By now, we’ve made it clear that we’re all about whole, real, plant foods like fruit, veggies, beans, nuts, and spices. That’s it. No added sugars, sweeteners, oils, or other junk.

But the ingredient-reading sticklers out there may have noticed something curious.

One example is Geremy’s brother-in-law, a chef in Washington, D.C. On a recent visit to celebrate a new baby in the family (welcome, Emmer Smith!), Geremy was asked about this ingredient inconsistency.

Why, Chef Cable asked, is there an ingredient in airfare snacks that is not a whole, real, plant food?

Yes, chef was asking about salt. And it’s a fair question we want to address.

As any chef knows, although salt is found on our spice racks and is considered a “seasoning,” it isn’t a spice at all—it’s a rock. By definition, a spice is a “vegetable substance,” but salt is a mineral made of the naturally-occurring chemicals sodium and chloride jammed together.

Today we’ll explain the health implications of salt and why we allow it in our snacks.

Before we do that, let’s clear up a frequent confusion: the difference between salt and sodium.

Sodium and salt

Sodium naturally occurs in many plant foods and is an essential building block for all living things.

One of its main functions is to help nerve cells send signals telling muscles to contract. Another mineral, potassium, plays a critical role in this balancing act. For an informative deep-dive on this topic, check out this funny and informative video from Crash Course.

Salt contains sodium, but consuming more salt isn’t necessarily a good thing. Salt contains a very high concentration of sodium. For comparison, while an apple contains about five milligrams of sodium and a cup of broccoli has 30 milligrams, a single teaspoon of salt contains nearly 10 times that—more than 2,300 milligrams.

Active adults require between 200 and 500 milligrams of sodium per day, so we don’t need added salt. On the contrary, consuming high amounts of salt can actually lead to overconsumption of sodium if we’re not careful.

Consuming too much sodium has been linked to heart disease and high blood pressure. People with blood pressure concerns should be especially wary of high-sodium foods. This was the case when an airfare customer requested we add a “low-sodium” filter to our snack page.

The bottom line is that we should all limit salt intake to about a teaspoon a day.

Why, then, do we allow added salt in our snacks?

Salt in airfare snacks

The airfare marketplace currently has about 65 snacks. While one-third of them have no added salt, we made a conscious decision to allow added salt in our snacks for three primary reasons.

1. Increasing snack choices

People’s taste preferences are all over the map. To achieve our mission of making it easier to eat healthy on the go, we believe variety is critical to creating a sustainable business.

Given our strict health criteria—vegan, gluten-free, no added sweeteners and no added oils—our marketplace leaves out the vast majority of snacks. Almost every snack in an airport, 7-Eleven or even Whole Foods fails the #actuallyhealthy test.

So, in order to present a variety in which anyone and their mother can find a snack they like, we chose to allow snacks with added salt. We have plenty of dried fruit snacks and nut mixes that have no added salt, but those alone don’t create the true spice of life we want.

Our priority is to provide access to healthy plant foods. Many of the snack makers who produce these fantastic options decide to add salt, and we’ve decided to accept it.

2. Prioritizing cutting sugars and oils

While the same “variety-first” logic could apply to added sugars, we drew our line here. We believe added sugar is worse than added salt for two reasons.

First, it’s fairly well-agreed-upon that added sugar is just…bad. While we need some sodium, there appears to be no minimum requirement of “free sugars.”

Second, unlike salt, sugar just doesn’t seem necessary to make great-tasting snacks. The massive success of companies like LÄRABAR and Bare Snacks point to this truth. Adding salt, however, is fairly ubiquitous in the snack arena since it’s such a fundamental element of taste.

3. Limiting sodium in snacks

Finally, a practical point: there simply is not much salt—or sodium—in our snacks.

Only a handful of snacks in our marketplace have more than 200 milligrams of sodium, and the average is about 100 milligrams.

The daily recommended limit is 2,300 milligrams, so even eating 20 airfare snacks in one day will leave room under the daily sodium allowance.

In this way, added salt is akin to added “cassia” cinnamon, the type of cinnamon in most foods. At some level, both sodium and cassia cinnamon can be toxic—cassia because of a chemical called coumarin. However, it’s pretty hard to reach a dangerous level eating just fruit, beans, and nut bars.

Even snacks we consider to be “better for you” but not #actuallyhealthy aren’t problematic because of their sodium content.

Let’s use CLIF Bar as an example. We credit this pioneering snack brand for introducing a “healthier” snack option to the general public. But just like the our country’s founding fathers, there is plenty of bad to go with the good. A CLIF Bar’s astounding 20 grams of added sugar is significantly worse than it’s 130 milligrams of sodium, which is just 5 percent of the daily allowance.

Sticking with salt

In sum, allowing added salt in our snacks increases variety, allows us to leave out truly unhealthy additives like sugars and oils, and can still maintain low levels of sodium across the board.

It also allows us to promise to maximize access to #actuallyhealthy snacking on the go. On the way to fulfilling that promise, we will continue to be transparent with our choices.

So continue to be like Chef Cable…call us out. Ask us. We love to hear from you. And we’ll answer as truthfully and with as much science and sincerity as we can.