12.03.2009
Next time someone asks you to pass the salt, say ‘No!’ Australian men don’t need any more salt. Without knowing it, every day they eat far more than the recommended amount.
The salt is so well disguised that usually the food doesn’t even have a salty taste. A morning bowl of regular cereal may taste slightly sweet but some brands contain about the same amount of salt as a bowl of seawater.
Regular bread may seem a healthy thing to eat but it too contains very high amounts of salt. Avoiding excess salt requires constant vigilance. Salt is sprinlded into virtually all edibles that can be bought in supermarkets, from cheese to tinned food to biscuits.
The best way to avoid it is to get to food before anyone has had time to process it. The food you eat daily should never be saltier than your tears. Human tears contain about 320 mg of salt per 100 grams, and all the food that nature provides has less than this. Fresh red meat has about 60 mg, but when processed into corned beef it goes up to about 1500 mg. The same is true when fresh pork becomes bacon.
It is beyond dispute that excess salt is associated with high blood pressure, swollen ankles, kidney stones, osteoporosis and the giddiness that accompanies Meniere’s syndrome. It also contributes to heart failure, kidney failure, stroke and stomach cancer.
About 75 per cent of the salt Australian men consume comes from supermarket items or takeaway foods. About 15 per cent is added at home, in the pot or at the table, and the remaining 10 per cent occurs naturally in fresh foods. It’s always a good idea to read the labels and to look for ‘sodium’ in the nutrition information chart on processed food packaging. If it is less than 120 mg per 100 grams, the food is low in salt. If it is between 120 and 320 mg, it is medium. Anything more than 320 mg is high.
Men who are coming off salt often worry that they will never enjoy a meal again. It is not so. Salt, at the levels it exists in modern industrial society, is an acquired taste from which they can be weaned.
It is never too late to stop adding salt. Conditions associated with high salt intake usually improve when it is reduced. That is one of nature’s little acts of benevolence.
The Australian government set a target of sodium intake of a tiny 100 millimole (mmol) a day to be achieved by 2000. This is measured in urine taken over 24 hours and is equivalent to eating just over a teaspoon of salt a day, from all sources.
One man, whose salt level was being controlled, went away for the weekend and, for 48 hours, lived off fast foods. When he returned his urine showed 578 mmol. (He had added no salt to his food while he had been away, having eaten only what was handed over the counter.)
A couple of years ago, in response to the target, doctors decided to measure the salt intake in a population sample of 200. The results showed that only 6 per cent of men and 36 per cent of women reached the target. As young people and lower socioeconomic groups were under-represented in the sample, the results probably overestimated the extent to which the target was reached. The curious thing was that more than half of those surveyed said they never or rarely added salt to food. Other studies have also shown that the average intakes of salt, particularly in men, are substantially above the 100 mmol national target. This target is much higher than the actual bodily requirement of 10 to 20 mmol a day. And it is much lower than actual consumption, which usually exceeds it by a factor of between 5 and 30.
There have been suggestions that salt substitutes could be recommended for use in Australia. These have resulted in long-term blood-pressure reduction in older people suffering hypertension in The Netherlands.
Japan, which used to have the highest stroke rate in the world, had twice the salt intake of Australia until a major public health campaign reduced the intake by half. The rate of stroke has since fallen substantially.
A decade ago ‘low salt’ was the big concern, but it has since been pushed out of the limelight and now ‘low fat’ is centre stage. Some say there was an overconcentration on the role of salt, to the exclusion of other factors, and attention justifiably moved to issues of fat and obesity. But they admit that salt was pushed too far into the wings. It is time it was brought back out!
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