Reading this thread, I thought I'd have a quick rummage throught the kitchen cupboard and read the labels on all the various soy sauce brands we have around. I found plenty of bottles, but the only one which explicitly quantifies sodium is the superior organic Tamari (from Japan) with 6.3% (this compares with 40% sodium in pure salt). The RDA for sodium is about 2.4g so to play by the rules, you don't want more than about 35ml of the stuff per day - that is, about two tablespoons. That seems quite generous, but remember this represents your
entire recommended sodium intake - assuming you consume nothing else with salt in it, at all.
But most people - most Western people that is - probably exceed their RDA in sodium, it's so easy to do so and difficult to avoid salt especially in manufactured food.
As for me - well, plenty else to worry about, so why bother? We use quite a lot of soy sauce in meals but not every day.
To my mind, if you really want to watch the salt,
don't put a salt cellar out on the dinner table. We
never do, we put out a pepper mill but no salt, so no-one bothers to sprinkle salt on a meal which should be adequately salted already. We do however put a soy sauce bottle out if the meal is a 'chinese' type, and we then help ourselves from that, so you can't win...
