A brilliant charity called CASH (Consensus Action on Salt & Health) hit the headlines today with some of their latest research demonstrating the scarily high levels of salt found in some children’s foods. These foods were mainly those from high street pubs, resturants and fast food chains.
Salt is known to raise blood pressure and increase the risk of stroke, heart disease and osteoporosis and therefore allowing young children to develop a preference for salty foods could have detrimental effects on their long-term health.
Within the UK we consume far too much salt. Salt is added to a great number of our everyday foods, many of which we probably wouldn’t even consider to be “salty”. Foods such as bread, cereals, rice, sauces, dressings and meat products often contain especially high levels of salt and the large quantity of salt in bread also came under scrutiny last year.
In the UK we also add salt to our food at the table as well as during cooking. However, this amount only makes up around 25% of the salt we consume. The rest (75%) is already present within the foods we are eating.
To me, all this research and information simply highlights, yet again, the importance of encouraging people to prepare more food from home, cook more meals from scratch and to try and rely less on processed meals.
A few tips to reduce salt intakes for the whole family:
1.) Train your taste buds – it actually is suprisingly easy to get your taste buds tingling to a lower level of salt. Simply reduce the amount of salt you add to your foods a tiny amount each day. After just a week or so, you will be using less salt and won’t even notice a difference in the taste of your food – try it!!
2.) Swap the flavouring – instead of flavouring foods with salt, choose other methods such as adding lemon and lime juice, ground pepper or experimenting with the many, many herbs and spices that the supermarkets have on offer.
3.) Don’t add it at the table – leaving the salt pot out of reach, at the back of the cupboard, when cooking and eating is a great way to reduce your intake. Remember, you don’t actually NEED to add salt to anything, pasta and rice included!
4.) Cook from scratch – make home made meals more often and leave the ‘eating out’ to a one-off treat, every now and then.
For more information on this topic please see CASH’s press release here:
Dangerously high levels of salt in kid’s meals – CASH
Or have a look at my earlier response to this on Mindful Mum’s Website: