COME the revolution, the people who have sugar in their tea will be the first ones up against the wall, so I’m keeping my head down.

The food police have been out in force again, with the amount of sugar we have in our dinners being their latest concern.

A campaign group calling itself Action on Sugar has even been formed to help.

At first I thought they have it in for Alan Sugar, but it turns out they are trying to force processed food manufacturers to reduce the amount of sugar they put in their cans and packets.

I know this because it was on the BBC News website, and I’m sure it’s very naughty, but although there was lots of advice on how to cut down on sugar (the sweet stuff, not the entrepreneur) they neglected to say what the safe level of consumption is. So neither I nor anybody else reading it could work out if they needed to cut down, or by how much.

However, they did point me towards a special NHS advice page, which seemed more promising, except that began by saying: “Most adults and children eat too much sugar.”

Unfortunately, I’m not “most adults”, so I was interested to find out how much sugar is “too much sugar” and work out whether I really am too sweet.

But I couldn’t find the bit where they said how much sugar is safe or normal.

You see, although I have a spoonful of sugar or sweetener in my tea and I also occasionally have a can of Heinz tomato soup, which is probably the sort of over-sweetened processed food that Action on Sugar have in mind, I suspect my sugar consumption is actually low. This is because I generally don’t eat a lot of cakes and biscuits, never have sugary soft drinks, and have even been known to resist chocolate.

But the fact is: I just don’t know.

Neither the BBC, the NHS, nor the three or four other reports I read about the launch of Action on Sugar wanted to tell me how much of the white stuff I should be eating, but they were all keen to explain about sugar content, and how to cut down. I eventually found a link to a PDF that had been put up by Action on Sugar, but it was just a table of sugar content in food, and still no clue as to how much I can safely eat in a day.

By now I was less worried about sugar than Action on Sugar, because their unhelpful page was part of the official Consensus Action on Salt and Health (not sugar) website.

It seems the sugar people are a splinter group of the salt people, and I’m wondering where it is all going to end. They should have known better than to get me started on salt.

Everybody I meet is trying to cut down on salt – because that’s the general advice – but almost nobody makes sure they are getting enough.

We have an elderly relative in our family who recently passed out – possibly because of salt deficiency. That can cause all kinds of things, from tiredness to death. We all learnt at school that without salt we’re goners.

So, without concrete evidence about my own levels, I’d rather take my chances with too much salt, rather than too little.

I still don’t know if I am getting too much salt or too much sugar, but there is definitely one thing I’ve grown tired of: people feeding us incomplete advice about food.

If you’re one, be a sweetie and stop trying to scare us to death.