‘Target salty food’

GOVERNMENT HAS BEEN applauded for its good start in taxing salty snacks but it must consider fast food and other restaurants whose salt content is not regulated.

President of the Barbados Heart & Stroke Foundation of Barbados, Dr Dawn Scantlebury, in reaction to the latest measure to fight the high non communicable diseases, said the strategy to increase the prices leading to what is hoped would be a drop in consumption was a good thing but she wanted some responsibility placed on those who seasoned the foods.

In yesterday’s 2025 Financial Statement and Budgetary Proposals, Minister in the Ministry of Finance and Economic Affairs Ryan Straughn, he said that from June 1, a 20 per cent tax would be applied to high sodium snacks including potato chips, pretzels, popcorn and cheezees.

“I really do applaud the efforts. I think the emphasis on looking at where bad things are creeping in and trying to wake up Barbadians to the importance of focusing on the fact that we eat too much salt and we eat too much sugar, is good. I am asking for us as a society to look at it in a broader sense,” Scantlebury said.

However, there are other foods that are fairly highly processed that also have trans fats and that must be taken into consideration.

“It is easy to look at the manufactured products that you can tax because it’s easy to tax it and it’s easy to target but what about the fast food restaurant health? How do you encourage that fast food restaurant to change the composition of their food such that they’re not killing people?” she asked. Scantlebury used the example of French fries and those who might be applying the salt, reasoning that quantity of unregulated salt in such cases could be even higher than some of the other targeted foods.

Sodium information

“There is no requirement on the fast food industry to provide caloric information, to provide sodium information, or any of these things. We know how much sodium is in the salty sacks, because they have to put it on their products and but we don’t know how much sodium is in the fast food that we consume. We don’t know how much sodium is in macaroni pie that restaurants are feeding us.

“So I applaud the Government for taking the step to reduce the import tax on the fruits and to increase the tax on salty foods and I encourage them to take the additional step to look at other unhealthy things with trans fat, things that are ultra processed and to look at our food industry and encourage restaurants to look at what people are eating and see how we can encourage healthier, wiser choices and discourage unhealthy choices.”

The situation with high salt and sugar diets was like watching a plane crash because there is a burgeoning level of non communicable diseases and burgeoning levels of cardiovascular disease associated with diets, she said.

“This is good but I’m hoping that we’re not too little too late, because we’re not having this conversation on a daily basis, on how bad our diets are. If you take a salty meal in context of an overall diet that is low in salt, maybe that salty meal is sufficient to bring your overall salt intake for that 24 hours to what is acceptable but that’s not what’s happening.

“I wish that we were also highlighting high sodium restaurant foods, fast foods. We need more education at the level of primary, secondary and tertiary. Tertiary, in the sense that people who go to learn to be cooks and to be chefs should have additional sensitisation as far as their civic responsibility to the people for whom they’re producing food.” ( AC)

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