Restaurants, sandwich chains and coffee shops will soon start to display calorie counts on their menus in a misguided attempt to fight UK's obesity.

Restaurants to display calorie counts on menus to help obesity crisis
article in the Telegraph

Extract:

"Within the next six months many well known chains, including Pizza Hut and Pret a Manger, will start to prominently display the calorie content of all of its food.

The idea is being pushed by the Food Standards Agency, the Government's food regulator, which wants all outlets from fish and chip shops to Michelin-starred restaurants to give details of what is in their meals.

If it is a success, the FSA is considering going even further by asking restaurants to publish so-called 'traffic light' labels on their menus, which would highlight in red if a dish was too salty, sugary or fatty."

Knowledge of calorie content will not help anyone to become less obese. Providing this information will be just another colossal waste of time and money. - To lose excess weight it is helpful to know the salt/sodium content, not the calories.

Obesity is not caused by eating fat or sugar or too many calories. Nor is it caused by inactivity/laziness. It is caused by weakened veins leading to fluid retention in the bloodstream, i.e. sodium retention and water/fluid retention, and thereby to excess weight/obesity.

The way to reduce/prevent obesity is to avoid salt and salty food, and to avoid prescription drugs as far as possible because these are a major cause of the the blood vessel damage that precedes the salt sensitivity/fluid retention.

Why not help with disseminating the truth? - If you have any friends who are overweight and know from experience that dieting does not work, tell them about my blog or send them a link to my website. - Better still, tell your MP about my website. - I'm afraid my own MP is as much use as a chocolate teapot...)o:

Lose weight, reduce your risk of most cancers, high blood pressure, type 2 diabetes, stroke, heart disease, heart attack, vascular dementia, osteopenia, osteoporosis, hypercholesterolaemia, depression, liver and kidney problems, and improve your health in many other ways without drugs, hunger or expense by eating less salt! - Try it! - You will feel so much better!

Read my Mensa article on Obesity and the Salt Connection

And see Sodium in foods and

http://www.wildeaboutsteroids.co.uk/story.html - my 'political' page

http://www.wildeaboutsteroids.co.uk/socio.html - social and economic considerations

amitriptyline

prescribed steroids and HRT

See advice for pregnant mothers

Children and Obesity

Associated health conditions

and FAT RETENTION

I can be contacted via my website if you need my further help. My help is free.

Beware that Subway sandwich! - It is laden with salt!

Supermarket sandwiches have 'more fat than two McDonald's burgers'
Article in the Telegraph

Extracts:

"Channel 4's Dispatches programme examined products from five of Britain's largest sandwich companies - Boots, Greggs, Subway, Pret a Manger and Marks and Spencer.

Researchers measured the levels of fat, saturates and salt in 100 sandwiches using the Food Standards Agency's traffic light system.

According to the FSA, a red light indicates that the food is "high in something we should be trying to cut down on" and should only be eaten occasionally."

"Subway came bottom of the list in terms of salt content with 93 per cent of the sandwiches tested earning a red light.

The retailer's foot-long 'Meatball Marinara' contained 9.4g of salt, equivalent to 18 packets of ready-salted crisps.

Pret a Manger came third, followed by M&S and Greggs. Boots again faired best, with 7 per cent of its sandwiches earning a red light for salt."

If you are overweight or have high blood pressure/hypertension you need to avoid salt and salty food.

Lose weight, reduce your risk of most cancers, high blood pressure, type 2 diabetes, stroke, heart disease, angina, vascular dementia, osteopenia, osteoporosis, hypercholesterolaemia, depression, liver and kidney problems, and improve your health in many other ways without drugs or expense by eating less salt! - Try it! - You will feel so much better!

See my website http://www.wildeaboutsteroids.co.uk/.html (The site does not sell anything and has no banners or sponsors or adverts - just helpful information.)

Read my Mensa article on Obesity and the Salt Connection

See Sodium in foods

See also FAT RETENTION

Sandwiches often contain more salt and more calories than a Big Mac

Sandwiches with more calories than Big Mac

Extracts from the Telegraph:

"Leading sandwich chains are selling products that frequently contain more calories, salt and fat than a Big Mac – and failing to inform their customers.

The National Consumer Council, the Government's consumer watchdog, called on shops to provide better information to its customers, some of whom are consuming two-thirds of their daily recommended salt and saturated fat intake with just one sandwich.

Greggs, the country's largest chain of sandwich shops, not only fails to provide any information in-store, the company does not give out any details on its website, leaving customers in the dark that a £1.95 chicken sandwich contains 3.6 grams of salt – two-thirds of the 6 grams doctors say is the maximum adults should consume in a day.

Both Eat and Pret a Manger, which pride themselves on selling gourmet lunches full of fresh ingredients, do not give out information in their shops, either on packaging or in a leaflet.

Customers have to go to the company's websites to find details.

In contrast, McDonald's – following a major revamp in recent years – prints full details on every burger box and bag of chips."

"Marks & Spencer's Oakham chicken and pancetta caesar sandwich contains more salt and saturated fat than a portion of chips combined with a Big Mac burger from McDonald's.

Many of Tesco's sandwiches, such as its red cheddar and tomato, contain more than half the recommended daily amount of saturated fat – linked to heart disease and considered by doctors to be the most unhealthy form of fat."

It is important for information about salt content to be provided, since so many people are sensitive to salt and need to restrict their salt intake. - In my opinion, information about calories is not important, because excess weight and all its attendant illnesses - hypertension, type 2 diabetes, heart disease, impaired liver and kidney function, premature aging, etc. are caused by fluid retention and not by eating too many calories. Obesity/Overweight is easily reduced by avoiding salt and salty food.

Lose weight, reduce your risk of most cancers, high blood pressure, type 2 diabetes, stroke, heart disease, vascular dementia, osteopenia, osteoporosis, hypercholesterolaemia, depression, liver and kidney problems, and improve your health in many other ways without drugs or expense by eating less salt! - Try it! - You will feel so much better!

See my website http://www.wildeaboutsteroids.co.uk/.html (The site does not sell anything and has no banners or sponsors or adverts - just helpful information.)

http://www.wildeaboutsteroids.co.uk/steroids.html

http://www.wildeaboutsteroids.co.uk/ami.html

vulnerable groups

How to Lose weight!

Children and Obesity

Read my Mensa article on Obesity and the Salt Connection

See Sodium in foods and

Associated health conditions and

http://www.wildeaboutsteroids.co.uk/story.html - my 'political' page

Wider implications of the flawed theory that excess calorie intake causes obesity

I can be contacted via my website if you need my further help. My help is free.

Warning that shop-bought sandwiches are high in salt.

Sandwich seven times saltier than crisps - Telegraph

Well it's been in 'all' the newspapers today and on Radio 4 and Radio 5 and on various TV newscasts. - You've got to hand it to CASH - Consensus Action on Salt and Health - they are good at drumming up publicity when they want it... - If only they would tell the full truth about salt and health, instead of the very restricted version they choose to put across. - I'll pick this up following this extract from the article:

"Pre-packed sandwiches can contain as much salt as several bags of crisps, according to research into Britain’s favourite lunchtime food.

A survey of 140 ready-made sandwiches found that some had more than half the recommended daily allowance of salt.

A total of 40 per cent of sandwiches tested by the health lobby group Consensus Action on Salt and Health (Cash) had 2g or more of salt, or a third of an adult’s recommended daily allowance.

The saltiest sandwich in the survey was Asda’s Extra Special Yorkshire Ham and Hawkes Wensleydale, which was found to contain 4g, or 65 per cent of the recommended daily salt intake.

Pret a Manger’s All Day Breakfast, with 3.54g, was next on the list followed by Tesco’s Finest All Day Breakfast, Morrisons’ Chicken and Bacon, Sainsbury’s Taste the Difference Brunch and Waitrose’s Sausage, Egg and Bacon, all with 3.5g of salt.

Cash, which carried out the survey for the BBC, noted that a standard bag of Walkers Ready Salted Crisps contains 0.5g of salt, so the saltiest sandwiches contain the equivalent of seven bags of crisps.

The sandwiches with the least salt were Co-op’s Healthy Living Tuna and Cucumber and Tesco’s Healthy Living Chicken Salad."

Although it is good that CASH draws attention - both the consumers' attention and the retailers' attention - to these high salt/sodium levels, and although Prof MacGregor of CASH always correctly gives the information that lowering salt intake reduces risk of heart disease, high blood pressure and stroke, he does not give the most important information of all - that fluid retention is the cause of salt sensitivity, which in turn is the cause of weight gain/obesity and that lowering salt intake is the best and safest way to lose weight.

What a pity CASH's Professor MacGregor does not give the vital message that reducing the amount of salt eaten by obese/overweight people would be the safest, swiftest and most reliable way to reduce their excess weight! - What a pity he does not mention that high salt intake is the chief cause of child obesity! - What a terrible pity he does not mention that steroid victims - made morbidly obese because of taking certain prescribed steroids or HRT or tricyclic antidepressants or certain other drugs - need to reduce their salt/sodium intake to as low as they possibly can - permanently - in order to lose some of the vast volume of excess fluid they are carrying! - And what a pity he does not warn them that reducing calories is completely inappropriate and ineffective as a means of steroid victims losing weight and that eating less food will exacerbate their health problems, rather than helping them!

What a pity he does not press the food companies to produce some lines of foods specially for steroid victims and other obese victims of negligently prescribed/monitored drugs and people morbidly obese from other causes! - These would be foods containing NO ADDED SODIUM AT ALL. - And for everyone who thinks it's easy to avoid salt by cooking from fresh, I agree. - But it isn't easy cooking from fresh when you are morbidly obese and exhausted at having to carry gallons of excess fluid round with you all the time. - Nothing much is easy for morbidly obese people actually...)o:

And what a pity he doesn't seek to get it across to doctors that when they give their patients prescriptions for these potentially dangerous drugs they should give them a serious warning that eating salt while taking the drugs is likely to result in their becoming salt-sensitive and obese and likely to develop diabetes and dementia and a host of other degenerative diseases!

And what a pity he doesn't press for on-pack labelling of all these drugs to warn people not to eat salt or food containing salt while on the medication!

Lose weight! by eating less salt! Go on! - Try it!

See my website http://www.wildeaboutsteroids.co.uk/

and see http://www.wildeaboutsteroids.co.uk/steroids.html

and http://www.wildeaboutsteroids.co.uk/ami.html

and http://www.wildeaboutsteroids.co.uk/vulnerable_groups.html
(The site does not sell anything and has no banners or sponsors or adverts - just helpful information.)

Remember: 'slimming' is harmful and unnecessary; all that is normally necessary to lose excess weight is to eat less salt, i.e. to reduce one's sodium intake, and to eat plenty of fresh fruit and vegetables - because their high potassium content helps to remove sodium from the body.

Read my Mensa article on Obesity and the Salt Connection

See Sodium in foods

I can be contacted via my website if you need my further help. My help is free...(o: