How cautious should we be about Salt?

[Polyethyl]

My DD is 7 months old and mostly breast fed. She's beginning to be interested in fruit and purees. But I'm not hurrying her.

Tonight my husband cooked a delicious soup from boiling up the carcass of yesterday's roast guinea fowl- thus making his own stock. But he included a small pinch of salt - so we didn't give any of the superb soup to baby. Were we being over cautious?

When can she start joining in such meals?

[CornishYarg]

Presumably she would only have had a small amount of soup so the proportion of the small pinch of salt she would have had would be miniscule. So personally, I would have given that to DS. I was more wary of shop-bought stock in the early days, as that tends to be pretty salty, so didn't give this to DS. (I used baby stock cubes or just made a small individual portion for him using water, meat juices and herbs rather than stock.)

Something I read re salt and babies which made sense to me was "If you're worrying about salt then you don't need to." So if you're checking food labels and are aware of what is salty and limit how often you give it etc, then you'll be on top of the salt issue.

[noblegiraffe]

Babies can have up to 1g of salt a day. So a bit of soup would have been fine.

[KatAndKit]

It is mostly processed and convenience foods that are high in salt, rather than meals cooked at home. I would have fed the soup to the baby. I was a bit over cautious at first but when you realise how small their portion is, you realise that the amount of salt they get is tiny. Also if one meal is slightly saltier than usual you can make up for this the next day with blander food. It's more dangerous to give lots of salty food like cheese and bacon and sausages and crisps and that sort of thing - people don't realise how salty these things are. A small amount of seasoning in your cooking is likely to be absolutely fine. Beware of stock cubes though - you can buy Heinz cook at home ones for meals that your baby will share. Babies do need some sodium in their diet anyway, just a lot less than we do.

[Polyethyl]

Thank you.
My DH is going to try a Nigel Slater soup this evening. Tomato and crab. Baby will get some too!