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Shopping for healthy food is set to get easier with a new wallet-sized card to help people decipher labels on food packaging. The free β€˜ready reckoner’ card, launched by the British Heart Foundation (BHF), is a handy tool that explains if the levels of fat, salt and sugar in manufactured food are healthy or not.

Eating a diet that is low in fat, salt and sugar, and high in fruit and vegetables will reduce your risk of developing heart disease by keeping cholesterol, blood pressure and weight to healthy levels. But while it is important to keep a check on the food types you consume, it isn’t always easy to read the labels on food packets accurately.

Traffic light labelling, which uses red, amber and green colours to show if a food is high, medium or low in fat, salt and sugar, has proved to be the easiest way for consumers to understand what’s in the food they pick. But not all food manufacturers and retailers use this system: some supermarkets design their own labels using Guideline Daily Amounts (GDAs), including Tesco and Morrisons.

But the BHF’s new card, can help shoppers translate between labels, using a simple grid to see if food has the green light for health, whatever system it uses.

Burger? Off the menu!

Laurence Little, Regional Director at the BHF, said: β€œEating healthily is a vital investment in your short and long-term health – and it needn’t be difficult. Pop this little card in your wallet and you’ll always be able to work out if the food you want to buy is good for you. Aim to pick lots of food with green on the nutrition label, a handful of ambers and the occasional red.”

Many processed foods, such as bread and soup, can have unhealthy amounts of salt, fat and sugar hidden in them. Figures show that in Great Britain, women eat an average 8.1 grams of salt a day and men eat an average 11 grams of salt a day. These levels are well above the Food Standard Agency’s maximum recommended limit of six grams a day.

Our palates get accustomed to a certain level of salt, but they re-adjust after a few weeks of a lower-salt diet. Food writer Sybil Kapoor says β€œIronically, the less salt we eat, the more salt we can taste in our food”. Saltiness is masked by sweetness and enhanced by bitterness and sourness, so adding a squeeze of lemon can make less salt taste stronger, she says. Remember six grams of salt is a level teaspoonful.

CSV Action at ΒιΆΉΤΌΕΔ Radio York has lot's of these cards, so if you'd like one fill out the form below and Kirsty-Lou will pop one in the post for you.