Salt and sugar are added to the majority of processed foods, including biscuits, cakes, oven-ready meals and drinks. When managing our weight it's important to understand how to control our salt and sugar intake as it can limit weight loss progress. Evidence strongly indicates that we weight more than we need – with the average sugar consumption per adult estimated at 700g – twice what we need.
Day 1 (1 lesson this week)
Lesson
Sugar and salt can creep into our diet without us realising and can hinder our weight management progress. Whilst eating homemade food can make this easier as we can generally be aware of what is going into the food we make, when salt and sugar is combined into a recipe, such as a cake, it’s difficult to understand just how much salt and sugar there is in each portion.
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This has the side effect of making us want more, so not only will be eating significant and unknown quantities of salt and sugar, we’ll also be at risk of eating more calories than we intended.
All about salt
Many people consume too much salt, which causes high blood pressure (currently affecting 1 person in 3 in the UK) and increases the risk of heart disease and stroke.
The recommended daily dose of salt for an adult is 6g – equivalent to a teaspoon. For a child, it is half this amount.
When buying pre-prepared food, it’s important to understand how much salt is included. The nutritional labels help –
• If the salt content is more than 1.5g per 100g (or 0.6g sodium) – the salt content is HIGH – for these the food label will be colour-coded red
• If the salt content is less than 0.3g per 100g (or 0.1g sodium) – the salt content is LOW – for these, the food label will be colour-coded green
High salt-content foods include:
• anchovies
• bacon
•