Shake up your salt intake!
Nutritionist and food writer, Fiona Hunter, offers advice on keeping an eye on the amount of salt in your diet

We all want to do whatever we can to stay fit and healthy and medical experts agree that eating less salt is one important step on the road to good health. Experts from The Blood Pressure Association believe there is an overwhelming amount of evidence linking high blood pressure with high salt intake. The good news is that in many cases making some lifestyle changes, like cutting back on salt, can be enough to restore blood pressure to normal. However, cutting back on salt isn't quite as simple as throwing away the salt pot (although of course it helps!).

Although processed food now generally contains less salt than it used to, it is still worth looking at the label to find out how much salt is in foods such as ready meals, sandwiches, soups and snacks.

The recommended maximum intake, or Guideline Daily Amount, for salt is 6g per day. Guideline Daily Amounts (GDAs) are a guide to how much energy and certain key nutrients are recommended for a healthy diet for a person of normal weight and activity level. GDAs are based on Government recommended figures and offer a reference point to help better understand the concept of a balanced diet.

The good news is that there's a new food label called the "What's inside guide" which is on the front of thousands of packs of food. It enables you to see at a glance just how much salt (as well as calories, fat, saturates and sugars) a portion of food contains. Importantly, it also shows what percentage of your Guideline Daily Amount (GDA) a portion contains so you can tell if it contributes a little or a lot towards your GDA.

 

The what's inside guide can be used to compare the levels of salt or other nutrients in different products so that you know more about what's inside the foods you're choosing which will help you decide which foods fit better into a healthy diet.

For example, if you're choosing a ready meal for dinner, one may contains 2g of salt which is 33% (approximately a third) of your GDA for salt whereas another ready meal may contain 3g of salt which is 50% of your GDA, so the latter one is higher.   So if you are wanting to keep your salt intake below the 6g GDA, you may want to go for the lower salt ready meal.  Using this information you'll find it's easy to balance your diet - but it doesn't mean you have to cut out all your favourite foods, if you have a sandwich that is high in salt at lunch time you can still keep your diet balanced and healthy by choosing a meal that is low in salt in the evening.

4 simple steps to eating less salt

1. Use flavourings such as fresh herbs, spices and lemon zest to add flavour to your food.
2. Check the GDAs on packaged foods. Adults should eat no more than 6g day, children age between 5-10 years should eat no more than 4g.
3. As a rough guide try to keep meals below 30% of the GDA for salt and snacks at 10% of your GDA.
4. Use high salt ingredients and flavourings such as bacon, cheese, soy sauce and stock cubes sparingly.

For more advice and ideas on how to cut back on your salt intake, go to www.salt.gov.uk.