What a load of...

By Jim Winship, British Sandwich Association Director

So sandwiches are more salty than several bags of crisps or a Big Mac according to CASH (Consensus Action on Salt and Health)!

Come on….let’s at least get the facts right.

We all know that you can find examples to fit the headline and CASH have done a very good job in finding some sandwiches to do just that! Indeed, if you eat an All Day Breakfast sandwich by its very nature it will have a higher salt content than most other sandwiches because of the ingredients it contains!

Conveniently CASH leave it to the tail end of their press release to state that the average salt levels they found in their sample was 1.9g per sandwich – below the average recommended by the Food Standards Agency for a meal (2g). And this was an average, so many of their sample must have been well below 1.9g.

In fact, a large proportion of commercially made sandwiches contain far less salt – often below 1g.

There is also the question here of the consumer’s freedom to choose. It is not the job of the food industry to tell consumers what they are allowed to purchase and, indeed, it would be very wrong for it to do so.

After all, there is no reason why a consumer might not choose to treat themselves to a high salt meal one day but eat more carefully all the rest of the week and end up meeting the FSA guidelines! And all the information they need about salt is declared on pre-packed sandwiches.

"Not a single commercial sandwich maker I know adds any salt to their sandwiches," says BSA Director Jim Winship. "The salt in a sandwich comes in through the ingredients – bread, bacon etc. Even most of the bread used in the sandwich industry contains about 50% less salt than the bread bought every day by consumers and used to make sandwiches in the home.

"You despair sometimes about the way these lobbying groups twist the facts just for the sake of making headlines! Even the data on the sandwich market they quoted in their press release was inaccurate."