One of the things that the Food Standards Agency is campaigning about is the reduction of salt per person in the UK. They say that 6 grams per day is the maximum for adults and 4 grams for children and that many people take up to 11 grams per day. The driving force for the campaign is the frequency of strokes and heart attacks. Too much salt can help to cause major illness. For babyboomers, and the young too, eating less salt is a good way to help reduce blood pressure or prevent high pressure from occurring.
Babyboomersuk.com will continue to develop its section on health to improve information on food contents, especially processed food because most people don’t know enough about the salt content. The surest way to know how much salt you are eating is to cook meals yourself. You might say that this takes too much time but with practice, cooking becomes quick and easy, except for when you want to produce the most elaborate of meals. With a little planning (see our article titled Food and Drink) you don’t need to spend too much either. Food labelling, especially for processed foods, is better now than some years ago but not good enough for people to work out how much salt they are taking daily. Not only that but most nutritional information on labels shows salt as sodium. This can be misleading. To show how complicated it is to work out your daily intake if you eat significant amounts of processed foods, here’s some examples:
A well known brand of mini cheese biscuits, claimed to be low fat, cheese & onion flavour, with the contents weighing about 25 grams contains 0.2 grams of sodium or the equivalent of about half a gram of salt. . Another, salt & vinegar flavour and claiming to have less than 10% of fat, has 1.5 grams of sodium per bag. This is the equivalent of 3.75 grams of salt. Eat just 1 bag, which is just 30 grams of crisps, and you have taken over half of your recommended daily maximum of salt.
What we also need to take into account, is that a combination of foods can greatly increase the salt level in just one meal. Take for example a curry. A leading supermarket brand of vegetable curry shows that for half of the tin of 400 grams, you get 1 gram of salt. Not bad you might think since you only eat 3 meals per day not counting snacks. But, the curry sauce and vegetables need a partner. Usually its rice and if you buy a shop bought processed rice to microwave, well, that’s got salt in too. And what about that lovely naan bread. It has salt in as well. The result is that if you also usually put salt on your meal at the table, you could end up having half of your daily maximum of salt in just one meal. If all of this is making your ears ring, it might not be that working out salt contents of processed food is very difficult, it could be that processed food is giving you high blood pressure.
Salt is very difficult to avoid if you buy any processed food. The best way to stop taking too much of it is to cook more for yourself. Just in case you thought that it was only the snacks that had too much salt, here are a few more examples of foods that have salt added but which carry it listed as just sodium on the labels because that way the figure looks lower. Figures are taken from within the best buy dates as at 21 November 2006.
Bisto Gravy Granules
0.23 grams of sodium
Bisto Reduced Salt Gravy Granules
0.17 grams
Campbell’s Condensed Tomato Soup
not stated
Branston Baked Beans
0.9 grams of salt per 100g
Heinz Baked Beanz
0.9 grams of salt per 100g (100 grams of beans is almost the same as a quarter of a large tin)
Small tin of Heinz Ravioli in tomato sauce
1.6 grams of salt (that’s a quarter of your recommended maximum daily intake, they put salt in the pasta and salt in the filling)
Green Giant Sweetcorn
0.3 grams of sodium per 100g
Homepride Chilli Con Carne Cook in Sauce
0.6 grams of sodium per 100g
Tesco Value Red Kidney Beans
0.4 grams of sodium per 100g (put the last two together for a con carne and you have 1 gram of salt per 200g)
Sausages from a leading supermarket:
Pork and Leek
1.0 gram of salt per sausage
Pork, Smoked Ham & Apricot
1.3 grams of salt per sausage
It all goes to show that if you eat a high proportion of processed food in your diet, then you are probably eating too much salt and might consequently be at risk of high blood pressure or worse.
So, when you shop, cook or just eat what’s given to you, take note of how much salt is involved with your food before adding any more.
The following advice comes from the blood Pressure Association website.
"Some people think they do not eat much salt because they do not add it to foods at the table or when cooking. But surprisingly most of the salt we eat does not come from salt added in this way – around 80 per cent is “hidden” in processed foods. Many foods that we do not think of as salty, like some breakfast cereals and bread, are high in salt and make up a large part of the salt we eat.
To help control your blood pressure, eat fewer processed foods or choose low-salt versions when available. Some foods are so salty that they should be avoided altogether.
These include processed meats like bacon and sausages, salted snacks, tinned soups, ready-meals, takeaways and pizzas. For a fact sheet on how to eat less salt, and how
to make salt-free bread, contact the BPA".
http://www.bpassoc.org.uk
