Sodium Content in Cereal-Based Products Sold in Italy: How Far Are We from the Global Benchmarks?

Abstract

Reformulation of food products is one of the measures needed for reducing salt consumption. Accordingly, the World Health Organization (WHO) recently proposed global sodium benchmarks for different food categories to be used for setting national policies. Therefore, the sodium content of cereal-based products currently sold in Italy was compared with the WHO benchmarks, highlighting those categories primarily needing a reformulation. To this aim, the sodium content and several declarations (i.e., nutrition and health claims, organic or gluten free declaration) were retrieved from 2917 cereal-based products sold on the Italian market. All “minimally processed breakfast cereals” had a sodium content below the benchmark, while “flatbreads” and “leavened bread” had the highest percentage of items above the respective sodium benchmarks. Flatbreads and “crackers/savory biscuits” showed the highest median delta values from the respective benchmarks of 360 and 278 mg/100 g, respectively. Large variability in terms of percentage of products with sodium content above the benchmark was observed within the same categories, as well as among products with different declarations. A large number of food products currently sold on the Italian market have a sodium content above the benchmark. This result suggests the need to reformulate many food products currently on the market to achieve the WHO/United Nations (UN) objective of 30% global reduction in sodium intake by 2025.

Pertinence of Salt-Related Knowledge and Reported Behaviour on Salt Intake in Adults: A Cross-Sectional Study

“…However, in recent years there have been no revisions to the national Greek Food and Drink Code regarding the salt content of processed foods, primarily due to ongoing debate that prioritizes allocating resources towards consumer awareness initiatives. This study provides evidence supporting the need of accelerating food reformulation efforts, with the cerealbased products being of particular interest in the EU countries as showed in previous studies (e.g., [24]). A recent study [25] showed that reducing the salt content of bread, with or without dietary counseling, successfully reduced dietary salt intake without adversely affecting the dietary nutritional quality.…”

Sodium Content in Pre-Packaged Foods in China: A Food Label Analysis

“…If all pre-packaged foods met WHO global sodium benchmarks, the average sodium intake of the Chinese population would be reduced by 13.9% [38]. However, achieving this goal means that approximately 46.9% of Chinese packaged food needs to be reformulated [38]; this result is similar to the study by Martini et al [40], in which they found the sodium content of most of the items of cereal-based products currently sold on the Italian market is much higher than sodium benchmarks. These results indicate that further efforts are needed globally to reduce the sodium content in pre-packaged foods.…”

Processing and Nutritional Quality of Breakfast Cereals Sold in Italy: Results from the Food Labelling of Italian Products (FLIP) Study

“…Authors attributed these disagreements between the two FOPNL to the different aspects considered for the definition of the healthiness of the products: while Nutri-Score has a nutrient-based scheme for the calculation of the different values, NOVA does not profile nutrients, but just the processing. This means that, for example, the presence of high amounts of salt or sugars in breakfast cereals-as also confirmed by data from our group [11,21]-are differently taken into account by Nutri-Score and NOVA algorithms, i.e, low Nutri-Score and minimally processed items. On the contrary, the presence of industrial ingredients and additives, which classifies the product as "not healthy" by the NOVA system, is not considered for the Nutri-Score.…”