Studies on dietary sodium knowledge, attitudes and behaviours in the Americas: a scoping review
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Objective: To characterise the literature on dietary sodium knowledge, attitudes and behaviours (KAB) among adults in the Americas. Design: A scoping review conducted between September 2023 and August 2024, with an updated search in March 2025. Data sources: Ovid MEDLINE, Ovid EMBASE, Web of Science Core Collection, ProQuest Dissertation & Theses Global, Latin American and Caribbean Health Sciences Literature, Scientific Electronic Library Online, and other grey literature sources. Inclusion criteria: Studies with adults (≥ 18 years) residing in the Americas that assessed sodium-KAB were included. Screening and data extraction: Two reviewers independently screened titles, abstracts and full texts. Data charting was conducted by one polyglot reviewer and validated by another. Results: Thirty-two studies were included, mostly from North America (n=17; USA=11), followed by South America (n=13; Argentina and Chile=4) and Central America and the Caribbean (n=7; Costa Rica=5). Only one US study monitored sodium KAB over time, and three assessed differences by intake level. Most used quantitative methods (n=26), convenience samples (n=22), and had predominantly female participants (n=20). Rural populations were interviewed in only two studies, and just one used questions that underwent content validity testing with published results. Knowledge assessments focused on health outcomes (72%), food sources (47%) and intake recommendations (44%). Attitudes centred on concern about intake (53%), perceived intake (41%) and intention to change (28%). Behaviours commonly assessed included actions to reduce intake (72%), use of added salt (53%) and food practices (50%). Conclusions: Significant gaps exist in dietary sodium KAB monitoring across the Americas, particularly in lower-income countries with several under-represented populations. Future research should prioritise equity-focused surveillance using validated tools and behaviour change theories and frameworks to generate actionable data to advance public health policies and WHO sodium reduction targets.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.007 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.004 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".