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Processing food in China and the US has the highest salt content

 Processing food in China and the US has the highest salt content


The salt contents material of processed ingredients stays high, even though some nations ranked notably worse than others in the BMJ Open study.



                                                                                                                           Pixabay

The salt (sodium) content material of processed meat and fish merchandise is so excessive in the US that it ranks 2nd in the world, in accordance to a five-country find out about posted in the on-line journal BMJ Open.

China comes first, whilst the UK comes closing in the ordinary rankings. But salt stages inside and between the nations studied assorted widely, relying on the product and brand, the findings show.

High dietary salt consumption is an important motive of excessive blood stress and the related dangers of cardiovascular and kidney illnesses and death. The World Health Organization (WHO) recommends a most salt consumption of 2000 mg/day. But the BMJ said the common international salt consumption in 2010 used to be round twice that.
The WHO has set a goal of a 30 percentage world discount in salt consumption with the aid of 2025, and to gauge development towards this, centered on the salt content material of processed meat and fish merchandise in three developed and two growing countries: the UK, USA, Australia, China and South Africa.

The study’s authors say merchandise for the learn about have been sourced from foremost grocery store chains in the five countries, and the meals vitamin labels scanned to determine the salt (sodium) content material (mg/100 g).

A complete of 33,955 processed meat and fish product labels had been scanned, of which 7455 (22 percent) have been excluded due to the fact of lacking or reproduction information, leaving 26,500 (78 percent) merchandise for analysis.

Overall, China had the easiest salt degree (1050 mg/100 g) for all products, rating it the us of a with the saltiest merchandise for each meat (1066 mg/100 g) and fish merchandise (942 mg/100 g) , accompanied with the aid of the USA, South Africa, Australia and the UK (432 mg/100 g).

But the common salt contents material of meat merchandise used to be decrease in Australia (580 mg/100 g) than it was once in the UK (590 mg/100 g). And great variants in salt content material have been evident amongst all the subcategories and between countries.

For example, the salt content material of roast fowl in China was once 4.5 instances that of the identical product in the UK (893 mg/100 g vs 197 mg/100 g), whilst chilled fish in China used to be 4.5 instances saltier than that of the USA (1744 mg/100 g vs 389 mg/100 g).

A massive percentage of processed meat and fish merchandise fell into the crimson and amber site visitors mild categories, with the best percentage of inexperienced mild merchandise located in the UK, accounting for simply over 12.5 percentage of all meat and fish products.

But the common sodium content material of meat and fish merchandise in every u. s. a. Used to be high, with solely 10 percentages of the merchandise in the UK and USA, and no extra than five percentages in China and South Africa, falling into the inexperienced mild category.

“It is now not handy to truly substitute or reformulate the excessive sodium merchandise that already exist for years. However, the giant distinction in sodium content material of comparable merchandise in special nations, and the distinction in sodium content material amongst exceptional manufacturers inside the equal country, point out that there is, nevertheless, a lot of room for salt reduction,” stated the researchers.

They renowned quite a few obstacles to their findings, inclusive of that these are primarily based on purchases from chosen retailers at one factor in time. What’s more, they didn’t seize meals buying information to quantify true sodium consumption of processed meat and fish products.

Third, facts series spanned numerous years, from 2012 to 2018, at some point of which time product reformulation might also have occurred, they suggest.
Nevertheless, they conclude: “The sodium content material of meat and fish merchandise in all the chosen international locations used to be very high, with a hundred g serving dimension of meat and fish merchandise contributing to one half/0.33 of WHO endorsed most everyday sodium intake.”

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