Contrast that to yesterday morning when I awoke to hear a discussion on the BBC Radio 4 Today programme about salt in cheese. It followed the release of a survey by Cash (Consensus Action on Salt and Health) that had found an ‘alarming amount of salt hidden in cheese’. The BBC website reports that Cash ‘analysed’ 722 cheese portions of 30g each and found that many contained more salt than a bag of crisps.
What did this ‘analysis’ consist of, I wondered? Was it merely a look at the labels or was there a more scientific approach?
The lady from Cash, speaking on the Today programme, said salt increases blood pressure. One of the speakers at the conference in Brussels, a professor from the University of Copenhagen, also observed that cheese contained salt, and salt can increase blood pressure levels. It also contains saturated fat, so you might perceive that cheese is very bad. But, he warned, this is a prediction made purely by reading the label. What about doing some studies actually looking at cheese and testing its impact, he asked – then you would focus not just on one ingredient alone but how several ingredients work together in combination.
Research had shown that people who eat a lot of cheese had a 25% lower risk of heart attack and a lower risk of stroke, he said. And the dairy calcium in cheese reduces fat absorption by the body, and helps reduce blood pressure, as do some peptides in cheese. So, this whole subject is not as clear cut and straightforward as some of these pressure groups would have us believe.
The interviewer on the Today programme asked Dr Judith Bryans, hard-working head of the UK’s Dairy Council, why cheese makers didn’t reduce salt levels. Well, of course, they have. Dairy UK has been working with the industry to do that, and two press releases on its website in early 2009 and early 2010 show this.
The Department of Health said it was tackling salt levels in food. Public health minister Anna Soubry was quoted on the BBC website as saying, “Soon, we will have a single front-of-pack labelling scheme that will make it easier for people to compare products and choose the healthier options available.”
Is that the ‘healthier option’ according to the lady from Cash or the ‘healthier option’ according to the professor from Copenhagen?
Why do politicians and legislators have this obsession with a ‘single issue’ focus, choosing to ignore the whole food, the whole diet.
One of the speakers told us that it took five positive messages to counter one negative message. So once again, Judith Bryans and her team are going to be working hard to counter the effects of this latest scare story. As I’ve said before, it highlights how important is the work of our national dairy councils and similar bodies who keep an eye on all these developments and fight the dairy corner.
As I scrolled through the various Twitter reactions to the salt in cheese story this morning, I couldn’t help but feel some sympathy with those who tweeted ‘Leave my food alone!’. I thought about the speaker from the European Commission who said that nutrition labelling laws encourage the food industry to reformulate its products. Doesn’t it just.
When I go shopping, the thing that makes me shudder most is to see a tin or packet of food I have eaten and enjoyed for many years with two additional words: ‘New recipe’.
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