Love your heart: watch the salt!

Be careful how much salt you eat. Too much salt causes high blood pressure and high blood pressure makes it more likely you’ll get heart disease.

It’s recommended that people over eleven years of age should eat less than 6g of salt a day, that’s less than one level teaspoonful of salt.

So try and reduce the amount of salt you put on food – and watch out, lots of canned food, ready meals and takeaways contain high levels of salt, so you could be eating lots of salt without realising.

Try these ideas for cutting down on salt:

• Add less salt to food when you’re cooking or at the table. Taste the food first rather than automatically adding salt.
• Cutting down salt gradually is easier than stopping suddenly.
• Try adding mixed herbs or spices instead of salt to your food if you want to add flavour.
• Check out food labels when shopping and choose food with lower salt content.