Reading labels is the key to healthy eating
Checking food nutrition labels could be the difference between us eating a healthy diet and constantly putting ourselves at risk by breaking our maximum daily recommendation of salt.
Just two sausages could provide as much as half of the allowance per day with some containing 2.3g/100g but at the other end of the scale others contain less than 1g/100g, a huge difference when it comes to monitoring your diet.
The maximum daily allowance is just 6 per cent and Consensus Action on Salt and Health found that as many as one in three of the 300 sausages looked at still failed to meet the 2010 salt targets while four in five don’t yet meet the Department of Health’s 2012 targets.
The 2012 targets would remove 500 tonnes of salt from the diet per year – the equivalent of over 90 elephants.
It’s not always just as simple as reading the label though with 25 per cent of products having no front of pack labelling.
Victoria Taylor, Senior Dietitian at the British Heart Foundation, said “Whether it’s salty sausages, sugary sweets or fatty fast food, we need clear and consistent front-of-pack food labelling so we can all make informed choices to help keep our hearts healthy.”
