Want to cut the amount of salt your family shakes on their food? Stick clear tape over half the holes in the salt shaker. Who knows? It might just work. It certainly did for one study where they found that people shook the salt shaker for a certain time regardless of how much was coming out. When they taped over half the holes, the study subjects unknowingly ended up eating half the amount of salt.

This ‘stealth’ method of reducing salt is exactly what many nutritionally responsible food manufacturers around the world are doing right now. In nutrition talks I used to be able to say that a plate of Cornflakes had more sodium than a small bag of potato crisps, but not now. Although it’s still one of the higher salt breakfast cereals, Sanitarium has cut back the sodium in Cornflakes quite significantly – and I can’t taste any difference. Watties has reduced sodium in their reformulated products by up to 62% and Kelloggs is also stealthily reducing sodium. They don’t advertise the fact because product sales would drop due to people assuming that less salt means less taste.

Babies enjoy the natural flavours of food without added salt but as we grow our taste buds are exposed to more and more salt and they adapt to these higher levels. Food companies are simply reversing this by reducing salt so gradually that we don’t even notice.

So why the big fuss over salt? The more salt a population eats, the higher their blood pressure and heart disease rates. Not to mention that eating lots of salt pulls calcium out of our bones. New Zealanders eat around 9 grams of salt a day. If we want to reduce our risk of disease we’re meant to be eating less than half this amount – 4 grams a day. In salt terms, that’s about two teaspoons. (1 gram sodium = 2.5 grams salt)

“But I don’t use two teaspoons of salt a day!” you may be saying. Maybe not at the table or in your cooking, but most of the sodium we eat (75-80%) comes from processed foods such as bread, cereals, processed meats, crackers and sauces. This is where the food manufacturers come in. It’s great that they are reducing salt levels. My question is why did they have to put so much in to start with?