We need this to make an assessment of salt intake in the country.
It depends what do you want to measure. Do you want measure each individual salt or all salts as a whole?
For individual lets take a consumption rate of 6 g/day, for a family of four, salt consumption works out to about (6g X 4) = 24 g per day; or about 750 g per month.
For a family of four adults which buys a 1 kg pack of salt, about 1/4th is left out at the month end. Similarly, revise engineer the amount depending upon the salt consumption by the family per month to individual consumption and thus we get daily salt intake in diet by individual. To further refine one can take consumption unit into consideration while calculating. This method is fast and feasible in large scale survey.
If you want to assess salt intake accurately, 24-hour urinary sodium excretion is best for healthy people but is not the easiest thing to do. You may want to use PABA to check that the urine collection is complete.
Spot urine samples have been used but results less accurate = http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/24047921
If you follow the food intake assessment by a food frequency questionnaire, previously validated or validated by yourselves plus asking how much salt are you adding to meals and then translating the results to nutrients, I think you can obtain good estimations for sodium and chlorine whole intakes, and then translate this results into salt intakes estimations.
I fully agree with Angela !
Forget about spot urine, unless you correct for urinary creatinine excretion (Na/creat)
I agree with Rocio calculate the salt intake as sodium fronm food intake
I very much agree with Angela, 24hr urinary iodine assessment provides abetter estimates of reentry consumed iodine.However, to have a better estimate of the actual amount, triangulate the result with dietary food intake, focusing on how much is added to food and also taking into account iodine losses after cooking that specific food.
New open access review might be helpful: Measuring Population Sodium Intake: A Review of Methods.http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/25353661
I agree with both Angela and Yves. To accurately measure total sodium intake is a tough job which involves a long-term food collection and several 24-hour urine sample collections. However, to measure sodium exposure at the population level, a spot urine sample may be adequate if the sodium is controlled by creatinine. This is not an accurate measurement but may give a relative standing of a person in the targeted population. If several spot urine samples are collected, the measurement may quite represent a person's usual sodium intake level.
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