When cooking pasta in salted water how much of the salt is absorbed? Most chefs recommend that you should add quite a bit of salt to boiling water which you cook pasta in (sometimes 1 teaspoon).

For those watching their sodium intake, how much of this salt will actually end up being absorbed by the pasta, and how much will be thrown out with the water?
Here is a report entitled "Change in sodium content of potato, pasta and rice with different cooking methods".

So the "scientific answer" is:


The sodium content in pasta cooked with different levels of salt increased approximately linearly with the amount of salt added to the cooking water. Pasta cooked in 4g salt/100g raw took up on average 28 mg Na/100g whereas when cooked in 40g/100g raw this increased approximately 10 fold to 230 mg Na/100g. 


HTH!

PS: This may help you forget the Na intake temporally