Food chloride distribution in nature and its relation to sodium content
1988
Al-Bander, S.Y. | Nix, L. | Katz, R. | Korn, M. | Sebastian, A.
Because of growing interest in the biological and clinical effects of dietary chloride as the anion accompanying the dietary cation sodium and because the standard food composition tables used in the United States to estimate sodium content do not contain data on chloride content, we analyzed the nutrient data base of the English workers Paul and Southgate, which contains an extensive listing of both chloride and sodium contents in foods. To examine food chloride distribution in nature, we focused on the uncooked, unadulterated, discrete, primitive foods in the data base (no. = 216 food items). The findings indicate the existence of both a large variability of chloride content among foods and a high degree of coupling of chloride with sodium. The contents of chloride and sodium varied over a similarly large range (coefficients of variation, 229% vs. 263%), differed very little from each other on the average (less than 20%), and correlated (r = 0.84, p less than 0.001) to the extent that greater than two-thirds of the overall variation of chloride content was linked to that of sodium content. Those findings accord with the often posited but untested assertion that the chloride content of foods approximates and parallels that of sodium. Nevertheless, the differences in contents of the two elements among individual foods varied over a sufficiently large range (from -14.0 to +40.0 mmol/100 kcal food portion) that, depending on the foods selected for a daily diet, total intake of the two elements can differ by amounts large enough to warrant consideration of the potential biological and clinical effects of ingestion of each element separately from consideration of the effects of ingestion of the combination. (author)
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