BBC2’s Newsnight last Thursday devoted most of the programme to problems with salt in food. According to a survey carried out by the BBC, 80% of people who responded to the poll want the government to take action and make it more difficult to eat unhealthily by restricting salt, fat and sugar in processed food. Many of these are the same bunch of people who (according to another recent survey) believe the government shouldn’t dictate what we eat.

Newsnight’s somewhat skewed view on salt included an analysis of certain items bought in supermarkets to fulfill one day’s food intake. This included the following, which it claims is [an] apparently healthy choice:

• Breakfast of flaked cereal and fruit, two slices of toast, two sausages
• Lunch consisting of a pork pie
• Dinner consisting of soup, two smoked salmon fish cakes and vegetables.

Not surprisingly, this adds up to around 19 grams of salt; more than 3 times the recommended intake. Neither does this strike me as particularly healthy. Flaked cereals, sausages, pork pie and smoked salmon are of course full of salt. You don’t need labels to realise this. Shockingly, Newsnight also needed to emphasis the fact that crisps include lots of salt, by comparing it to the salt content of seawater. Why?

The government is in talks with the food industry to cut down salt content in processed foods. Others want clearer labelling. For example, labelling salt content is not mandatory. Most foods that are labelled include the sodium content since sodium based compounds are used as flavour enhancers, and are therefore not just salt. It’s also claimed that having sodium content is confusing because you need to multiply it by about 2.5 to get the equivalent salt content. So what’s the problem? If salt is a part of the sodium content, then by multiplying the sodium content by 2.5 you surely must get a worst case figure for the amount of salt. Additionally, why not promote low sodium content in food rather than low salt content? Or is the government telling me that people can’t multiply by 2.5. It’s easy: multiply by 5, divide by 2. Or failing that, multiply by 10, then divide by 2 twice.

What about Red, Green and Yellow labelling of salt content? Well, that sounds okay except for the fact it bears no relation to the quantity of food consumed. It’s best to stick with quantitative guidelines. You can’t mess with these.

Now we have to ask why there is so much salt in food. I’ll ignore the sample food intake from Newsnight as it is just plain ridiculous. Salt is used as a cheap flavouring and because it binds with water is often used to bulk food up. It stands to reason therefore that lower quality food is more likely to have lots of salt content. Indeed, lower quality food, whilst being cheaper, is also higher in fat and sugar content. Wouldn’t it be novel if the government promoted the consumption of better quality processed (or pre-prepared) food and the use of fresh vegetables over processed, canned and frozen vegetables. I reckon it would balance out cost-wise, plus have a beneficial impact to the public and the health service. This is without even beginning to ask people to reduce the actual amount of food they eat. Don’t tell me that people don’t have time to go shopping for fresh food. In any case, fresh food can last quite some time in a fridge.

Thus it’s time to introduce two other food industry conspiracies, one of which is with the collusion of the government and health institutes: the use of best before dates, and ‘do not freeze’ symbols. Best before dates are there to advise people on whether something may not be at its best. It’s not a ‘throw this away’ date. It may be my imagination, but I’m sure best before dates are nearer to the dates of purchase than they used to be. Having an earlier date encourages people to buy more food to replace that which is unnecessarily thrown away. If you keep hold of food a little bit longer it actually reduces the amount of money spent on food and reduces the number of trips to the shops.

The ‘do not freeze’ symbol is a classic marketing gimmick. If you cannot freeze something you have to consume it on the day of purchase or stick it in the fridge. Whereupon you’re then confronted by the best before date syndrome. In my experience there are only two types of food that cannot be frozen: some vegetables and most cheeses. Cheese is a particularly tricky beast as it loses its flavour quite significantly and loses its structure. Other foods may lose some of their flavour but this is only marginal.

So finally here are my recommendations. Firstly those that would be possible:

• Make sodium labelling on food compulsary.
• Advise people on the quantity of sodium (and indeed fat, sugar, fibre, protein etc.) that should be consumed in a day. That should only take five minutes.

And now those that wouldn’t be possible since at least one of them is too emotive for this current government:

• Ban value foods
• Ban white bread
• Revise the use of ‘best before’ dates
• Revise the use of ‘do not freeze’ symbols
• Provide assistance to allow people to buy good quality fridges and freezers