New Covent Garden Soup Company gets duffed up by something called Consensus Action on Salt and Health for having 'too much' salt in its soups. CASH's website violates various principles of good website design - nothing to tell you who they are or how to contact them (they just describe themselves as "a group of specialists") There are various dead-end pages - where you click to then can't click back to the home page. Grocer's apostrophes also make a few appearances. Also I wonder what the www.hyp.ac.uk part of their URL refers to - if you click on it you just get a set of folders and directories that you obviously aren't supposed to see. ac would suggest academic. University of Hype? Ah I've just found via Google that CASH is headed by Graham MacGregor, Professor of Cardiovascular Medicine at St. Georges Hospital, London, who is also President of the Hypertension Society. So this is his life's work, and he ain't going to give up in a hurry, even if anyone proves him wrong.

New Covent Garden Soup Company is a nice scalp to claim of course, because the company used to be much loved by the organic food eating worried middle classes but now it's owned by an evil multinational - Singapore Food Industries.

Apparently public health minister Melanie Johnson has given processed food producers until February 27 to prove to her they mean to cut salt or she has warned tough measures could follow.

All this happened to coincide with my reading a chapter on salt in Jeffrey Steingarten's book "The Man Who Ate Everything". He says of the the Intersalt survey of 1988 which conducted surveys in 32 countries around the world to examine the link between salt and hypertension, that "the results were extremely distressing to those who had hoped to prove a link, once and for all, between salt and blood pressure." It did show that the more salt people eat, on average, the more likely it is their blood pressure will increase as they grow older. But it's not hugely significant - if everyone in the US slashed his or her salt consumption from 8 grams a day to 2, the average blood pressure would go down by only 2%. Losing weight and cutting back alcohol are much more important contributors to lowering blood pressure. Some people are extremely sensitive to salt - about 8% of the US population apparently. "The other 92% of us can handle just about all the salt we feel like eating".

It's not just Jeffrey Steingarten that says don't panic.