Prison food is better than food in NHS hospitals

Prison food is better than the food in NHS hospitals, as the BBC reports here. I don't think many hospital patients will be surprised at this research finding by Bournemouth University academics. Many patients get their families to take in food for them as they are not keen on the hospital meals.

I was particularly interested to read that prison food is lower in salt than hospital food. When I spent an appalling month in the Northern General Hospital in 2007 I was shocked at how high in salt the meals were, when you consider that the health service is continually exhorting the public to eat less salt. In addition to the meals being so high in salt (e.g. a ham sandwich: both ham and bread are high in salt and the butter was also salted), tiny individual packets of salt were given out routinely with every meal. You would never guess from those hospital meals that the government and their agencies have a policy aimed at lowering the average consumption of salt. - Policy and practice are not going hand in hand.

As a steroid victim I am extremely sensitive to salt and need to avoid it much more assiduously than most people. Incredibly, only one of the many doctors I encountered in the hospital knew that steroid victims needed to eat food with no added salt, and it proved impossible in practice for me to have meals with no added salt, very largely because of the unhelpfulness of the chief dietician, who persisted in claiming, falsely, that the meals provided were low in salt. Since it is harmful and dangerous for me to eat salty food, and as I had no family to visit and bring me suitable food, I was unable to eat much apart from breakfast, when I was able to choose porridge, a food that does not contain added salt.

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Read my Mensa article on Obesity and the Salt Connection

Vulnerable groups

Sodium in foods