Excessive daily consumption of salt can lead to numerous health complications, such as high blood pressure and, in the long term, hypertension or other cardiovascular diseases. The demand for reducing salt intake is therefore significant, and countries around the world are striving to limit salt usage through legislation and consumer education. The method considered the gold standard for checking or evaluating salt intake is measuring the sodium excreted in 24-hour urine samples. Since conducting a national-level study in this way is challenging, time-consuming, and expensive, we are striving to validate other methods that would be more affordable and less demanding for both execution and for participants. In our study, we aimed to compare two subjective methods for measuring salt intake: the food frequency questionnaire and the 24-hour dietary recall, with the method of measuring sodium excretion in 24-hour urine samples. The study was conducted with 50 participants, who provided their urine samples twice, one month apart, and completed both questionnaires. We hypothesized that the food frequency questionnaire is a method that provides a sufficiently good estimate of salt intake to replace measuring sodium in 24-hour urine samples for general use, while the 24-hour dietary recall method has poor alignment with the gold standard and is therefore less suitable. The results of the study showed that neither of the subjective methods had good alignment with the standard method, nor did they show good alignment with each other. Due to its hidden nature, salt intake is difficult to accurately assess using subjective methods; therefore, the food frequency questionnaire is not suitable for evaluating daily salt intake as it has too many shortcomings.
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