​To promote a new reduced salt and sugar dietary culture and living style in Hong Kong, the Food and Health Bureau, the Centre for Food Safety (CFS) of the Food and Environmental Hygiene Department, and the Committee on Reduction of Salt and Sugar in Food (CRSS) jointly held a promotional event entitled Salt & Sugar Reduction Day today (February 23).
Speaking at the launch ceremony, the Secretary for Food and Health, Professor Sophia Chan, said that reduced intake of salt and sugar is the key to good health. She appealed to the public to take good care of their health and support the initiative by consuming less salt and sugar. Adopting a reduced salt and sugar diet does not mean that food becomes tasteless, she said. On the contrary, reduced salt and sugar dishes are tasty if the ingredients and the cooking methods are good.
The Chairman of the CRSS, Mr Bernard Chan, also said at the ceremony that the Committee is encouraging food premises to offer more reduced salt and sugar choices for customers, and food manufacturers to conduct food product reformulation. The progress is gratifying, he said. Apart from the trade, the Committee also needs the support of all members of the public to reduce salt and sugar in food.
Since January this year, more than 500 food premises of various types have participated in this promotional event by providing options of reduced salt and/or sugar in food for customers, while some 70 others have also offered tailor-made less salt and sugar dishes. In the past one month, these food premises have saved a total of about 7 million grams of sugar after customers requested less sugar in their food or drinks. The organiser has used part of this amount of sugar to build a sugar cube pyramid to achieve a world record. The sugar for the pyramid will be used to produce teaching kits to show the sugar content in selected foods. The teaching kits will be distributed to secondary and primary schools.
People can easily recognise the food premises participating in providing reduced salt and/or sugar options or dishes when eating out, as the relevant logos (see attachments) will be displayed in the food premises. In addition, the CRSS launched the "Salt/Sugar" Label Scheme for Prepackaged Food Products in 2017. The public can readily identify "low salt", "no salt", "low sugar" and "no sugar" products by looking at the labels.
Information on reduction of salt and sugar and healthy diets is available on the designated Facebook page (www.facebook.com/HongKongsActiononSaltandSugarsReduction) or Instagram page (www.instagram.com/hkassr) of the CFS.
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