Salt in ready meals

I'm blogging a lot on salt at the moment, but I wanted to welcome the survey by Consensus Action on Salt and Health (CASH) , which indicates that on average the salt content of ready meals has reduced by 45% since 2003. The Agency is aware that work on salt reduction has been ongoing in both branded and own label ready meals and this level of reduction is a real achievement by the food industry.

However CASH does highlight some meals which are still very high in salt and some 'healthy eating' range meals that are higher in salt than their standard range equivalents. This emphasises the need for consumers to check out the label.

CASH mentions that 84% of the ready meals it surveyed already meet the Agency's 2010 salt targets. Again this is great news. The Agency is due to review progress against all the salt targets early in the New Year and we will publish information about what we find. We will also look at whether we are on track to meet our ultimate average population target of  6g and whether in some food categories we can lower the targets we set in 2006.

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