Yes, this luxury hot chocolate treat actually contains more salt than a packet of Walker’s crisps! Each serving will give you 0.6g of salt compared with 0.46 in a bag of crisps. And why does it contain salt? Simply to enhance its flavour.
Lots of us are aware that eating too much salt is bad for our health. The government recommendation is that we should consume no more than 6g of salt each day but that isn’t easy to achieve. Without salt many of our everyday foods would be so tasteless that we wouldn’t want to eat them, with breakfast cereal being a classic example. The frightening thing is that salt is often found in foods that don’t even taste salty and is hidden away in cakes, biscuits, pastries, sauces, and Galaxy Ultimate Marshmallow hot chocolate!
Why should we cut back on salt? If we consume too much salt it attracts extra fluid which is stored in our body and this in turn raises our blood pressure. The more salt we eat, the higher our blood pressure. The higher our blood pressure, the more strain it puts on our heart, arteries, kidneys and our brain which can lead to heart attacks, strokes, kidney disease and even dementia. So cutting back our salt consumption can reduce the risk of these health issues. If you have a family history of heart disease, reducing your salt intake is particularly important.
The good news is that if you are reading this and you are a member of Rosemary Online you will have made a choice to eat more healthily anyway as all our eating plans are based on low fat foods. If you eat low-fat, you will automatically be eating less salt. Salt is added to fatty foods to enhance the taste of food as without salt, fatty foods are really unpalatable. So, put simply, eat less fat and you’ll eat significantly less salt.
I am sure you won’t be eating a sausage roll for breakfast (hopefully anyway!) nor a packet of peanuts or crisps as a mid-morning snack. But some people would eat all of those, and more, every day with the consequence that they are consuming vast amounts of unhealthy grams of fat, hundreds of unnecessary calories which will inevitably lead to long term weight gain but, more importantly, also copious amounts of salt.
How can we cut back on salt even more? The first golden rule is to never add salt to your meal on the plate. Avoid foods that cause you to be very thirsty as they must be laden with salt to cause thirst. Ready meals are notoriously salty so why not get into the habit of cooking your own recipes? We have so many low fat recipes at Rosemary Online, together with how-to-cook videos, it’s easier than you think. When you follow a recipe and it says ‘add a pinch of salt and pepper’, just add the pepper and omit the salt. You just don’t need it.
We need to avoid all savoury snacks because they are laden with salt. That sausage roll I mentioned contains 1.8g of fat, almost a third of our daily recommended consumption. And meat ‘products’ such as processed ham, sausages, Scotch eggs, pork pie and salami can contain extraordinary levels of salt so beware!
The Government and World Health Organisation make recommendations to encourage us to eat more healthily: remember to eat your 5-a-day; avoid eating red meat more than twice a week; eat fish twice a week and include one portion of oily fish like salmon or mackerel; cut back on sugar; cut down your fat intake; drink no more than 14 units of alcohol a week; limit your salt intake to 6g per day and so the list goes on. All of the recommendations make sense but it does make eating healthily rather complicated.
Whilst I believe being aware of the nutritional recommendations is important and we should make every effort to eat healthily it is important that we don’t become paranoid about the recommended daily allowances, (RDA). Just be mindful of the nutritional content of the foods you buy and check the nutrition panel which you will find on the pack of almost all the foods you buy. We can cook without fat, we can minimise our use of salt. We can prepare our own food rather than buy a take-away or dine out. When we prepare our own food, we know exactly what’s in it and we are much more likely to be more in control of our weight and our health. And I think I will give the Galaxy Ultimate Marshmallow hot chocolate drink a miss!
