Students and staff at Wirral Metropolitan College’s Conway Park campus received free pots of herbs as part of a campaign to get people to use less salt.
Leading coronary heart disease prevention charity Heart of Mersey, teamed up with The Food Standards Agency and Wirral Primary Care Trust, to give away the herb samples in support of the FSA’s latest national salt awareness campaign, ‘Full of It’.
The message they want to grow in people’s minds is: If you want to reduce your risk of developing heart disease, cut down on salt. Herbs make a good alternative flavouring to salt.
The campaign aims to raise awareness that about three-quarters of the salt we eat is already in the food we buy, including processed foods such as ready meals, sauces, baked beans and pizza.
Consumers are being encouraged to check product labels and choose low salt products.
Goodie bags were handed out which included pots of herbs, recipe cards and Food Standards Agency leaflets with tips on how to cut down on salt.
Modi Mwatsama, Heart of Mersey food and health programme manager said, “Eating too much salt can raise blood pressure, which triples your risk of developing heart disease and stroke, whatever your age. Adults should have no more than six grams of salt a day but on average people are actually having much more than this – about nine grams a day. If children have too much salt, this could affect their health in the future and it could also give them a taste for salty food, which means they’re more likely to continue eating too much salt when they grow up.
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