A carton of soup and two slices of bread should not have my daily salt allowance and half of my sugar allowance

[Marue]

I'm a bit in shock, just worked out that by having a soup with bread I've had just over my salt allowance and half of my sugar allowance for the day in one snack!

I know your only supposed to eat half of the carton, but they aren't very big and one carton equals about one bowl.

It was a Thai style soup, it was just OK nothing special!

Artandco Yes, soup is pretty easy to make. But OP had Thai soup - you couldn't make that from just stock and chopped vegetables, you'd probably also need coconut milk (£1+), lemongrass (£1+), coriander (50p+), garlic, chilli, lime juice, fish sauce, etc. Which would take a damn sight longer and cost even more than pre-made.

I regularly make soup myself, and yes it's really cheap, easy and yummy. But I appreciate not everyone has the time, inclination, equipment or confidence to make home-made. And sometimes I'll grab a carton of soup, because it's still cheaper and healthier than most ready-made lunch options.

Soup with two slices of bread as a "snack" before going to bed? 660 kCal is a large meal, not a snack.

Eat an apple instead. Or have tea.

Op I think you are right. Even if you'd only had half the pack, that would still have been half your salt allowance at one meal. That's a lot of salt. And the amount of sugar in bread - a staple, cheap food for most people - is also a disgrace.

But that's the nature of processed food. If you use it infrequently, it doesn't matter, but if you use it all the time all that salt and sugar will catch up with you. Both are preservatives, and needed to balance each other and increase the shelf life of food...

If we could put the food snobbery aside for one moment....

the problem is that it's considered snobbery to suggest making soup from scratch. Soup is dead easy. Bread is a bit of a faff, but nice bakery bread (which goes stale in a day or two) won't be bad for salt or sugar.

I don't put sugar in anything other than cakes and puddings.

When I make food at home I make it to taste. Unless you are just dumping salt and sugar in your food, it's unlikely you will come close to the content of salt and sugar in processed food. Even a table spoon of sugar in a loaf of bread translates to 1/3 tsp per slice (in a 10 slice loaf). Not that I am advocating sugary bread.

baked goods are a different thing to me altogether. Very rarely does store bought baked good taste anything like homemade and I think the reason is simple: too much sugar. it masks the taste, especially of chocolate.

Or 'skinny' version 180 kCal + 160 kCal for the 2 slices of bread = 340 kCal. It's still not a little snack before bedtime.

Even a table spoon of sugar in a loaf of bread

But who would do that? It's routine for bread machine recipes, to ask for a teaspoon of sugar, about 5g, because it kick starts the yeast and allows the programmes to be shorter, but (a) that equates to less than 0.5g per slice and (b) a significant proportion of it will have been converted by the yeast into alcohol and carbon dioxide, that being the whole point of using it in the first place. I do sometimes wonder if the anti-sugar people have the first idea of why sugar is used in yeast cookery, and how much of it they will end up eating.

In other news, grape juice has a lot more sugar in it than wine does. I wonder why?

What on earth did you eat for dinner if you still needed a full tub of soup and bread for supper?

But who would do that?

I wouldn't, and I don't think most people would. That's why I said I don't advocate sugary bread.

My point was there is a big gap between what one could put in their homemade soup/bread/whatever and still remain reasonably healthy, and what comes in processed soup/bread/whatever.

My point was there is a big gap between what one could put in their homemade soup/bread/whatever and still remain reasonably healthy, and what comes in processed soup/bread/whatever.

Let's take a random "processed" bread: Warburton's Toastie.

Here's the ingredient list:

Wheat Flour [with Calcium, Iron, Niacin (B3) and Thiamin (B1)], Water, Yeast, Salt, Vegetable Oil (Rapeseed, Sustainable Palm), Soya Flour, Emulsifiers: E481, E472e, Preservative: Calcium Propionate (added to inhibit mould growth), Flour Treatment Agents: Ascorbic Acid (Vitamin C), E920 (Vegetarian)

Nope, I can't see any added sugar there, either. Warburton's too fancy for you so you're buying "Tesco everyday value"?

Wheat Flour (Wheat Flour, Calcium Carbonate, Iron, Niacin, Thiamin), Water, Yeast, Salt, Soya Flour, Spirit Vinegar, Preservative (Calcium Propionate), Emulsifier (Mono- and Di-Acetyltartaric Esters of Mono- and Di-Glycerides of Fatty Acids), Rapeseed Oil, Flour Treatment Agent (Ascorbic Acid), Palm Oil

We can argue the toss about the Palm Oil and whether it's hydrogenated, and I'd be worried that there's more salt by weight than there is oil, but there's no sugar in either of those.

I think the "sugar in bread" concern comes from the US, where a lot of sliced bread definitely does have sugar in it. Consider this (Sunbeam King Thin Sliced Bread):

Unbleached Enriched Wheat Flour [Flour Malted Barley Flour, Niacin, Reduced Iron, Thiamin Mononitrate (Vitamin B1), Riboflavin (Vitamin B2), Folic Acid (A B Vitamin)], Water, High Fructose Corn Syrup, Contains 2% Or Less Of Each Of The Following: Yeast, Vegetable Oil (Soybean Oil Or Canola Oil), Salt, Dough Conditioners (Sodium Stearoyl, Lactylate, Calcium Stearoyl-2-Lactylate, Monoglycerides, Calcium Peroxide, Datem), Soy Flour, Calcium Sulfate, Calcium Proprionate (To Retard Spoilage), Monocalcium Phosphate, Yeast Food (Ammonium Sulfate)

which, by implication, has more than 2% HFCS. But in the UK, I'd be interested to know how much commercially sold bread has added sugar, because I've not noticed any.

there's no sugar in either of those.

For clarity, there's no added sugar in either of those.

I didn't say it was a little snack, 300 calories is hardly huge. On the goady food threads here its full of people that eat a whole tub of b&j.

I think the "sugar in bread" concern comes from the US, where a lot of sliced bread definitely does have sugar in it. Consider this (Sunbeam King Thin Sliced Bread):

I don't think there is a lot of sugar in bread. I never said there is a lot of sugar in bread.

My point, clearly not stated well, is that (as you have pointed out) there is a lot of either or both sugar and salt in processed food, as well as other preservatives. I am not saying people should put sugar in bread or that there is a danger of this here. But IF you put sugar in bread, and I used the example of a tablespoon because that would be a lot for a loaf (again, I am not saying you should do this, I don't do this), it still isn't a lot of sugar.

My example was clearly bad because there isn't often a lot of sugar in bread. The big difference in sugar would appear in ready made biscuits, and salt in things like soup.

What I was trying to highlight is that if you cook from scratch (or near it), you will be so far from approaching the preservative levels of most packaged food, that care is unlikely needed to keep levels low.

What I was trying to highlight is that if you cook from scratch (or near it), you will be so far from approaching the preservative levels of most packaged food

Indeed.

I find the anguish about sugar hard to get worked up about: the quantities are quite small and the effect usually about counteracting the effect of other parts of the process. It's the salt that I find almost inedible in the quantities it's used in processed food.

I use small amounts of salt in cooking water when boiling vegetables, although I suspect the effect is basically placebo because I don't think "these vegetables need more salt" of the other veg I steamed over it. But I don't use salt, other than what is already in other ingredients, in "meat or pulses plus veg plus tomatoes plus herbs/spices" one pot meals, and therefore when I eat such dishes that do have salt in them I notice it as a one-note flavour. I don't put salt on meat (steak, roast, stirfry, whatever) or fish (other than from the chip shop, of course).

The only things I use salt in significant quantities are where it's needed to help with gluten in various ways (bread in particular, but also when boiling pasta, although I suspect that a double-blind trial of the latter would be interesting). Family of four, we get through maybe a kilo of salt a year (so

Are we talking one of those 600ml plastic tubs of soup? They're fucking massive! They are very definitely meant to be a two portion job.

M&S medium wholemeal listed sugar as an actual ingredient at one point.

I cook with "a lot" of salt, but even then I find food out is either adequately or over salted. It sounds like more than you, but I imagine it's actually not that much.

the reason that packaged food can get away with hideous quantities of salt is they have fine tuned the sugar/salt/preservative balance.

I am possibly the opposite of you. I get more worked up about sugar (not at home, but in processed food). Sugar is crazy high in "healthy" foods like fruit yogourt.

I'm sure many people are aware of the benefits of making your own rather than buying shop bought but as has been pointed out up thread that's not always doable for various reasons. It's arguably beside the point too.

It's all very well people getting sniffy but the fact is that huge quantities of everyday items like bread and soup etc are being bought by people rather than home made. If they were only occasional purchases then supermarkets would stock them about as often as they stock Christmas cake but they're not, many of them are staples that are eaten regularly, the manufacturers know this and are aware of the health guidelines and therefore I agree that a carton of soup for two people really shouldn't have 50% rda of salt. Half of what I presume is a 450/500 gram carton of soup is not in fact a huge meal.

eat something else???

but as has been pointed out up thread that's not always doable for various reasons.

of course it isn't always doable. I don't think people are advocating building a log cabin in the woods and living off the land.

The problem isn't that some people occasionally have carton/tinned/preserved food (that will almost certainly not effect your health). It's that some people have it daily, and it isn't good for them. We know the reasons why (time, effort, knowledge, laziness), so I think we should use that knowledge to help people not do it so often.

"redstrawberry10" My point is that manufacturers have or should have a responsibility here. Not all of the responsibility of course but I'm not talking about shoving crisps or biscuits in daily, rather staple items as mentioned which are consumed regularly by many people as part of a normal diet. They aren't the sort of foodstuffs that we should automatically be suspicious of so many people would be very surprised by the levels of salt and sugar.

I really don't think a 600l soup at 180 cals is huge.

I've just made a quick tomato soup from 500ml jar of pasta and it was just one medium bowl full.

You must have huge bowls

They aren't the sort of foodstuffs that we should automatically be suspicious of so many people would be very surprised by the levels of salt and sugar.

The evidence that salt and sugar at the level implied by eating a carton of pre-packaged soup is pretty sketchy, though. There is a clear association between salt and blood pressure in hypertensives; the evidence that salt causes hypertension in the otherwise asymptomatic is hardly convincing. Similarly, the evidence that sugar, rather than calories, cause obesity is pretty sketchy as well (and the "sugar is a poison" people are simply unhinged). If you eat too many calories, you will gain weight, and it's the weight, not the cause of it, that is linked to various bad health outcomes (including Type II obesity). It sounds plausible that gaining weight by eating too much sugar might somehow be more likely than gaining weight by eating deep friend food all day to cause diabetes, but so far as I know (I'd welcome correction) there's not a lot of evidence it's true.

including Type II obesity

including Type II diabetes