Yes — if the butcher's label says loin, the numbers stay green no matter how you cook it. Fresh pork loin holds 40.8–78.0 mg of sodium per 3-oz serving across braised, broiled, and roasted rows, with potassium columns above 300 mg. The same animal wearing a different word flips the verdict: cuts labeled ham rate red at 82.5–104.0 mg on the processing veto, and cured bacon sits at 875.5 mg. Pork is not one food for blood-pressure purposes — it is a vocabulary quiz.
Why: every loin row — raw (56.5 mg), braised (40.8 mg), broiled (52.7 mg), roasted (50.1 mg), bone-in chops (78.0 mg) — sits far under the 140 mg line with potassium between 317.9 and 402.3 mg. Cooking method barely moves the number.
Watch: fresh ham-labeled cuts rate RED at 82.5–104.0 mg — the deep-processing veto fires on the ham category even when the raw number looks innocent. Cured bacon (875.5 mg) is a hard red.
The loin rows read like a rule that never wobbles: braised 40.8 mg of sodium with 317.9 mg of potassium, roasted 50.1 mg, broiled 52.7 mg, raw 56.5 mg, bone-in blade chops 78.0 mg — all green, all per 3 oz. Braise it, roast it, grill it; the cut itself carries almost nothing, and the kitchen adds what it adds. Pork tenderloin, the leanest slice of the same muscle group, behaves identically in the database.
That makes pork loin one of the rare proteins that matches skinless chicken breast number for number — this site scored chicken's cleanest rows at 40.0–103.6 mg, and pork's cleanest at 40.8–78.0 mg. Rotating the two across the week is not a compromise; it is the same verdict wearing two different animals.
The potassium column deserves a mention too: 317.9–402.3 mg per serving puts loin cuts in the same band as a cup of cooked millet, and well ahead of the sausage entries that share the meat case's refrigerator. The turkey sausage verdict showed what processing does to the same meat — loin is the before picture.
The pork spectrum, per database serving:
| Cut (database serving) | Sodium | Potassium | Verdict |
|---|---|---|---|
| Fresh loin, braised — 3 oz | 40.8 mg | 317.9 mg | GREEN |
| Fresh loin, roasted — 3 oz | 50.1 mg | 346.8 mg | GREEN |
| Fresh loin, broiled — 3 oz | 52.7 mg | 359.6 mg | GREEN |
| Fresh loin, raw — 3 oz | 56.5 mg | 402.3 mg | GREEN |
| Blade chops, bone-in — 3 oz | 78.0 mg | 325.4 mg | GREEN |
| Fresh leg (ham label), raw — 3 oz | 82.5 mg | 402.3 mg | RED (veto) |
| Fresh leg (ham label), cooked — 1 cup | 104.0 mg | 561.6 mg | RED (veto) |
| Cured bacon, broiled | 875.5 mg | 480.2 mg | RED |
Here is the row that confuses careful readers: fresh leg cuts labeled ham hold just 82.5–104.0 mg of sodium — numbers that would rate amber or better on thresholds alone — yet every one of them carries a red verdict. The reason is the deep-processing trigger: "ham" is by definition a cured category, and the engine rates the category risk, not only the raw figure printed on this particular package.
The logic is the same one that red-flags pickles at 283 mg or praises a low-sodium jar at 6.3 mg — structural sodium deserves structural skepticism. A fresh "ham" cut today was brined or injected yesterday at some plants and not at others, and the shopper cannot tell which from the meat case. When the database cannot distinguish, it defaults to protecting the reader.
The starkest illustration in the entire pork file: a composite trimmed-fresh row holding just 16.2 mg of sodium still rates red — the lowest raw number attached to a red verdict anywhere on this site. If a number that small can earn red, the lesson is not "ignore the number." It is that the number is the first check, never the only one.
Cured and broiled bacon closes the file at 875.5 mg of sodium per serving — nearly 40% of the daily ceiling in a food whose serving size most people exceed casually, with a potassium column too thin to matter. It trips both the cured trigger and the very-high-sodium line. Nothing about the "turkey bacon" shelf changes this arithmetic; that story is told in the sausage verdict and ends the same way.
Fresh belly, interestingly, holds just 36.2 mg of sodium before curing — the bacon problem is the cure, in full. The gap between raw belly and finished bacon, roughly 840 mg, is what the smokehouse adds. That number is the cleanest single demonstration on this site of what processing means in milligrams.
A Sunday-roast pattern from the green rows: loin at 40.8 mg of sodium per serving, prunes contributing sweetness and 796 mg of potassium per cup from the dried-plums article. The pan sauce comes from stock or wine, not a gravy cube — the crust of sage, thyme, and cracked pepper does the work salt usually claims.
Sunday-roast pork loin under a sage-thyme crust with prunes — zero added salt, built on the green loin rows.
Yes — fresh loin cuts hold 40.8–78.0 mg of sodium per 3-oz serving with 317.9–402.3 mg of potassium, green under every cooking method tested. Skip ham-labeled cuts (82.5–104.0 mg, processing veto) and cured products like bacon (875.5 mg).
The engine fires a deep-processing veto on the ham category itself, because "ham" is a cured product by definition and plants vary in how much they inject. When the raw number (82.5–104.0 mg) and the category risk disagree, the verdict protects the reader — the same logic that red-flags pickles regardless of jar.
On the sodium and potassium columns, effectively yes — loin rows run 40.8–56.5 mg of sodium per serving against chicken breast's 40.0–50.9 mg, with comparable potassium. Rotating the two is a wash for blood pressure; choose on price and recipe, not on the verdict.
SodiumScore is an independent data project — not a medical practice.
Ratings derive from USDA FoodData Central nutrient data and the 2025 ACC/AHA Hypertension Guidelines (DASH pattern).
Dietary reference information only. Always consult your healthcare provider before making dietary changes.
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