Reading nutritional labels before buying packaged food is the way to go, but only if the labels don’t lie.
Tests on some popular ready to eat and instant products by the the Centre for Science and Environment (CSE) — a foodsafety advocate group — found that packaged foods are often not as safe as the labels claim to be.
Salt content, for example, was so high in instant noodles (3.7gm/100gm of sample) that eating a packet would have accounted for more than half of the daily recommended intake of not more than 6 gm for an adult. Children under 11 years are recommended less that 5 gm.
So, if a label says that a product has more than 1.5 gm of salt (0.6 gm of sodium) per 100 gm, it is high in salt.
CSE tells us this and more about what food manufacturers conveniently forget to mention in its Junk Food Busted — Why and How.