Around 300 deaths could be avoided every year if five major Australian food manufacturers cut the salt content in their packaged foods, research by The George Institute for Global Health found.
“We estimated that if all companies complied with the Australian government’s new sodium targets, over 500 deaths could be prevented each year,” lead author on the research, Dr Kathy Trieu said. The report was looking at the health impact of sodium reduction in Australia.
“If Australia had the same targets that area already in place in the UK, it could increase the number of deaths prevented by another 660 deaths,” she said.
The top three companies alluded to in the report were major supermarkets. The institute said if these supermarkets reformulated their home brand products to meet governmental sodium targets around half of all deaths would be averted.
The George Institute program head of nutrition science Dr Jason Wusaid, “Our study suggests that prioritising the reformulation of supermarket private label products would be a good place to start.”
Coles has already taken the first step in salt reduction earlier this year, removing 76 tonnes of salt from its bakery line-up, and Kellogg Australia also recently announced it had achieved a 300 tonne salt reduction over the last 15 years.
In 2013, the federal government signed up to global targets to reduce the population’s salt intake by 30 per cent by 2025. Despite these steps, the average adult’s daily salt intake has remained mostly unchanged. In comparison, strategies implemented in the UK have resulted in a 15 per cent reduction over seven years and are estimated to have saved around 9000 lives annually.
“If we had the same targets as those set by the UK government, it would more than double the number of deaths averted, which would be comparable to the number of Australians that died on our roads in 2019,” Trieu added.
The study also found that despite voluntary government guidelines, some products are seeing a salt increase. The George Institute’s senior public health nutritionist Clare Farrand said the salt content in veg-based snack products had increased by 68 per cent between 2013 and 2020
Farrand said that in the UK, multiple salty food categories including spreads, ready meals, canned fish, butter, table sauces, and breakfast cereals are covered by the program, but are not included in Australia’s scheme. Additionally, a large proportion of some products such as plain biscuits, rice cakes, cheddar cheeses, and sweet bakery items already met the targets, which indicated the guidelines were too lenient, she said.
Reformulation Readiness: A best practice guide to salt reduction for Australia food manufacturers supports reduction of salt (sodium) in processed and packaged products. It guides manufacturers through the reformulation process with information on checking nutritional composition, completing competitor benchmarking, establishing salt targets and timeframes, product improvement and testing.
