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The Facts About Salt in Our Childrens Diet

Salt

The stark message being delivered to parents and carers is that feeding children salty foods condemns them to high blood pressure in later life. According to Consensus Action on Salt and Health (CASH) the upper safe limit for salt consumption is;

6 grams for adults
Children age 7-14 5 grams
Children age 1-6 2 grams
(Babies should have no salt at all)

Recent surveys have shown that adults are consuming between 10 and 12 grams of salt a day, three times more than the body needs, and children, who require even less salt, are consuming the same amount as adults. This is thought to be largely to do with children’s high intake of breakfast cereals, snacks and fast foods.

Salt causes the body to retain more fluid, increasing blood volume over time and causing hypertension. Hypertension is linked to the risk of developing kidney damage, loss of vision, osteoporosis, abnormal calcium metabolism, kidney stones, atherosclerosis, cardiac arrest, or stroke. Research has shown that 35,000 deaths from stroke and heart attack in the UK could be prevented if we halved our salt intake.

Graham MacGregor, Professor of cardiovascular medicine at St Georges Hospital London, comments that salt was not part of the human diet until 5,000 years ago, and if it was still absent from the diet, there would be no high Blood pressure. He believes that we must drastically cut our salt intake and lays the blame squarely at the door of the food industry, stating “it is criminal in the way it markets rubbish products to children… If you got all the world’s nutritionists together and asked them to design a diet for children that would cause cardiovascular disease or furring of the arteries as they got older, what they would come up with is what we’re feeding them now. It’s almost as though the food industry is experimenting to see how quickly they can kill everyone off.”

Children’s salty diet also promotes thirst, which is all too often quenched with sugary drinks, linked with tooth decay and weight problems.

But what can we do to protect our children? We have to keep fast food, processed foods and ready made snacks to a bare minimum, preparing home-made foods and healthier snack options. We must tell our children why too much salt is bad for them so that they can make responsible choices themselves. Often people worry about how they will adapt to a low-salt diet, but the body’s taste receptors adjust within a few weeks, and the entire family will benefit from a lower salt intake.

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