Every vision is a unique lens that analyzes food ingredients according to a specific dietary approach. Choose the visions that match your needs, and OK4ME will evaluate every product through those lenses.
The Low Salt vision is designed for people who want to reduce their daily salt intake and make it easier to spot products that are genuinely lower in sodium. Its role is to favor foods built from naturally low-salt ingredients while drawing attention to the hidden salts, sodium-based additives, and heavily processed components that often make packaged foods saltier than they appear.
At its core, this vision gives the best ratings to foods made from simple, minimally salted ingredients. Vegetables, fruits, legumes, grains, starches, nuts, seeds, herbs, spices, plainly named animal ingredients, eggs, and dairy milks generally fit well within this approach. These foods do not usually depend on salt to create flavor or preserve shelf life, which makes them more compatible with a lower-salt eating pattern.
The vision also recognizes that some ingredients can play a supporting role in a product without necessarily making it high in salt. Certain acids, antioxidants, thickeners, gums, starches, and colorants may still align reasonably well when they are not being used as major sodium sources. In the same spirit, some potassium-based preservatives are treated more favorably than sodium-based ones, since they are less directly tied to the salt burden this vision is trying to reduce.
Things become more cautious when ingredients suggest a more processed product or one that may carry sodium in less obvious ways. Cheese, buttermilk, processed dairy ingredients, baking agents containing sodium, celery-based curing agents, and yeast extracts are all examples of ingredients that can contribute to a saltier profile, even when they do not look like "salt" in the usual sense. These ingredients are not always a reason to reject a product outright, but they can be a sign that the product is moving away from a truly low-salt profile.
The vision becomes much stricter when it encounters clear sodium-heavy ingredients. Traditional salts such as table salt, sea salt, Himalayan salt, kosher salt, and seasoning salt are all strong signals. The same is true for ingredients like monosodium glutamate, disodium phosphates, sodium-based preservatives, brines, bouillons, stock concentrates, soy sauce, tamari, fish sauce, oyster sauce, teriyaki sauce, miso paste, and other sauces or pastes that are often used to intensify salty flavor.
Hidden sodium reality
One important idea behind this vision is that salt is not always obvious on the front of a package. A food does not have to taste extremely salty to contain a meaningful sodium load. In many packaged products, sodium is added not just for taste, but also for texture, preservation, shelf life, or processing. That is why this vision looks beyond the word "salt" itself and also pays close attention to sodium-based additives and processed ingredients that can quietly raise intake.
When nutrition facts are available, they provide an especially useful reality check. Products containing 0.3 g of salt or less per 100g receive a meaningful boost because they are much more consistent with a low-salt objective. On the other hand, products containing 1.5 g of salt or more per 100g are treated much more cautiously, since that level is already considered high.
≤ 0.3g salt per 100g
Products meeting this threshold receive positive weighting
≥ 1.5g salt per 100g
Products at this level are considered high in salt
Understanding the numbers
To put this into perspective: if you eat 300 grams of a product containing 1.5 grams of salt per 100 grams, you would consume 4.5 grams of salt in one go, which is already close to the maximum daily intake of 5 to 6 grams per day commonly recommended for adults. This vision also helps with unit conversion, as sodium and salt are often presented differently on labels. As a rule of thumb, sodium multiplied by 2.5 gives the equivalent amount of salt. That means a number that may look modest in sodium can still represent a significant salt intake once converted.
The Low Salt vision can be especially useful if you are trying to reduce overall sodium intake, choose less processed foods, avoid hidden sources of salt, or simply compare packaged products with more confidence. It is not there to make the decision for you, but to give you a clearer picture of how the product is built and whether it truly supports a lower-salt way of eating.
Reducing sodium intake
Avoiding hidden salts
Choosing less processed
As with every vision in the app, this is best understood as a practical lens rather than an absolute judgment. A product may be low in salt but still be less favorable for sugar, fat, or degree of processing. The goal is to help you make choices that fit your priorities more easily, with less guesswork and fewer surprises.
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