How much salt do you eat daily and how much damage is it doing? If you're anything like the rest of us, the answer to both questions will be too much.
On average, Irish people consume almost twice their recommended daily salt allowance with most of it buried deep inside breads and processed foods, some of which are dressed up as healthy alternatives.
It's time to worry when not even our salads are safe to eat. A recent report from a British food safety lobby group found that although some salads are dressed up as healthy, they contain more hidden salt than a burger and fries.
Britain's Consensus Action on Salt and Health (Cash) surveyed over 150 different store- and deli-bought salads this summer and found one which had 4.4g of salt in a single portion - 73 per cent of an adult's recommended daily salt limit of 6g. A Tesco tuna and sweetcorn pasta snack, meanwhile, contained 3.7g of salt - 62 per cent of the daily allowance - while two salads from McDonald's, a crispy chicken Caesar salad and a grilled chicken Caesar salad - both with low fat dressing - were found to have more than 50 per cent of the recommended daily salt allowance.
Cash believes the worst offenders should be made to carry health warnings rather than be described as healthy options.
After the salad survey was published, the British Heart Foundation policy officer Alex Callaghan said it was "easy to assume that something like a salad will be full of goodness, but this report goes to show that the name of a food product doesn't always tell the full story".
It is not the first alarming salt study Cash has produced this year.
In May, it surveyed an array of shop-bought soups and found that the average salt content per soup serving was 1.6g and nearly a quarter of products surveyed had more than 2g of salt per serving - over a third of an adult's daily recommended intake. The survey included canned, chilled, packet, pouch, ready-made and instant soups across eight supermarket own-brands and 12 other brands.
"Salt is a hidden killer which can lurk in the unlikeliest of foods, but it's hard for shoppers to be able to distinguish healthy from unhealthy at a glance," Callaghan said.
EATING TOO MUCH SALT can cause blood pressure to spike and significantly increases the risk of strokes and heart disease.
If the Irish adult population reduced its salt consumption by just half a teaspoon per day, the incidence of stroke would fall by 13 per cent, coronary heart disease would be reduced by 10 per cent and as many as 900 deaths could be prevented annually.
But working out how much salt you're eating is not easy, and is made even more difficult by some manufacturers listing the sodium rather than the salt content in their products.
This information is of little use to consumers and can be misleading - to convert sodium to salt, you need to multiply the listed amount by 2.5.
To see how quickly the salt content adds up, we imagined a day of comparatively healthy eating. For breakfast, there was a small glass of M&S "pure Florida orange juice" (0.3g), two slices of Brennan's wholemeal bread (0.8g) and a small bowl of Kellogg's Just Right (0.7g). Lunch was half a pot of Browne's fresh Mediterranean soup (2.75g) and a sandwich made with organic M&S "mature farmhouse cheddar" (0.9g), two slices of Galtee Deli Carved ham (0.7g), two slices of bread (0.8g) and a dollop of Hellmann's mayonnaise (0.5g).
Dinner was made up of a single portion of a comparatively upmarket puttanesca sauce from Lloyd Grossman (1.8g) and a three slices of Tesco's finest Parma ham (2.1g). The pasta - boiled in unsalted water - contains only trace levels of salt. Three McVities chocolate-chip cookies guiltily eaten while watching the telly added another 0.75g, taking the total salt consumption to 12.4g of salt - more than twice the recommended daily amount with not so much as a shake of salt from a shaker or a single Tayto crisp consumed.
High levels of hidden salt are the main reason Irish adults eat an average of 10g of salt each day with 80 per cent of that coming from processed foods.
Both the Department of Health and the Food Safety Authority of Ireland (FSAI) have consistently stressed the need to lower salt intake from a 10g a day average to a recommended daily allowance (RDA) of 6g, and regulatory authorities in Ireland are working with the food industry to lower the salt levels in processed food. According to Dr Wayne Anderson, chief specialist in food science with the FSAI, industry "is responding very well".
BREAD MANUFACTURERS have reduced the salt content used in the baking process by about 10 per cent in the past four years, and while this may seem like a small drop, Anderson says a slow but steady approach is essential. "We are seeing cuts, but we are doing it in a gradual and sustained manner. If it is done too quickly, then people will notice the changes immediately and stop buying certain foods, making it counterproductive."
EU legislation governing food labelling is currently being revamped and the FSAI is pushing to ensure it will become a legal requirement for salt levels to be listed.
"The stakes are high in terms of public health," Anderson says. "We would like to see clearer labelling and we would like to see consumers more conscious of their salt intake. We would also like to see consumers putting more pressure on manufacturers to make more lower-salt products - there is a symbiotic relationship between the consumers and manufacturers."
