The quest for lower-sodium foods

It is not a mystery that the dependency of North Americans on sodium for flavouring has gotten way out of hand. You can find lots of low-sodium versions of products that people know to have high levels of sodium (i.e. soy sauce, condensed soup). The problem comes in the form of foods that aren't known to have high levels of sodium, but are sneaking it in there all the same and the items which have dramatically varied levels of sodium, depending upon the brand. My trips to the grocery store are entirely different than they were about 5-years ago and even differ from what they were a year ago. I spend half my trip reading labels and what I have discovered is shocking.
In the deli department, I was looking at cheese. It is "common knowledge" that cheese is high in sodium (my husband has a clip of Mike Rowe, of Dirty Jobs fame, sprinkling a huge quantity of salt into a vat in which he was making cheese). My comparison revealed that the sodium content in cheese (I looked at feta, cheddar and gouda) can range between 140mg and 650mg per 30g serving. One might assume that the lower number is a "low-sodium" product. Not so. Baby Bel Gouda rounds (the ones wrapped in the red wax) have 135mg/20g serving. The feta was where I found the most variation - 290mg/30g serving and 650mg/30g serving.
On to the bakery where bread truly boggled my mind. I have never tasted a "salty" piece of bread and yet many of the commercially produced loaves of bread had more sodium that one of the pieces of cheese listed above. We buy whole wheat bread, which, ironic as it sounds, has higher sodium content on average than white bread. The "low-sodium", "healthy" bread contained 165mg of sodium/slice (note that this more than one whole Baby Bel). The bread we used to buy all the time has 450mg/slice!! I was blown away. How had I not noticed this. How had I been feeding my daughter 900mg of sodium (for a child her age, nearly 100% of her recommend daily sodium intake!) at one meal? And that doesn't even include the sandwich filling.
From here, we move to the cereal aisle. I spent a lot of time in this aisle because Orin's favourite food is Cheerios. He would eat an entire bowlful if given the opportunity. I was hoping to find something with no sodium at all (I mean, who has ever had salty cereal, so it must be possible, right?) or at least something lower in sodium than the 210mg/cup in Cheerios. Much to my surprise, this was one of the better options overall with regard to both sodium and sugar content - it beat out both the store brand and the "organic" brand for lower sodium. The moment you could have knocked me over with a feather though was when I read the Shreddies box. The summary - you would be better off eating frosted Mini-Wheats than Shreddies! I am sure you are surprised - I can tell you that I was. Take a look:

In a larger serving size, Mini-Wheats (on the right) has 10 more calories, the same amount of fat and a smigeon more carbs (made up in the extra 2g of sugar, I suspect). The sodium is where the rubber hits the road for us, of course, and the difference blew me away - Shreddies: 310mg and Mini-Wheats: 0mg. Shreddies has the most sodium by far than anything else in our cupboard (6 different types of cereal). When you consider the fact that I put brown sugar on Shreddies when I eat them, I am sure that makes up the difference in the carbs, meaning that it is likely better for me to consume Mini-Wheats at brekkie than Shreddies. I would never have guessed that. The more you know...