We must therefore increase awareness of these health disorders to enable the consumer to avoid the pitfalls in the intake of salt, sugar and saturated fat.

Right now, the labels on food packages are in fine print and reading them is difficult, confusing and inconvenient.

There is an ongoing new colour-coded labelling system in Britain for all packaged food that should be introduced locally for the benefit of consumers.

Following this “traffic light” system, all food sold is rated according to their content of sugar, salt and saturated fat.

The grading goes progressively from red to green: high levels would be marked red, medium would be orange and low, green.

The National Heart Foundation recommends less than 6g intake of salt a day for adults but sadly we see people helping themselves generously to ketchup and other stuff in their meals.

About three-quarters of salt consumed comes from processed food and our government must ascertain that food labelling by colour coding is implemented so as to facilitate consumers to make informed choices.

This traffic light methodology must be undertaken as a matter of urgency as the health benefits derived from this practice would be huge and would curtail the health costs to the public in the long run.