Doctor push for salt content in food labels


 In two weeks, the Food Safety and Standards Authority of India (FSSAI) is planning to put out a draft of the revised food labels, which will include sodium along with other nutritional facts such as carbohydrates, fats, and sugar, FSSAI scientist Anitha Makhijani said at a conference in the city on Friday.
She expected to see smiling faces and hear an applause from senior doctors, scientists and public health experts, who were lobbying for stringent rules that force food manufacturers to reduce salt in their products. But most of them expressed discontent. "It should be salt and not sodium," argued UK-based Dr Graham Macgregor, professor of cardiovascular medicine at the Wolfson Institute of Preventive Medicine. Macgregor has campaigned for regulations for low salt food in countries like the UK, Canada, and Australia.

Until now, FSSAI has said packaged foods can volunteer to display nutritional facts. A few products that list salt usually report it as sodium per 100g. Sodium in food must be multiplied by 2.4 to get the salt in it. "Britain had sodium on food labels more than two decades ago. They changed it to salt because no one knew what they were eating," he said....Read more

 

Source web page:Times of India

 

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