Things have really begun to take off now and if we sustain the momentum we will make

Things have really begun to take off now and if we sustain the momentum we will make major progress."Danger on the TableOn average, a Briton eats 9g of salt a day. Experts recommend this be cut to 6g a day.Salt raises blood pressure, which increases the risk of strokes and heart attacks.If the target reduction to 6g a day were met, it would save 34,000 lives a year from heart attacks and strokes.An average slice of bread contains 0.5g of salt.Prepared meals are especially salty. It has been calculated that if the recommendations were followed, strokes would be cut by 22 per cent and heart attacks by 16 per cent, saving 34,000 lives a year.Tessa Jowell, minister of Public Health, told the conference at the Royal Society of Medicine yesterday that officials at the Department of Health were meeting food industry representatives to agree a strategy after last month's White Paper on public health highlighted the need to cut salt consumption.She said urgent research was needed on "what scope there is for reduction".Verner Wheelock, professor of food science at the University of Nottingham and organiser of the conference, said that as supermarkets had begun to cut salt levels the problems they had foreseen had fallen away "A lot of the objections were largely hypothetical... Yet adding salt at the table is the easiest thing in the world. Removing salt at the table for those who don't want it is impossible."Average consumption of salt is nine grams a day, only 15 per cent of which is added in cooking or at the table. About 10 per cent occurs naturally in foods but 75 per cent is added during processing.The Government's expert Committee on the Medical Aspects of food policy recommended in 1994 that the salt content of the diet should be reduced from nine to six grams a day, but no government has adopted the target. Wendy Wrigley, head of Co-op brand, said: "There is a feeling that industry should not impose healthier eating on the public.

The companies' chiefs have been delighted that the consumer resistance they feared has failed to materialise.Asda led the way in cutting salt levels by at least 10 per cent across more than two-thirds of its own-label brands, and Sue Malcolm, nutritionist for the company, said: "Not one customer noticed when 10 per cent of salt disappeared from Asda loaves of bread."The Co-op, which has done a deal with the manufacturers of Lo-Salt, a salt substitute, to include it in their manufactured products, said there was still resistance within the food industry. "It has gradually built up [among retailers] to the point where anyone with common sense has said we have got to do something," he said. Three supermarket chains - Asda, Marks & Spencer and the Co-op - have moved to cut salt levels in their processed foods and others, including Tesco and Sainsbury, are now racing to catch up. Graham MacGregor, professor of medicine at St George's hospital, Tooting, south London, who addressed a conference on salt in London yesterday, said recognition of the dangers had increased sharply in the past year. A high-salt diet raises blood pressure, increasing the risk of heart disease and strokes. The salt content of supermarket products is falling after years in which retailers resisted demands from nutritionists to cut the levels of sodium in the British diet in the interests of health. BRITONS ARE losing their taste for salt - and no one is more surprised than the big food stores. The worst-affected babies are given special helmets to wear when they sleep.Parents are advised to vary a baby's sleeping position so the infant does not always rest on the flattened part of the skull.

But Dr Graham stressed: "It is important to put babies to sleep on their backs because this prevents death from suffocation.". When babies have tightened neck muscles, which usually begin to develop in the limited space of the womb, they are more likely to develop misshapen heads if they are consistently placed into one sleeping position, the doctors believe.Dr Graham said the disorder is relatively simple to treat provided the symptoms are recognised early enough in the child's development when corrective action is most effective.Each year, his clinic treats between 250 and 300 babies with a course of neck massage and stretching. Left untreated [it] can result in permanent distortion of the head as well as persistent facial asymmetry," he said.Babies with the condition usually suffer from shortened or tightened neck muscles,which cause them to tilt their heads towards the tight side, resulting in the development of a preferred resting position. Medical researchers in the United States have found a big increase in plagiocephaly, asymmetric head growth, since the American "back to sleep" campaign was launched five years years ago. Although the campaign was successful, resulting in a 30 per cent decrease in cot deaths, John Graham, director of the Craniofacial Clinic at the Cedars-Sinai Medical Centre in Los Angeles, said the prevalence of misshapen heads among babies has jumped fivefold during this period, from an estimated 1 in 300 live births in 1994 to 1 in 60 births today."When infants sleep in one position, there is a consistent pressure on their soft and forming skull, which can result in deformation of the head," Dr Graham said."Unfortunately, many care providers are unaware of the symptoms and inappropriately reassure parents that the child will grow out of it. The overall effect is that the industry will be able to make higher profits but will have to work harder for them.. DOCTORS ARE reporting an epidemic of "misshapen" heads among babies who are placed on their backs because of fears over cot deaths.