Ever found whilst sipping a cup of dirty old seawater that it wasn't quite salty enough for you? Well, whilst it may only get worse due to global warming, "Consensus Action on Salt & Health" may just have an answer for you.

In a study released yesterday, CASH- a group concerned with the adverse health effects of a high salt diet - found that cheese packaged for children had a rather high salt content. Higher indeed than many adult cheeses. This finding might not have been particularly thrilling to the world's media, other than they noted that 100 grams of Kraft Dairylea Light Cheese slices for example contained more salt than the same amount of salt-water from the Atlantic Ocean.

Indeed, whilst the ocean - apparently the world's definition of salty - was found to have a mere 2.5 g salt per 100g of sea water, the calciummy alien cheese goo contains a good 2.8g. Professor Graham MacGrego from CASH took a legitimate shot at their advertising, saying that as Dairylea likes to promote itself to parents as being good for children's bones, it might like to mention that excessive sodium from the salt actually "leaches calcium from bones..." and is "implicated in osteoporosis".

A Kraft spokesman produced a less than amazing insight into why this would be, saying "Salt is an essential part of the cheese-making process, and levels vary between different types of cheese".

Kraft was far from the worst however of the 175 cheeses surveyed. Somerfield 'So Good' feta ranked in as a heavyweight at 6.8g of salt per 100g, but even its crown was taken by Sainsbury's Pecorino Romano at 7.4g per 100. One assumes though that these aren't marketed in quite the same shove-it-up-your-kids-to-make-them-healthy way as some of the more slimy cheesey characters.

Below is a table of salty winners and losers in the big cheese competition.