Gromit, that's it! Cheese! We'll go somewhere where there's cheese!

A quick look at the labels on the lumps of cheese in our fridge turns up some alarming results. It seems that cheese, as a rule, is very high in sodium, with 0.7g per 100g being typical. The Dairy Council state that salt is necessary in cheese, as a preservative. Do we really need levels that high given that most of us have fridges now?

So, off I trek to the supermarket to check some labels. The values below are all sodium per 100g. To put it into context, 100g of cheese would be about right to fill a chunky sub-sized roll for lunch. Government guidance on sodium is 2.4g per day. See here for more on this.There was only one cheese I could find that would be classed as "low" in sodium! It was:

Mascarpone - 0.05g

Good to know I can still make cheesecake should the desire ever take me. The next best options were:

Emmental - 0.17g
Cottage cheese with pineapple - 0.2g
Goats cheese - 0.28g
Wensleydale with blueberries - 0.3g

Obviously the bits of fruit in the wensleydale and cottage cheese reduce the amount of cheese you're getting, and so therefore the sodium too. Maybe we can all learn a lesson from that and simply buy our usual cheese, hollow bits of it out and stick fruit in.

The worst offenders were the blue and smoked cheeses, which were generally over 1g. More surprising was that Edam came in at 1.04g, about the same as feta. The worst was a pecorino at 2.36g.

The big problem I found, however, is that the cheddar-style cheeses were up at 0.6 - 0.8g (about the same as the parmesan I found). I love posh cheese, but let's be honest, it's cheddar that we eat most often, especially our eldest daughter. So it looks like we'll be splashing out grating emmental onto our baked spuds until I can find a low salt version.

There's some more guidance on sodium levels on the British Cheese website, which largely agrees with my findings, although I'm a bit confused by their numbers on cheese spreads, which doesn't seem to be backed up by the Philadelphia website.