Recently I wrote about Jamie Oliver’s salty sauces and this week ‘salt’ hit the headlines again. According to the British Medical Journal higher salt intakes are increasing your risk of stroke and cardiovascular disease. This recent study looked at more than 170,000 people and compared their salt intakes with their health outcomes for stroke and cardio vascular disease. This is one of the largest studies in this area so far but what is it about salt what seems to increase these risks.

Salt or sodium chloride is an essential nutrient yet according to the Food Standards Agency salt intakes for adults should not exceed 6g per day. Children moreover should consume less than that depending on their age. Studies around the world have shown that in most populations around the world the salt intake is much higher than 6g.

Recent figures for Great Britain found the average salt intake per head is around 8.6g per day.Salt influences blood pressure and reducing salt in the diet has been shown to reduce high blood pressure. High blood pressure is a major risk factor for cardio vascular disease and stroke. It is believed about 62% of all strokes and 49% of all coronary heart disease cases can be attributed to high blood pressure. Therefore reducing salt intake would subsequently also lower the risk of heart disease and stroke. According to the British Medical Journal reducing the habitual salt intake by 5g per day (about 1 teaspoon) could prevent about 23% of stroke and 17% of heart disease cases per year.

Other aspects of your diet affect high blood pressure too, so for example being overweight or obese contributes to high blood pressure as well as regular consumption of alcohol, therefore people who are overweight and drink frequently should be advised to check their salt intakes. Potassium and calcium furthermore appear to reduce high blood pressure. In scientific circles there is an ongoing dispute if it would be necessary to urge the public to increase potassium intakes significantly. Some studies suggest to prevent high blood pressure and in particular before the age of 60 the balance or ratio between sodium and potassium is most important and not simply the amount of salt in your diet.

Therefore opting for fruit and vegetables which are naturally high in potassium while reducing salt intakes and assuring one is consuming enough calcium would be preventive for high blood pressure. Moreover opting for sea salts in the use for cooking might be a further way to influence the potassium sodium ratio positively as some sea salts contain potassium alongside sodium.

Aiming to use no salt on the table sounds like an easy way of preventing high salt intakes, however most of the salt we eat is in the foods long before it get on our plates. The Food Standards Agency estimates only 15% of the slat we eat is added by us on the table and the remaining 75% are coming with the food on the plate.

Accordingly reading food labels seems to be an important step to avoid high salt intakes however in some labels monosodium glutamate (E621) and bicarbonate soda are not accounted for in the total sodium count. Furthermore not all food labels take the natural salt content of foods into consideration for the total sodium count. More importantly 1g of sodium equals 2.5g of salt hence often we need to convert the given sodium amount into the salt value to be able to assess how much salt a certain product has. Therefore is appears to be incredible difficult to know when a product is high in salt. Some of the traffic light labels give you a more helpful message – they give you a green light if a food contains 0.1g sodium or less per 100g and are red in colour for foods which contain 0.5g or more per 100g of food. Unfortunately it also depends on how much of these foods you generally consume, so eating high salt olives in a salad with no added salt might turn out to contain less salt than a ready to go sandwich.

Andrea Zick, Esteem Fitness Nutritionist London

Esteem Fitness – Personal Training London and the South East