Salt is very much in the news today, as the newspapers list quite a lot of well-known high street restaurants who make meals that are very overloaded with salt, which is many times your daily recommended amount!
These are often child friendly restaurants that are advertising themselves as “freshly made”, cooked on premises etc, when the reality is that the salt added to the food often outdoes any of the benefits of the vegetables etc.
Salt is one of the biggest contributors to blood pressure problems, as well as links to heart disease and certain other illnesses.
The reasons why a lot of these restaurants use so much salt is to preserve the food (make it last longer) and make it taste that much nicer again. This is playing right in the hands of children’s food as kids always go by taste first, and never of course worry about the nutritional content, not even on their list of concerns!
So naturally, if there’s far too much salt in the kids food, then the adult meal is likely to be over the top on salt too. This compromises the adult’s health and if done on a regular basis, will lead to ill health at some stage in the future.
Another bad situation developing from this is that kids and adults soon become accustomed to salt-laden food, and this soon becomes the benchmark of taste for future meals out and more importantly at home.
If you’re trying to make healthy snacks and foods for the kids, they will soon complain that the food doesn’t taste anything like when they “go out for food”, and your chances of keeping your child on a healthy diet go quickly downhill.
When your child wants to go out and eat in these places every day, you know have a problem.
Another serious problem is the likes of Harvester, Nando’s etc who are peddling the myth that they serve healthy food, are getting away with it.
They say “eat fresh” and “come to us”, when the reality is eat sort of fresh (sometimes), and we will make you much more unhealthy than if you made your own meal from scratch in the house!!
This is why its better to eat out once a week max and choose carefully from the menu, avoiding unnecessary sauces and other cooking methods designed to make your food taste nicer, but really disguises a cheap and poor product in the first place!
