This was one of Newshub's top stories of 2023. It was originally published on March 15.
A health expert says Kiwis need to change their eating habits after a consumer group hit out at the amount of sodium in everyday items.
Consumer New Zealand released a report that specifically looked at ultra-processed foods, pointing out the high salt levels in products like potato chips, tinned tomatoes and salami.
Consumer NZ found tomatoes rose dramatically in sodium levels as the product became processed into another form of food.
Auckland University of Technology public health professor Grant Schofield told AM on Wednesday the human body is "finely tuned" to get enough sodium.
"Sodium chloride breaks down to sodium. It's pretty much an essential nutrient. You're not going to live without it," he told AM.
"Every time a nerve fires or a muscle goes, then you need it and you lose some because you sweat, so you probably need to replace some."
Processed food is the big issue, Schofield believes, as you can't taste the salt in many products.
"The problem with the ultra-processed foods is some of them don't taste salty. A muesli bar has salt in it, a cake has salt in it, so you end up having more than you need," he told AM.
"For some people, that's an issue but in my mind, salt is a bit of a problem. It's a little bit like trying to fix a squeaky door when there's a gaping hole in the roof, to be honest."
He told AM the "gaping hole" is what Kiwis put in their shopping trolley each week.
"If you go and look at what New Zealanders put in their shopping trolleys, what they eat, and especially things like kids' lunches, then it's almost exclusively ultra-processed, packaged food," he said.
"It's got some salt, but it's actually the refined carbs, the sugar, the processed vegetable oils - those are toxic and we just need to eat way less of those, that's the hole in the roof."
Schofield is calling for Kiwis to take a tough look at what they eat and cut out ultra-processed food.
"We've lost our way as a society ... The bulk of what we're buying is food that humans aren't designed to eat. It hasn't been a legacy of how we've grown up as a species and it doesn't suit us."
Schofield said if Kiwis could somehow be convinced to eat a template diet, it would solve our eating problems.
"On one side, we've got ultra-processed foods, so food that clearly doesn't resemble anything that was alive. You can have that as 10-20 percent of what you eat, so you can still have chips and beers on Friday, but not for breakfast and not for every night of the week," he explained.
"Then 80 percent of what you eat is whole food. I call that food low in human interference. So it was clearly growing somewhere, running, flying, swimming recently."
Schofield said if Kiwis did this, New Zealand would be in a "much better place".
"Then you could add salt then and you can add it to taste and it's going to be fine and there is no harm in that in my opinion," he said.
Consumer NZ researcher and test writer Belinda Castles said in general the more processed a product is, the less healthy it is.
"People would expect there to be more sugar and sodium in tomato sauce than fresh tomatoes, but these levels may come as a shock," Castles said.
The Consumer NZ report found fresh tomatoes have 2mg of sodium while Wattie's tomatoes chopped in puree had 145mg and alarmingly Wattie's tomato sauce had 935mg.
The report said baked potatoes with no salt or oil have 2mg of sodium but that raced up to 350mg for Pams mini hash browns and 788mg for Bluebird Originals.
The report also found Harraways traditional rolled oats contained less than 5mg of sodium while Kellogg's Nutri-Gran had 350mg.
The Stroke Foundation said most Kiwis consume double the maximum recommended daily salt intake and concerningly, around 75 percent of that comes from processed and packaged foods.
Watch the full interview with Grant Schofield in the video above.
