — they are described as convenient.

So this site does not score the label on the front of the package. It scores two numbers and then applies a processing trigger on top: when a food is engineered around added salt rather than carrying the sodium its own ingredients brought with them, a small serving size does not buy it a pass. The cleanest example in our database is a cup of Cheerios. It lands at 139.2 mg of sodium, under our green line of 140 mg, and it still earns a limit verdict — because the number was designed to land there, and because a cereal bowl rarely stops at one cup. A cup of dry, unfortified oats runs 4.9 mg of sodium with 293.2 mg of potassium. Same category, same shelf, different math.

The scale of the problem shows up at the top of the column. A cup of dry cheese sauce mix carries 7,844.9 mg of sodium. A cup of shelled sunflower seeds, dry, 7,690.2 mg. A cup of dry alfredo mix, 6,345.5 mg. Nobody eats a cup of powder, and that is the point — a normal portion of the finished dish already blows past the ceiling, while the label number looks tame because the label decides what a portion is.

What the articles below do is pull the shelf apart item by item: the crime scenes, the quiet exceptions sitting next to them, and the swaps that keep the meal intact.

7 articles in this topic