My wife tells me off for adding salt to my pasta water, and seasoning my food during cooking – a pinch of salt as I cook my mushrooms just elevates them. How do I keep to sensible salt levels and should I add it to my mushrooms on toast?
Nick
Something tells me I’m going to get into all sorts of bother for wading into a marital debate, but here goes nothing: according to the NHS, adults should consume no more than 6g salt a day (that’s about a teaspoon), but Action on Salt says we are eating about 8.1g a day on average. So, Nick’s wife is right that we have a problem with salt.
To answer his question, though, you need to take a step back and look at what you’re eating as a whole. “Overall, ultra-processed and shop-bought, precooked foods have a relatively large amount of salt in them,” says Dr Saliha Mahmood Ahmed, author of The Kitchen Prescription and former MasterChef winner. By which she means ready meals, pasta sauces, crisps and the like. If much of your diet is made up of such foods, then, Ahmed says, you are probably getting too much salt. However, if Nick mostly cooks from scratch and avoids highly salted foods in the first place, then his mushrooms are in luck: “It’s probably OK,” Ahmed says. That said, be wary of hidden salt in, say, the toast: research by Action on Salt found that three out of four packaged sliced bread sold in supermarkets contain as much (or more) salt per slice than a bag of ready salted crisps.
