The City of Edinburgh Council is telling take-away restaurants to cut back on the amount of salt they use. An investigation into the levels of salt in takeaway meals found it was significantly higher than the recommended safe allowance.
Of the twenty restaurants, picked at random, eighty-seven percent of the Chinese style dishes sampled and 60 percent of the Indian style dishes sampled contained more than 3g salt, equivalent to half of the maximum recommended daily intake for an adult.
One portion of Lamb Biryani from an Indian takeaway contained as much as 9.66g and a Chinese dish of Beef with Oyster Sauce contained 8.99g, both having considerably higher salt levels than the recommended adult allowance of 6g per day.
Community Safety staff sampled dishes from the city's food takeaways to check on salt levels and make sure food businesses are aware of the recommended safe daily amounts.
The Council will now contact all the restaurants that were surveyed with the results and with advice on how to reduce the salt content of their dishes. The survey took place during national Salt Awareness Week in February, which was run by Consensus Action on Salt and Health (CASH).
National health guidelines state that adults and children aged 11 and over should consume no more than 6g of salt per day, while very young children (aged 1 to 3) should be eating no more than 2g per day.
The Food Standards Agency has a target to reduce the salt intake of the UK population to 6g per person, per day by 2010.
As well as looking at takeaway food, the Council is keen to promote salt awareness in its own premises in a bid to ensure that the food served in staff canteens also falls within acceptable guidelines on salt consumption.
Councillor Robert Aldridge, Environment Leader, said: "Too much salt in our diets is dangerous for our health - it can cause high blood pressure and triple our risk of heart disease and stroke. The results of this survey show that we need to be increasingly careful about hidden salt levels and demonstrates why our staff are promoting a greater understanding of safe salt levels to food businesses across the city, helping us all to make educated choices about the food we buy."
Carrie Bolt Nutritionist and CASH Coordinator quote "People have no way of knowing how much salt is in food that they buy from a takeaway. I think that people will be surprised that an Indian dish can contain nearly 10g salt. Many people will order a main dish together with Naan bread, poppadoms and other side dishes so the total salt content of their takeaway is likely to be far higher."