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Thread: Salt: friend or foe?

  1. #1


    Salt in the news
    Salt hit the headlines in 2004 with the Food Standard Agency’s ‘Sid the Slug’ campaign, which highlighted the association between salt consumption and high blood pressure. Around 18 million people in the UK have high blood pressure, or hypertension, a symptom-less yet dangerous condition. People with high blood pressure are three times more likely to develop heart disease or have a stroke than people with normal blood pressure. Around 50,000 people a year die from stroke and nearly 238,000 from heart disease in the UK, so cutting average salt consumption could save many lives.

    How much salt should we eat?
    Salt is crucial for our health, but currently we eat, on average, at least two and a half times what we need. The Government is trying to reduce average salt consumption for adults from more than 9g a day to no more than 6g. They think levels should be even lower for babies and children, recommending less than 1g per day from 0-6 month; 1g per day from 7-12 months; 2g per day from 1-3 years; 3g per day from 4-6 years; and 5g per day from 7-10 years. These are maximum levels, and they advise parents to aim for less.

    Where is the salt in our food?
    Six grams of salt is a level teaspoonful. It’s difficult to measure consumption because 65-85% of our salt is already in the foods we eat, and not what we add in cooking and at the table. Bread, breakfast cereals, biscuits, baked beans and ready-meals can be high in salt, alongside more obviously salty-tasting foods such as crisps, bacon, cheese and olives.

    Adding it up
    Food labels can be confusing. To find out how much salt is in an item, you need to check the label for sodium, which is the component of salt (sodium chloride) associated with health risks. As a guide, 0.5g or more of sodium per 100g is a high level, below 0.5g is moderate and 0.1g is low. To get the amount of salt by weight, multiply the sodium content by 2.5. Then you need to make sure you work out what you are eating per serving (a guideline portion may be given on the label). A salty anchovy can go a long way in a bowl of spaghetti, while you can consume a large amount of unnoticed sodium in a curry ready-meal.

    Is salt bad for all of us?
    Some scientists and food writers believe that salt has been demonised without conclusive evidence. They point out that Intersalt, a significant 1988 global study on salt consumption and high blood pressure, with more than 10,000 participants, did not prove a link between high blood pressure and salt consumption in healthy people, though it did show the more salt consumed, the more likely it was that blood pressure could increase with age.

    Critics argue that only some people are sensitive to salt and that these are the people, along with anyone with heart problems, liver disease or kidney disease, who need to watch their salt intake. For everyone else, argues food writer Jeffrey Steingarten, the food writer of American Vogue, in an essay in ‘The Man Who Ate Everything’ (Headline), salt is an important part of good food.

    Such ideas are disputed by health bodies who argue there is a clear health risk in eating salt, not just for blood pressure but also because of links to osteoporosis, stomach cancer and other health problems. Since it is difficult to measure salt sensitivity and much of the salt in our diet is unnecessary, they say the best advice is to cut down and save lives. In Britain, many food manufacturers have agreed to gradually lower salt levels in processed foods.

    Advice for healthy living
    Both those who agree and disagree with the connection between high blood pressure and salt say that eating plenty of vegetables, fruits and seeds alongside taking exercise, not going overweight and not drinking too much alcohol, are other factors important in preventing high blood pressure. Replacing salty processed foods with fresh foods is likely to be beneficial for reasons other than just salt. It is overall diet and lifestyle that matter, not just one component.

    Eating and cooking
    Our palates get accustomed to a certain level of salt, but they re-adjust after a few weeks of a lower-salt diet. Food writer Sybil Kapoor, in her book ‘Taste’ (Mitchell Beazley), was surprised to discover new nuances of taste in everything she ate after she cut down on salt. “Ironically, the less salt we eat, the more salt we can taste in our food,” she says. Saltiness is masked by sweetness and enhanced by bitterness and sourness, so adding a squeeze of lemon can make less salt taste stronger, she says.

    More information
    The Food Standard Agency’s ‘Sid the Slug’ campaign can be found on www.salt.gov.uk and has links to other concerned health organisations, including the Government’s overview of salt from its Scientific Advisory Committee on Nutrition (SACN).[/img]

  2. #2
    :cola; cool.

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