When I was in Japan, I was shocked at how much sodium was in everything. Japanese measure sodium in grams rather than milligrams and I knew that 1g = 1000mg. So when I’m at the grocery store and see that a single slice of salmon has 2.2g of sodium in it, I could feel my blood pressure rising just looking at it.
However, when I got back to America, I took a look at a bag of bonito flakes I had, which had the Japanese nutritional label on top and a sticker with the American equivalent on the bottom. The Japanese label had the whole bag at 1g sodium, but the American label said 13mg per serving of 8, which totaled to 104mg for the whole bag. I then checked out a [quick article](https://kokorocares.com/blogs/blog/japan-vs-america-nutritional-labels) comparing Japanese and American labels, and in it’s example it said 2.2g = 220mg.
So…does Japan measure grams differently? Everywhere I look says 1g = 1000mg, but it seems like in Japanese nutrition, 1g = 100mg instead. If so, that makes a lot more sense because everything having 1000mg of sodium or higher in it is a little crazy.
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A gram is a gram is 1000mg – it’s in the name. Milligram. One thousandth. 1×10^(-3).
One of the labels is wrong or your maths is whack. Or there’s additional factors between the foods and you’ve made major assumptions. Salted salmon vs dried salmon vs fresh salmon… who knows… but 1g is 1g.
::edit:: so the missing factor is how Japan reports salt vs sodium.
https://www.nature.com/articles/hr2013149
The person who wrote the article wrote a typo. 1g = 1000mg everywhere in the world.
Japanese food is notoriously high in salt.
A gram is a gram. The difference is probably because the Japanese label shows salt whereas the American one only shows sodium. Or some mistake somewhere
Japan uses The International System of Units. According to Google:
* The International System of Units (SI) is the same as the Metric System.
Also according to Google:
* The metric system was developed due to easy Calculation and interchanging between two or more units. However the SI system is the Standard System which is internationally accepted as the mean unit for measuring different quantity.
This took some digging, but apparently SI evolved from the Metric System and there IS some funny stuff going on with grams between the two systems. The Metric Systems BASE weight measurement is in grams. SI uses kilograms as their BASE weight. So in order to make everything work you have to convert grams to kilograms. g x 0.001 = kg
The real question is whether or not any given recipe is using the older Metric System or the newer International System of Units. I suspect that both systems are used in Japan because SI was introduced in 1960, but Japan didn’t switch over officially until 1972. I’m pretty sure Japan has a lot of recipes that are more than 50 years old.
This is why I use Freedom Units.
In the linked article I think she just failed at the conversion and didn’t realize 2.2 g is 2200 mg. Missed a zero is all.
Grams is grams.
There is no such a thing as “an American gram”