IF a national campaign could save 34,000 lives a year, you would think, wouldn't you, that it would be launched?

Imagine what would happen if government-backed research were to establish that tomato ketchup or sherbet dips were knocking over the population at the rate of just under 100 a day? They would off the shelves before you could blink.

However, back in 1994, the Committee on Medical Aspects of Food and Nutrition Policy, COMA, rang alarm bells about the levels of salt in our diet. It announced that if we were to reduce the daily intake of salt in our diets from 9g to 6g, the national blood pressure would benefit to such an extent that strokes would reduced by 22 per cent and heart attacks by 16 per cent. 34,000 lives would be saved.

The Tory Government did not adopt the COMA advice and issued no guidelines to the food industry, nor did the incoming Labour administration, although in 1999, Tessa Jowell did tell a conference that research into the effects of salt in our diet was urgently needed. What has happened since then we have not heard.

To give you an idea of the amount of salt that we consume, the sea contains, 1g of the stuff in 100g of water. Your average breakfast cereal contains 1.1g per 100, bread half a gram, cholesterol-free spread 0.8g and a breakfast sausage about 1.2g.

When you relate this to the fact that our bodies, and in particular our blood, are only a third as salty as the sea about 0.3g per 100, it is clear that we are taking in much more than we need.

By consuming all that salt, about 9g a day on average, the body needs to take more liquid to dilute and dispel it. And that liquid you buy in the form of fizzy drinks, squash and bottled water, is probably produced by the same manufacturer that artificially created your thirst in the first place.

To their credit some manufacturers including Asda, Marks & Spencer and the Co-op have taken steps over the last couple of years to reduce the salt content in their foods.

An Asda nutritionist tellingly commented that they had not one complaint when they reduced the salt content across 75 per cent of their own brands, including bread, by ten per cent.

Salt is useful for preservative and flavouring purposes, but it is undoubtedly also used in processed foods to stimulate the sales of other products of the manufacturer.

Why else do hotels have bowls of peanuts on offer for their customers? Increased bar sales is the spur, I would suggest, rather than philanthropy.

And the more salt one consumes the less sensitive to its taste the receptors in the mouth become. This creates the demand for even more salt when we eat our food.

Conversely, the reduction or removal of salt from the diet will after three or four weeks restore the taste buds to their original sensitivity and food tastes much better as a result.

COMA was disbanded two years ago. The Scientific Advisory Committee on Nutrition (SACN) is being set up in its place.

Let us hope it acts before the powerful Food and Drink Federation throws the COMA findings over its corporate shoulder for luck and continues to resist improving the nation's health in the name of increased sales and profit.