how much salt is too much salt?

[TracyK]

my ds is 8 mo and has been going through various eating/not eating phases.
At the moment he is quite keen on mashed potatoes mixed with other veg and/or chicken/salmon. Also home made soups with bread through it.
I buy Tescos healthy options mashed potato - which has salt in it - also my soups have stock cubes in them - which i presume has salt.
Is this ok - or too much salt? ds drinks quite a lot of water during the day.

I dont think babies this age should be having any salt. Stockcubes have lots of salt in them as I'msure processed mashed potatoe. I've just started being less fussy with what dd eats at 1 year but I wouldnt use stock cubes or prepared food not for children.

the only thing is - he loves all these things i've been giving him - and its only recently i realised its probably because there's salt in them and makes them more tasty.
I don't know whether its best to at least get him to eat these things - or maybe use cheese to tasty things up - or is there a lot of salt in cheese?

The Rda is 1mg salt- 0.4mg sodium.
on the back of the packet the sodium is listed so makew sure you go by this.

is that the rda for a baby or for us?

Just make your own mash. I would have thought homemade soup wouldnt need a stock cube.

I'm so a mum of a little girl with special needs, I thought you meant Speech And Language Therapy! I couldn't work out why you were talking about mash!!!!!!!!!!!!!

You can get stock cubes with virtually no salt - Kallo organic reduced salt cubes have next to none. We recently looked at some 'reduced salt bouillon' - can't remember the brand, and dp discovered it was 25% salt!! The full-salt variety was 40% salt. So you do need to read the packaging carefully.

Making your own stock with leftover chicken carcass, or other meat carcass, or boiling up a load of wilting veggies from your fridge is not that hard. And you can freeze it for whenever you need to use it.

For mash - make up your own and freeze it. You may find he doesn't like it as much without the salt! Try adding some cheese - if you've introduced dairy - to flavour it.

Tracy if you can't be bothered peeling potatoes, make mash by baking a whole load of jacket potatoes then just scoop out the contents and freeze. At 8 months she'll probably be happy to have it relatively lumpy but otherwise just mash it in the bowl as you feed her.

I use the Kallo organic stock cubes too - they're fine for babies. Otherwise no salt.

figure out how much salt in the stock cube - then figure out how much dose the baby gets in one go. If you are giving the baby bought bread they may well be getting more salt from that than they would from a small portion of your food.

i ahd never ever thought about salt in bread!

sorry only just got this again- it's the rda for babies 6months-12months. It increases as the child gets older until it gets to 6 for adults.
if this makes any sense The food standards agency are also having a drive on getting us to eat less salt