How Much Salt Is Hiding in Your Snack? A Singapore Guide to Reading Sodium Labels

Most of us watch the sugar and the calories on a snack pack. Salt slips by almost unnoticed — and in Singapore, it’s the number that quietly adds up fastest. If you’ve ever wondered how much sodium is really in your favourite crackers, chips or biscuits, this is a short, practical guide to finding it on the label and deciding whether it matters.

Why sodium is worth a second look in Singapore

Singapore has a salt habit. According to the Health Promotion Board, residents eat about 3,620 mg of sodium a day on average — nearly double the World Health Organization’s recommended limit of less than 2,000 mg, which is roughly one level teaspoon of salt. The 2022 National Nutrition Survey found that 9 in 10 residents exceed the daily recommended amount.

Why care? The WHO is blunt about it: diets high in sodium raise blood pressure, and raised blood pressure is a leading driver of heart disease and stroke. Globally, excess sodium is linked to an estimated 1.89 million deaths a year. Most of our salt comes from cooked meals and sauces rather than snacks — but packaged snacks are an easy, invisible top-up, and they’re one of the simplest places to trim.

Salt or sodium? They’re not the same number

This trips up a lot of shoppers. Salt (sodium chloride) is only about 40% sodium by weight. So if a label lists sodium, you can multiply by 2.5 to get the equivalent salt; if it lists salt, multiply by 0.4 to get sodium. A snack showing 0.4 g sodium is delivering about 1 g of salt.

The US Food and Drug Administration suggests a simple habit: look at the sodium figure and its Percent Daily Value. If a serving is 20% of the daily value or more, that’s a high-sodium food; 5% or less is low. It’s a quick gut-check before you even do any maths.

Read the “per 100g” column, not just the pack

Here’s the trick that makes label comparisons fair. As the British Heart Foundation points out, the per-portion figure can mislead you, because brands set their own serving sizes — a smaller listed portion can make a salty snack look gentle. Comparing the per 100g column instead puts every product on the same footing.

The same guidance gives a handy rule of thumb for what counts as a lot: a food is high in salt at 1.5 g of salt (about 0.6 g, or 600 mg, of sodium) per 100g or more, and low at 0.3 g of salt (0.1 g sodium) per 100g or less. Anything in between is moderate. Once you know those two goalposts, you can scan a shelf and rank snacks in seconds.

A quick worked example

Say a cracker lists 500 mg sodium per 100g. That’s 0.5 g sodium, or about 1.25 g of salt per 100g — moderate, sitting below the high-salt line. Eat a 30g handful and you’ve had roughly 150 mg of sodium, about 7.5% of your daily limit. Reasonable. A different cracker at 900 mg per 100g crosses firmly into high territory, and the same handful nearly doubles your intake. Same category, very different numbers — and you’d only spot it by checking.

What the labels and symbols actually tell you

Two Singapore-specific points worth clearing up. First, the Healthier Choice Symbol (HCS) does apply to packaged foods, including snacks. When it carries a “lower in sodium” tagline, HPB requires the product to contain at least 25% less sodium than similar products in its category. It’s a genuinely useful shortcut — though “lower” is relative, so a lower-sodium version of a very salty snack can still be saltish. The per-100g number is still your ground truth.

Second, a common mix-up: Nutri-Grade labels currently apply to beverages, not snacks. There’s no A-to-D grade coming to your cracker packet, so for solid snacks you have to read the nutrition information panel yourself. Don’t wait for a grade that isn’t coming.

Small habits that add up

You don’t have to swear off salty snacks to make a dent. Reaching for the per-100g column, choosing the lower-sodium option in a category, watching portion size, and balancing a salty snack with a low-sodium day elsewhere all help. HPB’s national goal is to cut sodium intake by around 15% — roughly a quarter-teaspoon of salt a day — which is enough to move blood pressure at a population level. Snacks are a painless place to find that quarter-teaspoon.

Where HexaCrunch fits in

We built HexaCrunch to be a snack you can check the label on without wincing. Our baked brown-rice crackers — made with cricket protein for a protein and fibre boost — are designed to sit on the sensible side of the salt line while still tasting like a treat. If you want to run the per-100g test yourself, the Try-All 3-Pack is an easy place to start: three flavours, real numbers on the back, no fine print. Read the label, compare it to your usual, and let the crunch earn its place.

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