Low salt foods are just as safe or safer than high salt level products in spite of expectations that cutting salt levels in food would increase the risk of spoilage by bacteria, say scientists.
Because of the known link between heart disease and high salt diets, food manufacturers have come under increasing pressure from health protection agencies to reduce the salt levels in their products. But reducing salt could also be expected to increase the risk of food spoiling, since salt is an ancient and widely used preservative.
Scientists from the University of Limerick in Ireland checked safety levels of low salt foods by studying the behavior of different strains of food spoilage bacteria inoculated into model systems.
"In general we discovered that the growth of different sorts of typical food spoilage bacteria was unaffected by the various salt levels we tested, which means that low salt foods are just as safe as conventionally processed ones" said Edel Durack.
All the bacteria studied were capable of growing in the highest concentration of salt used by the scientists at 3 percent. Even at this level of salt none of the bacteria experienced any difficulty in surviving for 24 hours. The researchers did find differences between the salt tolerances of all the bacteria tested, with some strains actually exhibiting greater resistance to the high salt environment.
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