The importance of eating the right amount of salt

Salt is considered by many people to be an essential cooking ingredient, but as with many foods, too much can be a bad thing.

However, how much salt is too much? Government statistics state that every day 26 million adults in the UK eat too much salt. This often occurs without diners realising it, because 75 per cent of the salt we eat is already in the food we buy. This is because salt is a preservative and helps keeps processed food fresh, while it is in transit and storage, before being sold and finally eaten.

Failing to address this problem can have serious health consequences. High salt consumption is linked with heart disease and strokes.

Cutting down on the amount of salt in a diet helps to reduce blood pressure, whether or not the individual's blood pressure was high to begin with. This is turn helps to reduce the risk of developing heart disease, whatever the individual's age.

Indeed, reducing the amount of salt eaten can lower blood pressure levels in just four weeks.

While often associated with older people, it is possible to develop high blood pressure at any age and more than a third of people in England and Scotland suffer from this condition.

Often people who have high blood pressure do not realise and for this reason it has been labeled the "silent killer".

Furthermore, not loading food with salt may help diners enjoy a wider range of flavours as their taste buds adjust to having less salt.

Government guidelines recommend that adults should eat no more than six grams of salt per day and health experts estimate that if UK over-18s stuck to this rule then 17,000 premature deaths could be avoided per year. Six grams of salt is roughly the equivalent to a teaspoonful.

However, it is important to remember this doesn't just refer to the salt added to food while cooking, but also to the salt already in most food products, such as pasta sauce and soups.

Babies should eat even less salt. Experts recommend that one gram per day is the maximum for a newborn child up to the age of 12 months, as their kidneys cannot cope with more than this. Babies who are breastfed will automatically get the right amount of salt and infant formula contains similar levels.

Those feeding babies solids after six months should never add salt to their food or give them foods not specially made for babies, as this will contain too-high levels of salt.