Eating too much of this food item is dangerous

Olives in pizzas, olives in salads, in pastas, olives in chicken dishes- if there’s one thing that we love adding to our recipes, it’s olives! However, consuming five olives a day is equivalent to one-third of the Reference Daily Intake (RDI) of salt. Health experts have cautioned that olives contain high levels of salt and must be consumed in limited quantities.

Researchers from Queen Mary University of London, and Action on Salt said that people are unaware of the fact that certain olives have twice the salt concentration as found in seawater. There’s a pressing need to keep an eye on the picnic snacks we gorge on.

The new study, which examined 555 savoury finger foods, inferred that some types of Halkidiki olives contained 5g of salt per 100g. The ideal amount of salt for daily consumption is 6g.

A fourth of these savoury picnic foods surveyed had ‘dangerously high’ levels of salt. Excessive salt levels can cause hypernatremia, characterised by weakness, loss of appetite, vomiting, and kidney damage among others. In addition, people who have diabetes should particularly be careful about consuming salt-rich foods.

Graham MacGregor, Professor of Cardiovascular Medicine at Queen Mary University of London and chairman of AoS said, “Due to inaction by the Department of Health and Social Care and Public Health England in enforcing the 2017 salt reduction targets, the public are still eating more salt than recommended which is leading to thousands dying or suffering from entirely unnecessary strokes and heart disease.”

“Reducing salt is one of the most cost-effective measures to protect health. The time has come for the Secretary of State for Health to resuscitate the UK's salt reduction programme, helping us to, once again, be world leading rather than trailing behind the rest of the world. The public's health has suffered long enough,” he further stated.