High blood pressure is still one of the country’s great quiet killers, and salt is still one of its most fixable causes. Adults are advised to stay under 6g a day — about a teaspoon. Average intake remains higher, and most of it is already in bread, sauces, meat products and ready meals before anyone lifts a cellar.
In the 2000s, a determined reformulation programme brought salt down and, with it, strokes. Then the pressure on industry eased. Targets slipped into the voluntary long grass. New categories of food — including many “high protein” snacks — arrived salty enough to undo older gains.
“This is not mysterious,” said Professor Cole. “We know how to lower salt in bread and processed meat because we have done it before. What we lack is the will to make it mandatory and keep going.”
People can help themselves: more cooking, fewer sauces from a jar, tasting before sprinkling. They cannot out-cook a food supply that seasons at industrial scale. That is why salt is a policy problem more than a personal one.
The prize is large: fewer strokes, cheaper NHS clinics, and food that still tastes like food. It is remarkable that this still needs saying.