Salty Fact - Sodium in Medicines

If you’re watching the amount of salt in your diet, like my family, you may have to look beyond your kitchen cabinet and into your medicine cabinet. I would have never thought to check my medicines for sodium until Andy became severely sick and diagnosed with Ménière’s disease. Sodium in meds?! Who knew!?

Sodium is added to medicines for various reasons, such as to aid absorption into the body. Many effervescent tablets use sodium bicarbonate to make them fizz; other medications use sodium compounds to aid their dispersal, or to help them dissolve in water. This means these medicines can contain very high quantities of sodium, even though sodium is not one of their active medical ingredients.

Some of the common culprits to know about…Tylenol: The dissolvable form of acetaminophen, better known as Tylenol, contained the most sodium, at 427 milligrams per dose. One Alka-Seltzer tablet contains 445 milligrams of salt, according to Bayer, the drug's maker. By taking the maximum recommended dose -- two tablets four times a day -- you'll consume 3,560 mg. That's more than double the American Heart Association's recommendation to limit salt intake to 1,500 milligrams of salt a day.For water-soluble medicines, are Drugs that dissolve in water (water-soluble drugs). It's the salt in these medications reacting with water that adds the fizz to the drugs.Advil - Fast-acting Advil Film-Coated contains ibuprofen sodium-a salt form of ibuprofen that dissolves differently from standard ibuprofen. However, each tablet contains 22 mg of sodium.Pepto-Bismol - each 30 mL dose cup contains 8mg of sodium. Claritin - is an antihistamine and from the look of things is 100% sodium freeTheraflu – each packet contains 23mg of sodium