Refreshing Watermelon Mint Limeade

The vast majority of dietary sodium in the contemporary American diet — approximately seventy percent — comes from processed and packaged foods rather than from salt added during cooking or at the table. This means that reducing the salt used in home cooking has a relatively modest impact on total sodium intake for most people, while reducing consumption of processed foods has a substantially larger one. The cook who seasons food properly with salt during home cooking is adding a small fraction of the sodium present in a single serving of most processed snack foods, fast food, or restaurant meals — making thoughtful home cooking with adequate salt a meaningfully lower-sodium dietary pattern than convenience food eating with no added salt.