How many babies have actually become ill because of salt in the past 10 years?

[colditz]

I'm sure we just used to feed them anything that wasn't curry. So are we being too fussy with what we feed our babies, or does salt-fussiness only really apply to very young (under6/7 months old) babies, or were previous generations salt damaged in some invisible way, or what?

It's my understanding that it is actually quite difficult (but not impossible) to poison a baby with salt by accident - so the chances of making them ill in this way are pretty small (though there was a horrific case in the 60s where babies fed on milk made up with salt rather than sugar died). And both the US and France allow salt in baby food.

But and it's a big but - there is evidence to sugest that salt in children's diets has a big effect on their risk of high blood pressure in later life. Which means less salt now = less heart disease later. well worth doing. This recent /link{http://hyper.ahajournals.org/cgi/content/abstract/48/5/861\study} in Hypertension explains.

Bother - can't make the link work.

here - good study

The main problem is that in the last (10, 20 30 whatever) years salt consumption in adults has risen so much - we're been eating more and more processed foods. Weaning a baby onto adult foods would once have meant plain-meat-and-two-veg, whereas now it means jar sauces and ready meals, and therein lies the worry...

Exactly - and if we wean our kids on high salt foods they've basically got no chance of reeducating their tastebuds later to reduce their risk of heart disease.

And in the meantime our friends in the food industry just keep shovelling the salt in because it's cheap.

Exactly - and if we wean our kids on high salt foods they've basically got no chance of reeducating their tastebuds later to reduce their risk of heart disease.

Why not?? DH did it very easily - he (and his SIL as well as it happens) used to PILE the salt onto/into their food - now he doesn't even add a pinch after it's cooked - and his SIL has stopped using it in her cooking too,

Well good for them, but it is unlikely to happen across a whole population.

Look at the tyical Glaswegian diet - very high in sugar and very high in salt, and these habits are made in childhood.

Individuals can and do take action (often in response to a specific health scare, and let's not forget that hypertension is a hidden problem whcih often goes undiagnosed until the damage is done), but populations don't tend to. The point is that it's harder to change diets if you've only ever known very high salt foods.

And the more hidden salt the food multinationals bung into our groceries the harder it is to avoid.