Salty facts: takeaways have more salt than labels claim:
Some of the UK's most popular takeaway dishes contain more salt than their labels indicate, with some meals containing more than recommended daily guidelines, new research has shown.
Scientists found 47% of takeaway foods that were analysed in the survey exceeded their declared salt levels, with curries, pasta and pizza dishes often failing to match what their menus claim.
While not all restaurants provided salt levels on their menus, some meals from independent restaurants in Reading contained more than 10g of salt in a single portion. The UK daily recommended salt intake for an adult is 6g.
Perhaps surprisingly, traditional fish and chip shop meals contained relatively low levels of salt, as it is only added after cooking and on request.
The University of Reading research, published today (Wednesday, 21 January) in the journal PLOS One, was carried out to examine the accuracy of menu food labelling and the variation in salt content between similar dishes.
[...] "Food companies have been reducing salt levels in shop-bought foods in recent years, but our research shows that eating out is often a salty affair. Menu labels are supposed to help people make better food choices, but almost half the foods we tested with salt labels contained more salt than declared. The public needs to be aware that menu labels are rough guides at best, not accurate measures."
[...] The research team's key findings include:
- Meat pizzas had the highest salt concentration at 1.6g per 100g.
- Pasta dishes contained the most salt per serving, averaging 7.2g, which is more than a full day's recommended intake in a single meal. One pasta dish contained as much as 11.2g of salt.
- Curry dishes showed the greatest variation, with salt levels ranging from 2.3g to 9.4g per dish.
- Chips from fish and chip shops – where salt is typically only added after cooking and on request – had the lowest salt levels at just 0.2g per serving, compared to chips from other outlets which averaged 1g per serving.
The World Health Organization estimates that excess salt intake contributes to 1.8 million deaths worldwide each year.
Journal Reference: Mavrochefalos, A. I., Dodson, A., & C. Kuhnle, G. G. (2026). Variability in sodium content of takeaway foods: Implications for public health and nutrition policy. PLOS ONE, 21(1), e0339339. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0339339
(Score: 2, Touché) by VLM on Friday January 30, @05:06PM (6 children)
Not even remotely a trustworthy or authoritative source, unfortunately, and the number is fake fear-mongering stuff.
Aside from that, this is an example of "know yourself".
https://www.health.harvard.edu/heart-health/dietary-salt-and-blood-pressure-a-complex-connection [harvard.edu]
About 2/3 of people just pee out or sweat out salt when they eat too much tasty food, if it tastes good, eat it, it won't have any noticeable negative health effects, maybe if food tastes better they'll get fatter LOL. About 1/3 are salt sensitive and their BP will rise when they eat "a lot" of salt, they can either not eat tasty food or compensate with BP meds or just not worry about it. About 1/10 have inverse reaction and eating salt lowers their BP.
Its not 1980. A cheap BP monitor is like $20 at amazon. It doesn't even matter if its accurately calibrated. Or you can borrow one from family, friend, etc. All you need to know is take your BP every hour, for a couple hours before and a couple hours after eating (drinking?) something with lots of salt (like several grams of electrolyte mix). If two or so hours later your BP is obviously reliably 5 or 10 points higher than before, you're in the 1/3 salt sensitive camp. If there's no obvious effect, you're in the 2/3 and it doesn't matter how much salt you eat. If it reliably drops with salt consumption then you're in the 10% and mildly excessive salt use will probably help.
You gotta run the experiment a couple times with and without added salt, because normal human numbers vary like 10, 20, 30 points over the course of a day. This makes BP meds a bit of a nightmare, old people passing out from low BP if they get up outta bed at 2am while still somehow simultaneously having too high BP at lunchtime. You can't run an experiment like this at breakfast or dinner one time because the increase from salt intake in most people is WAY smaller than normal daily variations. Regardless of salt sensitivity almost all people will have higher BP "after breakfast" and almost all people will have lower BP "after dinner". But if you run the experiment a couple times at the same time of day you can get good data.
Its a fun, cheap, and useful experiment. Its shocking really how bad the medical advice is that people will accept from propaganda outlets. Mostly propaganda outlets trying to sell low salt diets are usually pushing extremely highly processed very high carb diets to maintain food taste, they're the reason pasta sauce and ketchup used to taste good but now taste like corn syrup... because it is corn syrup. Getting fat from an unnatural high carb diet kills people a lot faster than a couple points of BP anyway. Med school does not include dietary education, so the average doc knows little more than the average TV watcher. Diet is just a mess, intentionally made a mess to increase profits. Hopefully, RFKjr will continue to improve things.
There's a dietary meme that people with low sodium levels will feel hungrier than people with normal or high sodium levels, so they'll self medicate with high carb junk food, making them fatter and sicker (thus more profitable). A lot of that comes from people coincidentally selling VERY expensive packaged salt electrolyte products. Its a lot cheaper to salt your food LOL.
(Score: 2) by VLM on Friday January 30, @05:11PM
Oh and I forgot another diet meme, that losing a kilo loses about 1 point of blood pressure.
"Most" people are like 50 pounds overweight and eating salt increases their BP around 5 points (with plenty of individual variation from -5 or so up to probably a lot).
Given a choice of losing 10 pounds via better diet or exercise, most will whine about eating icky unsalted food or demand a pill with plenty of side effects LOL. Thats a whole nother thing I would not even bother treating BP with pills or icky diet until the patient/victim has a healthy weight... then re-evaluate. Going low salt to "fix things" is like smoking filtered cigs... technically better, but its kind of f-ed up better off not smoking... low salt diet is a wasted effort for most people.
(Score: 1) by pTamok on Friday January 30, @07:05PM (1 child)
Do you have a reference for that particular diagnosis protocol? It's not in the linked article.
(Score: 3, Informative) by VLM on Friday January 30, @11:45PM
Oh I created it as an experiment to learn about biochem and statistics some time ago.
The linked article is typical of the somewhat more serious journal articles explaining the ratios of responders, non-responders, and anti-responders.
It was not hard to find out online that people sensitive to salt respond in 1 to 2 hours so I graphed a few hours before and after. It's very plausible, if I get muscle cramps from too little salt I'm cured in an hour or so if I eat some...
It also was not hard to find plenty of medical evidence of daily variation in BP, mine varied within the range I read about.
With an EE background the statistics analysis is kind of like a "lock-in" amplifier where I control if the signal (added salt) is present or not and then sniff out a possibly very small signal in the presence of a large noise signal.
It was kind of fun. Its not much money or effort and it would make a really cool science experiment for a kids science fair.
Was it a perfect experiment? Oh heck no, a double blind study would be way more interesting, if I had my wife apply or not apply extra salt in secret or I could try variable doses. That would be interesting. Perfect being the enemy of good enough... I wonder if response changes with age? My guess would be classification (respond, non-respond, or anti-respond) is genetic but its plausible the level of response in those categories varies with age...
N=1 experiments are interesting. I've done similar work with supplements and vitamins. People think, for example, that a vit D blood test is "like thousands of dollars because medical care is so expensive" but its actually pretty cheap and optimizing levels is super interesting.
It also reminds me of machine tools, you can't do anything useful unless you have the measurement tools, and you can seemingly do anything with good enough measurement tools, they're the key and highest priority.
(Score: 2) by fraxinus-tree on Saturday January 31, @08:04AM (2 children)
The bad thing in your theory about the salt sensitivity is that you can jump into salt sensitive group rather easily. The other way round easy is not.
(Score: 2) by VLM on Saturday January 31, @05:15PM (1 child)
Ah pretty interesting, I looked into this and I should re-run my experiment. Its fun and easy.
I will say the numbers mentioned below are kind of ridiculous, like 4 teaspoons of salt per day? When I think of reducing salt I think of using 1/4 tsp on a steak as opposed to 1/2 tsp, perhaps. I would think the 4 tsp/day folks must be in the bag of potato chips per day crowd.
https://www.ahajournals.org/doi/10.1161/HYPERTENSIONAHA.123.17959 [ahajournals.org]
"Prevalence increases with age and with comorbidities that impair kidney and vascular function (eg, diabetes, hypertension, kidney disease)." aka typical symptoms of a high carb diet. Possibly with a bad diet in general, I'd be susceptible to salt. Although I have zero desire to eat a bad diet so I'm not super motivated to try the experiment of bad diet plus or minus salt vs good diet plus or minus salt LOL.
"Investigators mostly use 1 of 2 approaches to identify salt-sensitivity, intervening either with diets of known low or high salt content for periods of several days ..." Thats my experiment, right there! The effect can be pretty small compared to natural daily changes so its an interesting statistical experiment to try and pull a signal out of the noise.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday February 01, @04:16PM
Speaking of kidney function a little extra sodium when it comes with bicarbonate via sodium bicarbonate didn't seem to cause harm: "The Effects of Oral Sodium Bicarbonate on Renal Function and Cardiovascular Risk in Patients with Chronic Kidney Disease: A Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis"
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC8665881/ [nih.gov]
"Effect of Bicarbonate Supplementation on Renal Function and Nutritional Indices in Predialysis Advanced Chronic Kidney Disease"
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC4297707/ [nih.gov]
So bicarbonate can be helpful.
Potassium bicarbonate might be an alternative: "Comparative effects of potassium chloride and bicarbonate on thiazide-induced reduction in urinary calcium excretion"
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0085253815471558 [sciencedirect.com]
(Score: 2) by looorg on Friday January 30, @05:29PM (3 children)
This is hardly a surprise. Salt taste good, sugar taste good ... So they add more. They prefer it to having some customer tell them that their food is bland, tasteless gloop.
On the other hand perhaps you should not be having takeaway/fastfood be all your meals every day.
Hardly a surprise. They use a lot of ham on pizza, that is normally salted. Pasta another not surprise, some people even add extra salt to the water for various reasons. Curry dishes? Can you even taste the salt behind the curry? Fries and/or chips normally gets a lot of salt added to it, for taste reasons. It has all the things people love -- it's warm, it has fat adding salt just makes fries perfect.
But as noted having a pizza every now and then is fine. Living on an all pizza diet, probably not as great.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Friday January 30, @07:47PM (1 child)
Ever work in fast food? That salt is shaken into a giant pile of french fries with no measuring whatsoever, entirely depends on how the minimum wage high school kid shakes the big salt shaker.
They can no more predict sodium content of that than Farmer's Almanac can predict rain next year.
🌻🌻🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 2) by driverless on Saturday January 31, @07:40AM
This seems to be country- and locale-specific. In fish&chip shops here you typically get little to no salt unless you ask for it. It's only at junk food places like McDonalds that they shake a pile of salt and MSG over the chips.
(Score: 2) by VLM on Friday January 30, @11:19PM
I have to bake bread for one of my kids, an allergy thing, and dough has a fair amount of salt. Also some cheeses need salt as part of the processing. And the salt helps preserve canned pizza sauce. And olives packed in brine. Its just all salty.
(Score: 2, Interesting) by Runaway1956 on Friday January 30, @05:55PM (3 children)
We bring home various foods (I use the term "food" loosely here) to try. It's not a common thing, but my wife sometimes brings foods home that are so salty, I can't even eat them. It has literally been YEARS since I've grabbed a salt shaker at mealtime. All of our foods are heavily salted, unless it comes from our own garden. Aside from salads, every ounce of food that can be replaced with an ounce of salt translates to profit for the food processors. Salt costs a fraction of what real food costs.
I'm going to buy my defensive radar from Temu, just like Venezuela!
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Friday January 30, @10:45PM (2 children)
Restaurants around me (meaning: the SouthEastern U.S. from Texas to the Carolinas to Key West) tend to put a lot more salt, fat, and sugar in what they serve than you would ever consider doing yourself in your own cooking.
It's like Southern Sweet Tea - to get that much sugar in the tea, you have to heat it up to get the sugar to dissolve then serve it iced, still not as much sugar as you find in something like carbonated root beer, but far more than you get when stirring a couple of packets of sugar into a regular iced tea...
Get into the actual ingredients of a lot of sauces served and you'll find not only MSG, but all kinds of sugars too.
And, who likes baked french fries more than those deep fried in oil? Studies show: consumers prefer french fries which have been flash-freeze-dried to remove all the water from the potato, then replace that water with vegetable shortening (ever since they made them stop using animal lard...) Of course, under RFK Jr. we've now got Steak & Shake returning to their original "Beef Tallow" (aka Lard) for fry oil, proudly advertised.
🌻🌻🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 2, Interesting) by Runaway1956 on Saturday January 31, @12:47AM (1 child)
Point taken, but lard seems to be healthier than seed oils. We must distinguish between vegetable oil, and seed oils. Vegetable oils are mostly OK, and some, like olive oil are good for you. Seed oils, not so much. Give me lard if the only other choice is seed oils.
I'm going to buy my defensive radar from Temu, just like Venezuela!
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Monday February 02, @04:31PM
I have not much problems with palm oil. But when I take some seed oils (or products containing them - mayo etc) I get zits in my nose and/or on my face.
I also more of that zit stuff with parmesan cheese from Australia but less so with Parmigiano Reggiano from Italy (for some I can eat a LOT and no zit probs).
Lard, animal fats and fried stuff are not so good for me - I get increased occurrences of temporary ringing in my ears. Small blood vessels getting clogged? I dunno, but whatever it is, it can't be good for me.
I'm sure this doesn't happen to everyone. So to me it's a matter of figuring out what works and doesn't work for you. What works can change over the years though as you age, etc...
https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2015/11/151119133230.htm [sciencedaily.com]
https://www.manchester.ac.uk/about/news/diets-how-scientists-discovered-that-one-size-doesnt-fit-all/ [manchester.ac.uk]
(Score: 3, Touché) by Gaaark on Friday January 30, @10:58PM
Just like with https://soylentnews.org/~fliptop/journal/20095 [soylentnews.org] ... Why would anyone have their car worked on at Walmart?
Why would anyone eat a 'meal' at McToilets and expect 'food'?
If you eat out, why are you believing anything they tell you? My memory tells me that it used to be "A human adult needs 1500 to 1800 calories per day", where now it is "A human adult needs 2000 calories per day. Is that because most take out 'meals' give you over half your daily calories?
And salt and fat? Of course you're getting more than they say.
Don't want much salt? Ask them not to salt your fries. You will get them hot and not as salty as they would have been.
Or make the meal at home. For the $15 to $20 per take out meal, you can have a nice steak, etc.
--- Please remind me if I haven't been civil to you: I'm channeling MDC. I have always been here. ---Gaaark 2.0 --