Why is there not as much salt in salt than there should be?

Question

I was packing a bag of fine sea salt today, and noticed that on the Nutritional Information that there was 38.7g of salt per 100g. How?

In: 0

Answer 1

Did it say 38.7g of salt or 38.7g of *sodium*? After all, table salt is typically sodium *chloride*, so for every .39 grams of sodium there is .61 grams of chlorine.

So since salt is made of both sodium and chlorine, there’s no way it can be 100% sodium. 100% sodium would be a soft, gray metal.

Answer 2

Sodium and Salt aren’t the same thing, although the majority of our sodium intake comes from salt.

Salt as we refer to it is Sodium Chloride. One atom of Sodium with one atom of Chlorine, which means that pure salt is only 50% sodium.

With sea salt, there are also other minerals that come along with the salt itself. Any naturally occuring, non-refined salt will have extra stuff with it. Magnesium, calcium, iodine…there’s a lot of other minerals that like to hang out with sodium chloride. It is also why sea salt is popular for cooking, the extra minerals can contribute to the taste.

Answer 3

Sea salt also has other salts than calcium chloride (table salt), such as magnesium, potassium and calcium chlorides and sulphates.

They are are CHEMICALLY salts and those ones mostly taste kind of salty (that’s why seawater is salty), with some bitternes. Not as salty as pure sodium chloride, iirc.

Basically, any “reduced sodium salt”, like sea salt, will have more of those non-sodium salts, because we have too much sodium in our diets as is (everything is already salted to hell, plus MSG)

TL;DR sea salt has less salt per salt and tastes less salty

EDIT:
After checking, the other salts in sea salt are something like 10%, not 60%, but it still could be reduced sodium “sea” salt (as in, artificial, not pure sea salt)

Alternatively, it could be what the other poster suggests with it being the sodium content of table salt, because sodium is indeed roughly 39% of sodium chloride’s weight. In which case I would like to beat the person who wrote the label with a heavy, blunt object for how stupid that would be