Most advice about raising sodium stops at "eat salty snacks and drink electrolytes." That skips the only part that actually matters: the arithmetic. If you have been given a daily sodium target and you do not know what an ordinary Tuesday already puts in you, you cannot know whether you are short by a little or by a lot, and you will end up either chasing a number you already hit or drinking four salty beverages a day for no reason.
This article is the arithmetic, the food side of the gap, and what to do when salty drinks stop being tolerable.
First, the number is not ours to give you
Published guidance on sodium intake for POTS varies widely between sources, and different bodies state it in different units, some as salt (sodium chloride) and some as sodium, which are not interchangeable. We keep all of those figures, with their units and evidence grades, in one place: how much sodium doctors recommend for POTS. Whatever number you use should come from your own clinician, who knows your blood pressure, your kidneys and your medications. Raising sodium is not right for everyone, and that decision belongs with them, not with an article. See when more sodium is not right for you.
If your clinician gave you a figure stated as salt and you need it stated as sodium, or the reverse, our salt to sodium calculator does the conversion. Do not eyeball it. Salt is only about 40 percent sodium by weight, so a given weight of salt contains roughly two and a half times less sodium than that weight suggests, and a salt figure always looks about 2.5 times larger than the sodium figure describing the same thing. Mixing the two up in either direction is the single most common error in this whole subject.
If you are still working out where electrolytes fit alongside the rest of POTS management, our main page on electrolytes and POTS covers the condition itself and what a supplement can and cannot do.
Step one: count what a day already contains
For two or three ordinary days, not your best days, write down the sodium line from the Nutrition Facts panel of everything you eat. Ordinary matters. If you audit a day where you cooked from scratch and felt well, you will underestimate a normal week and overshoot for months.
Four things to watch for while you count:
Serving size, not package size. A soup can that lists, say, 480 mg of sodium per serving and contains two servings gives you 960 mg if you eat the can. Those are illustrative numbers, not data about any real product, but this is where most people's tally goes wrong.
Bread, sauces and condiments. Foods that do not taste salty often carry more sodium than foods that do. Bread, tortillas, cereal, cottage cheese, deli turkey and jarred sauces are where a lot of a normal day's sodium hides.
Restaurant and takeout meals. Chain restaurants in the US usually publish nutrition data. Independent kitchens do not, so log those days as unknown rather than guessing low.
Salt you add at the table and in cooking. Round it, do not ignore it. If you salt heavily, this is not a rounding error.
At the end of three days you will have a rough daily average. That number, not zero, is your starting point.
Step two: find the gap
Subtract your daily average from your target. What is left is the gap you actually need to close, and it is worth writing down in milligrams.
Here is the arithmetic laid out. The food figures below are example label readings from one person's ordinary day, invented to show the method. They are not sodium data and they will not match your labels, because sodium per serving varies enormously between brands of the same food.
| Line | Example only |
|---|---|
| Target from your clinician | your number |
| Sodium already in an ordinary day (your three-day average) | 2,400 mg |
| Gap to close | target minus 2,400 mg |
A gap of about 1,600 mg and a gap of about 400 mg are completely different problems, and knowing which one you have is worth more than any product recommendation. How you close whichever gap you find, and whether you should be closing it at all, is a conversation for you and your clinician rather than something to work out from an article.
Step three: what closes a gap, and what it looks like on a plate
Cleveland Clinic's POTS guidance names the food categories worth knowing. Its dietary guidance says to "Choose beneficial salty snacks, like broth, pickles, olives, sardines and nuts," and adds "Don't over-rely on snack chips and crackers for salt," and to avoid alcohol. That guidance is general dietary advice given under a healthcare provider's direction, so treat the category list as a shopping guide and your target as your clinician's call.
Those five categories are useful for a practical reason. Broth, pickles, olives, sardines and nuts are dense in sodium relative to their bulk, which matters if your appetite is limited or if eating a large volume makes you feel worse. Chips and crackers are not on the list because they are bulky, low in everything else, and easy to eat a lot of without moving the number much.
We cannot publish a sodium-per-serving figure for any of them, and you should be skeptical of any site that does. A jar of olives from two different brands can differ substantially per serving. A carton of broth can range from almost nothing to a great deal per cup. The Nutrition Facts panel in your hand is the only reliable number, and it is on the back of every one of these.
Practical shorthand for the shop:
- Broth or bouillon is the easiest large lever. It is warm, it is fluid, and it is sodium at the same time.
- Pickles and olives are the easiest small lever. Brine is where the sodium lives, so pickles packed in vinegar without salt do not count.
- Sardines and anchovies bring protein with the sodium, which most salty snacks do not.
- Salted nuts carry sodium along with fat and protein, so they hold better through a long afternoon than a salty drink does.
- Cheese, cured meats and miso are not on the Cleveland Clinic list but are label-checkable and often high.
When salty drinks stop being tolerable
Nobody writes about this, and it is the reason a lot of people quietly stop hitting their target around month three.
Salt fatigue is real. Sweet-salty drinks are pleasant for a few weeks and then they are not. Your palate adapts, the flavor that was refreshing in April tastes cloying in July, and a drink you used to finish in five minutes sits on the counter going warm. This is not a discipline failure and it is not a sign the routine is wrong. It is what happens when you consume the same intense flavor several times a day for months.
Four things that help, in rough order of how much they help:
Rotate flavors before you get sick of one. Not after. Once a flavor becomes aversive it tends to stay that way, and you have burned it permanently. Alternating between two or three from the start keeps all of them usable.
Split servings. A full serving in a small volume of water is intense. The same serving split in half, in two larger glasses several hours apart, is much easier to finish, and finishing is the whole point. How you spread sodium and fluid across a day is worth planning properly, and we cover that in spacing fluids and sodium across the day with POTS.
Change the temperature and the vehicle. Cold, very cold, sparkling water instead of still, over crushed ice, as a slush in the freezer for twenty minutes. The same powder in a different form reads as a different drink.
Stop drinking it and start eating it. This is the one that rescues most people.
Putting unflavored powder into food instead of water
If you cannot face another flavored drink, the sodium does not have to arrive in a glass. Unflavored electrolyte powder goes into food.
Be clear-eyed about what happens when it does. One serving of Saltivate Raw Unflavored is about 3 g of powder carrying 800 mg of sodium, 240 mg of potassium and 60 mg of magnesium. That 800 mg of sodium is roughly 2 g of salt, which is a real amount of seasoning. It will not vanish into whatever you stir it into. It will season it, noticeably, the way salt does. Anyone promising you a powder you cannot detect in food is describing a product with very little sodium in it.
Used deliberately, that is an advantage. Salt makes savory food taste more like itself, and it does surprising things to chocolate, peanut butter and banana. Saltivate also comes in flavored versions if you would rather drink it, and you can see the range on our electrolyte powders page.
Where it works well:
- Soup, broth and stew. The obvious one. Stir it in at the end, off the heat, and taste before you add any other salt.
- Scrambled eggs and omelettes. Half a serving into the raw egg, then salt to taste after, if it even needs it.
- Oatmeal and porridge. Salted oatmeal is standard practice in a lot of kitchens for a reason. Half a serving is a good starting point.
- Peanut butter or almond butter. Stir a serving into the jar, or into a single portion on toast. Salted nut butter is a normal product, so this tastes like nothing unusual.
- Sauces, dressings, marinades and gravy. Anything you were going to salt anyway, salt with this instead.
- Chocolate, brownies and banana bread. Salted chocolate is a whole category. A serving in a batch works, though it spreads the sodium across however many portions the batch makes, so count it accordingly.
- Popcorn, roast potatoes, roast vegetables. Toss with oil first so it sticks.
- Smoothies with something strong in them. Banana, cocoa, peanut butter and coffee all carry it well.
Where it works badly:
- Water you pour off. Pasta water, potato water, rice you drain. Most of the sodium goes down the sink and you have no idea how much stayed. If you cook rice by absorption, where all the liquid is absorbed, that counts. Anything you drain does not.
- Delicate dishes with nothing to hide behind. Plain steamed white fish, a light broth you want clean, anything where you are chasing subtlety.
- Food someone else is eating. This one is easy to forget. If you are cooking for a household, season your own portion at the plate.
Two practical notes. Add half a serving, taste, then decide, rather than committing a full serving to a pan you might not want to eat. And keep the total honest: sodium you eat counts in your daily tally exactly the same as sodium you drink, so log it.
If you want to see what is actually in a given batch, we publish per-lot lab results for our products.
On a bad day, lower the bar on purpose
Some days you will not cook, will not shop, and will not want to drink anything. Have a plan that survives that, decided in advance while you feel well:
- A carton of broth in the cupboard and a mug.
- Stick packs somewhere you do not have to stand up to reach.
- A jar of olives or pickles that requires no preparation.
- A backup flavor you are not currently sick of.
Hitting a target most days over a month matters more than hitting it exactly on any one day. Perfect adherence for two weeks followed by giving up entirely is worse than an imperfect routine you keep.
What to take back to your clinician
If you are consistently unable to reach the number you were given, that is information worth reporting rather than a failure to confess. Ways it usually gets solved: a different target, a different split between food and supplements, salt tablets alongside food, or a check on whether the intake is landing where it should. Bring your three-day tally with you. A real count of what you eat is far more useful in a ten-minute appointment than a description of how salty your diet feels.
Always talk to your own healthcare provider before changing how much sodium you take in, and before adding a supplement to what they have already recommended.
