Slashing salt can save lives – and it won’t hurt your hip pocket or tastebuds

Each yr, greater than 2,500 Australians die from diseases linked to eating an excessive amount of salt.

We shouldn’t be putting up with a lot unnecessary illness, mainly from heart disease and strokes, and so many deaths.

As a brand new Grattan Institute report shows, there are practical steps the federal government can take to save lots of lives, reduce health spending and help the economy.

We eat an excessive amount of salt, with deadly consequences

Eating an excessive amount of salt is bad on your health. It raises blood pressurewhich increases the danger of heart disease and stroke.

About one in three Australians has hypertension, and eating an excessive amount of salt is the largest individual contributor.

Unfortunately, the typical Australian eats far an excessive amount of salt – almost double the beneficial day by day maximum of 5 grams, reminiscent of a teaspoon.

Australian governments know excessive salt intake is a giant problem. That’s why in 2021 they set a goal to scale back salt intake by not less than 30% by 2030.

It’s an ambitious and worthy goal. But we’re still eating an excessive amount of salt and we don’t have the policies to alter that.

Most of the salt we eat is added to food during manufacturing

Most of the salt Australians eat doesn’t come from the shaker on the table. About three-quarters of it’s added to food during manufacturing.

This salt is hidden in on a regular basis staples similar to bread, cheese and processed meats. Common foods similar to ready-to-eat pasta meals or a ham sandwich can have as much as half our total beneficial salt intake.

Salt limits are one of the best approach to cut salt intake

Reducing the quantity of salt added to food during manufacturing is probably the most effective approach to reduce intake.

Salt limits will help us try this. They work by setting limits on how much salt could be added to different sorts of food, similar to bread or biscuits. To meet these limits, firms need to alter the recipes of their products, reducing the quantity of salt.

Under salt limits, the United Kingdom reduced salt intake by 20% in a few decade. South Africa is making even faster gains. Salt limits are low cost and simple to implement, and might get results quickly.

Most consumers won’t notice a change on the checkout. Companies might want to update their recipes, but even when all the prices of updating recipes were passed on to shoppers, we calculate that at most it will cost about 10 cents each week for the typical household.

Nor will consumers notice much of a change on the dinner table. Most people don’t notice when some salt is removed from common foods. There are some ways firms could make foods taste just as salty without adding as much salt. For example, they will make salt crystals fineror use potassium-enriched saltwhich swaps a few of the harmful sodium in salt for potassium. And since the change shall be gradual, our tastebuds will adapt to less salty foods over time.

Australia’s salt limits are failing

Australia has had voluntary salt limits since 2009, but they’re badly designed, poorly implemented, and have reduced population salt intake by just 0.3%.

Because Australia’s limits are voluntary, many food firms have chosen to not take part in the scheme. Our evaluation shows that 73% of eligible food products will not be participating, and only 4% have reduced their salt content.

Action could save lives

Modelling from the University of Melbourne shows that fixing our failed salt limits could add 36,000 extra healthy years of life, across the population, over the subsequent 20 years.

This would delay greater than 300 deaths annually and reduce health-care spending by A$35 million annually, the equivalent of 6,000 hospital visits.

International experience shows the prices of implementing such salt limits could be very low and much outweighed by the advantages.

How to repair our failed salt limits

To achieve these gains, the federal government should start by enforcing the bounds we have already got, by making compliance mandatory. Fifteen countries have mandatory salt limits, and 14 are planning to introduce them.

The variety of foods covered by salt limits in Australia should greater than double, to be as broad as those the UK set in 2014. Broader targets would come with common foods for which Australia doesn’t currently set targets, similar to baked beans, butter, margarine and canned vegetables.

A loophole in the present scheme that lets firms pass over a fifth of their products ought to be closed. The federal government should design the policy, fairly than doing it jointly with industry representatives.

Over the approaching a long time, Australia will need many recent and improved policies to scale back diet-related disease. Reducing salt intake have to be a part of this agenda. For too long, Australia has let the food industry set the usual, with almost no progress against a serious threat to our health.

Getting serious about salt would save lives, and it will greater than pay for itself through reduced health-care costs and increased economic activity.