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

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-base...

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Autores principales: Martini, Daniela, Strazzullo, Pasquale, Serafini, Mauro, Porrini, Marisa, Pellegrini, Nicoletta, Angelino, Donato
Formato: Online Artículo Texto
Lenguaje:English
Publicado: MDPI 2022
Materias:
Acceso en línea:https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9370200/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/35956263
http://dx.doi.org/10.3390/nu14153088
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author Martini, Daniela
Strazzullo, Pasquale
Serafini, Mauro
Porrini, Marisa
Pellegrini, Nicoletta
Angelino, Donato
author_facet Martini, Daniela
Strazzullo, Pasquale
Serafini, Mauro
Porrini, Marisa
Pellegrini, Nicoletta
Angelino, Donato
author_sort Martini, Daniela
collection PubMed
description 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.
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spelling pubmed-93702002022-08-12 Sodium Content in Cereal-Based Products Sold in Italy: How Far Are We from the Global Benchmarks? Martini, Daniela Strazzullo, Pasquale Serafini, Mauro Porrini, Marisa Pellegrini, Nicoletta Angelino, Donato Nutrients Article 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. MDPI 2022-07-27 /pmc/articles/PMC9370200/ /pubmed/35956263 http://dx.doi.org/10.3390/nu14153088 Text en © 2022 by the authors. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/Licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland. This article is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) license (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/).
spellingShingle Article
Martini, Daniela
Strazzullo, Pasquale
Serafini, Mauro
Porrini, Marisa
Pellegrini, Nicoletta
Angelino, Donato
Sodium Content in Cereal-Based Products Sold in Italy: How Far Are We from the Global Benchmarks?
title Sodium Content in Cereal-Based Products Sold in Italy: How Far Are We from the Global Benchmarks?
title_full Sodium Content in Cereal-Based Products Sold in Italy: How Far Are We from the Global Benchmarks?
title_fullStr Sodium Content in Cereal-Based Products Sold in Italy: How Far Are We from the Global Benchmarks?
title_full_unstemmed Sodium Content in Cereal-Based Products Sold in Italy: How Far Are We from the Global Benchmarks?
title_short Sodium Content in Cereal-Based Products Sold in Italy: How Far Are We from the Global Benchmarks?
title_sort sodium content in cereal-based products sold in italy: how far are we from the global benchmarks?
topic Article
url https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9370200/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/35956263
http://dx.doi.org/10.3390/nu14153088
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