For years, big chicken producers have pumped their chicken with saltwater in a practice dubbed "plumping," designed to fatten and standarize the weights of chicken sold to Americans in supermarkets and in restaurants. A whopping one-third of chicken sold in the U.S. is pumped with saltwater or additives, according to the Wall Street Journal.

But most consumers have no clue that they're paying full price for chicken watered down with saltwater. The Food and Drug Administration and the USDA remain remarkably lax on package labeling and allow chicken companies to sell plumped poultry as "all-natural." How much salt are we talking? Natural chicken contains 45 to 60 mgs of sodium in each four-ounce serving. Plumped chicken however contains as much added salt as an order of fast-food French fries -- a whopping 200 to 400 mgs of salt per serving. Now, the average American eats 90 pounds of chicken each year (about 360 servings). That's a whole lot of salt disguised in what many believed a healthy protein.

It's especially alarming considering Americans have a major problem with salt. Nine out of 10 people eat more than double the daily recommended intake, according to a new study by the U.S. Center for Disease Control and Prevention. High salt intake often lead​s to high blood pressure, heart and kidney disease. About 77 percent of our salt intake comes from processed foods, including plumped chicken. Nutrition and medical councils have recently upped pressure on the FDA to force food corporations to cut the salt content in their products, salt we cannot directly taste but learn to crave.

Sen. Barbara Boxer (D-CA), the Center for Science in the Public Interest and others have joined the effort to pressure the USDA to tighten regulations on labeling plumped chicken as plumped, not "all-natural." But we can do better than that. Let's tell the top big chicken producers Tyson, Perdue and Pilgrim's Pride to stop plumping completely.