Food industry on target for reducing salt
The amount of salt in Australian-manufactured breakfast cereals and breads is being reduced by leading food manufacturers to improve the diets and health of Australians as part of an industry, retailer and government partnership called the Food and Health Dialogue.Under the Dialogue – jointly convened by the Australian Food and Grocery Council (AFGC) and Parliamentary Secretary for Health Mark Butler – salt reduction targets have now been set for most leading brands of ready-to-eat cereals as well as breads, rolls and buns.
“While salt is an important part of people’s diet, eating too much can be harmful and that’s why industry has been involved in salt reduction strategies for a number of years,” said AFGC Chief Executive Kate Carnell, who highlighted the support of other Food Dialogue representatives including the National Heart Foundation, Public Health Association, Woolworths and CSIRO.
“Many of Australia’s leading food and grocery manufacturing companies have made large strides forward in salt reduction. For example, Australian researchers recently found that more than 70 per cent of Australia’s ready-to-eat cereals were already below the salt target in this category*.”
The Dialogue agreed that for ready-to-eat breakfast cereals exceeding 400 milligrams of sodium per 100 grams, Kellogg’s, Sanitarium, Cereal Partners Worldwide, Woolworths, Coles and Aldi will reduce the sodium content of products by 15 per cent over four years.
Leading bread manufacturers George Weston Foods, Goodman Fielder Baking, Allied Mills and Cripps Nubake, as well as Woolworths, Coles and Aldi have agreed to reduce sodium across bread products to 400 milligrams per 100 grams by the end of 2013.
Since 2009, George Weston Foods has removed more than 342 tonnes of salt from its Golden and Tip Top product ranges without any alternation to the taste or texture. Ms Carnell said this has been a technical challenge and now many other brands were not far off achieving similar sodium reduction goals.
“Many other companies are also proactively identifying other food product areas where salt can be reduced including in processed meats, soups, sauces and snack foods,” Ms Carnell said.
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I think the hyping of salt in diet in the proportion of WMD is laughable. Perhaps it’s true for westerners, with the refined flour bread, produced and processed meats and dairy products with myriads of additives and hormones and what else; fresh vegetables are side dishes that more often only encountered in gourmet restaurants meals that cost an arm and a leg, as well as in the home fares, poisoned by mayonnaise sauces, cheese and oil, blah blah blah, which defeats the health benefits of fresh vegetables.
Most Asians diets I know of (okay, I am one) consists of barely husked rice (with all the vitamins in the bran still there, thanks to the primitive grain processing facilities in those “unfortunate” countries), heavily salted fishes and meat (to make the fishes and meat go further in each meal) and plenty of vegetables (leaves, roots, shoots and all) boiled (if unavoidable, to make them edible and less poisonous) or raw if possible (yep, good, not wasting firewood!). All in all, anybody who cares to take a vacation out of their ivory academic towers and live and eat in the down-to-the gutter Asia will know how much salt they consume daily. The catch is: They work their guts out earning a daily living, sweating it all out, as well as giving their cardiovascular system a beating day in, day out. More of them are finally dying of exhaustion, joints-wearing out arthritis, virus and bacteria-born diseases, than over-fed, under-exercised, under elimination of salts and the resultant cardio-vascular plague the west is suffering. Immigrants who adopted the new host country’s diets have been seen to suffer the same as the natives.
So the onus is on you. Do you really want to examine the deficiencies of your traditional diets in light of the prevalent lack of physical activity to metabolizes and excreting excesses?
Ah well. Looks like we are condemned to the tasteless crap like the food is in America. Still, I can always put salt on my sandwiches!
I wish the food loonies would go back to their labs and play with their toys!
Really?
Internet filters. Cigarettes and alcohol taxed beyond reason. Pointless drugs laws.
Now we can’t even be trusted to eat tasty foods.
How about Aspartame? How about High Fructose Corn Syrup?