Label reading and sodium

Well, after our walk this evening Dee and I went to Wal-Mart to pick up a few things. We ended up just cruising the aisles and reading the labels on a bunch of stuff. At first blush, sodium is EVERYWHERE and in EVERYTHING. In large amounts. In using my FitDay food calculator I was noticing a fair amount of sodium and was wondering where the heck all that crap was coming from, the sort answer is EVERYWHERE. Crazy...

We ended up in the cereal aisle. Now I am a HUGE fan of Vector Cereal. It's marketed as a healthy alternative, a meal replacement even, and supposed to have a ton of wholesome goodness in it... well, you know what else it has, a BUCKETLOAD of sodium! 365 mgs of the stuff to be exact, and thats before you add the milk, which by the way has, you guess it, sodium as well! What was even more surprising to me was when I compared the Vector to a kids cereal. You would expect the kids cereal to have not so much goodness and more calories via sugar. Surprise, not so... the kids cereal had half the calories in the same serving, only 25 mgs and the actual nutritional values were much the same. Crazy, and then, shreaded wheat... top dog by far, more fibre, no sodium and low calories. Needless to say the shreaded wheat was what came home with me!

Lesson to be learned? Read labels, understand that what you may believe about a food and whats in it may be very far removed from the truth.