Taking it with a pinch of salt – the key questions

So what does the government want to do?

Cut down on salt, or at least get us to.

Anna Soubry, the public health minister, has launched a new “salt strategy” to try and get people to reduce their daily salt intake from an average of 8.1g a day, towards a target of 6g – about a teaspoon – a day.

The government hopes that through lower targets, the food industry will be encouraged to rip up and re-write its recipes. In particular, it says that it will push the catering and takeaway sector to set new maximum salt targets for sandwiches and crisps.

It also says that it wants to get more companies across the food industry to sign up to pledges to reduce the amount of salt they have in their food.

It’s not new – the Department of Health and the Food Standards Agency were saying that average salt intake should drop to 6g a day as far back as 2003.

And experts in the cardiovascular review group on the Committee of Medical Aspects of Food and Nutrition Policy’s panel were suggesting the 6g a day target back in the mid 1990s.

The Royal Society of Chemists says that between 65 per cent and 85 per cent of our salt is already in the food we eat, and not in what we add to food in cooking or at the table.

What’s wrong with salt?

Going easy on salt might save as many as 40,000 lives a year, according to the National Institute of Clinical Excellence; reducing salt by just a gram a day could prevent 4,000 deaths from strokes and heart attacks a year, according to the Department for Health.

The World Health Organisation says that too much sodium – contained in salt – raises the risk of blood pressure, which increases the risk of heart disease and stroke.

Coronary heart disease is the biggest killer in the UK.

Too much salt also puts a strain on kidneys, which struggle to process it all, and has been linked to kidney disease.

But our bodies do require a small amount of sodium. Without it, we would die. The chemical name for salt is sodium chloride. The sodium helps maintain the fluid in our blood cells and is used to transmit information in our nerves and muscles. As the body cannot make it, we rely on food for salt to make sure we get enough.

Although sodium is found naturally in foods such as milk, cream and eggs, processed foods contain far more – bacon contains 19 times as much sodium as an egg.

The government may reconmmend 6g a day, but the Royal Society of Chemists says that based on the requirements of a human body, an average adult needs about 4.2g of salt a day.

So why aren’t we legislating on salt the way we do for tobacco or alcohol?

Mainly because the industry has been resistant to it, and opponents of legislation say that it would take five to 10 years anyway, and that it would be “cumbersome”.

Opponents of the “nanny state” say that reducing the amount of salt people eat should be a voluntary effort between government, industry and consumers, instead of the rule of law. It was Andrew Lansley, when he was health secretary, who introduced the Responsibility Deal in 2011 urging a “call to action” by food manufacturers. He said that “progress was made more quickly” than if there had been legislation.

“It’s like putting Dracula in charge of the blood bank.” Professor Simon Capewell

So far, around 81 companies and organisations have signed up to the pledge to take action to reduce salt, including McCain Food, PepsiCo, and JD Wetherspoon.

But when it was set up, one of the biggest charities, Diabetes UK, refused to sign up to it, saying that it contained too few promises to succeed in making food healthy.

Has the voluntary approach worked?

We’ll never know, as there is no blind test to compare progress with and without legisation.

But Professor Simon Capewell, who served on Mr Lansley’s Public Health Commission while in opposition, last year described the Responsibility Deal as “a pantomime”, saying leaving it up to the manufacturers was like “putting Dracula in charge of the blood bank”.

It does seem that claims the industry has been successful at regulating itself should probably be taken with a pinch of the proverbial itself.

According to the National Diet and Nutrition Survey, in 2011, urine samples suggested that the mean estimated salt intake for adults aged 19 to 64 in England was 8.1g a day. (It was 9.3g per day for men, and 6.8g for women.)

But in 2000/01, salt levels were 9.5g – so a reduction of 1.4g, or 15 per cent, over the decade. If nothing changes, it will take around 17 years to reach the 6g-a-day target, at these rates.

Katharine Jenner, campaigns director and nutritionist at Consensus Action on Salt and Health, also said that although a voluntary approach was preferred, legislation should be an option. In some cases, she added, some companies may reduce salt content in certain products, but then bring in something new which has high salt in it yet again. So although they could say they were reducing salt, they wouldn’t be so quick to point out they are adding it too.

Likewise, she said, the department of health doesn’t go as far as publically naming and shaming the companies which are failing to reduce salt. “If they don’t, we’re going to have to think about legislation,” she said.