Question about babies and salt intake

[OlderNotWiser]

Hiya, sorry if this has been answered before on here, had a quick look around but couldnt see anything. My DC2 is nearly 8 months and enjoying his solids now to the extent that I can't be doing with home made purees any more. He seems to be coping fine with most of what I give him ie same stuff as DC1 who is 3 and I've sort of done BLW so he can do chunks etc anyway. But yesterday he had toast and some cheese and then a few baked beans and I started to wonder about salt intake. DC 2s stuff does sometimes have a bit of stock in it for instance, whereas I know baby stuff shouldnt but I dont really know just how careful I should be. Are there some idiot proof guidelines somewhere? Thanks for any help!

I remmeber something about 1g a day? Does that sound right?

I thin the main thing is not to add salt to stuff and to minimise the processed foods (so beans OK but not every day)

also mild cheddar has less salt in it

Bugger! Just checked and a piece of bread is about half a gram, so toast for breakfast rules out a sandwich for lunch....am clearly not being careful enough. Thanks for advice EP. Need to rethink...

foolproof here

Thanks Mrs B. From this, clearly both my DCs are getting to much salt despite most of what they eat being homecooked...but I do use cheese a lot and they eat bread and butter and that alone would appear to take them over on current amounts consumed. Blimey. Radical rethink needed.

can you get low-salt bread? No idea

What about breadsticks? Some are pretty salty, but have found that the M&S was have v littel salt in them (and DS loves them)

I don't know either, but I can at least get unsalted butter/marg, low salt cheese and just be more aware I guess. Thanks for the pointers, given me food for thought if you'll excuse the pun!

A slice of bread has half a gram?! Oh lord...

Does he drink lots of water? Because remember the more he drinks the better his kidneys will process the salt. I really do think that as long as you are careful about not adding extra salt, you're doing just fine. Too much to worry about these days if you ask me.

SydneyB, funnily enough I intended to add another post later along the lines of 'My 8 month baby won't drink any water. What can I do...?' The two issues together are why I guess I'm a bit twitchy about it all at the mo. He is a bit constipted TBH so Im fairly sure he isn't drinking enough, but doesn't matter what I put water in (bottle/sippy thing/cup) he is not interested. He is still BF but of course that has dropped off a bit since solids. Feel like I'm a bit of a muddle so maybe will post this one separately later. Thanks for comments everyone.

It's so hard, isn't it? You're constantly encouraged to feed your baby the same as you're having, but I find that an awful lot of the time I can't, because of the salt levels. Eg last night we had lovely sardine and tomato pasta - very healthy, but it also had olives, capers and anchovies in it, and I decided it would be too salty for DS (9 months).

When I started weaning DS, I got really hung up on salt. Then I discovered that the government guideline amounts are based on what they thought the UK population would view as a reasonable target to cut down to, rather than amounts that were based in solid science, iyswim. So then I got a little less paranoid. Still tried to give not too much bread or cheese, and definitely no added salt. But didn't buy a breadmaker just to make no-salt bread