Table 3. Recommendations for preventing the overconsumption of alcohol and salt.

Recommendations	Example quotes
Alcohol advertising restrictions: Implement restrictions on alcohol advertising to reduce consumption and promote public health.	“The usual advertisements should go down”—health researcher
Alcohol licence restrictions: Enforce alcohol licensing restrictions and regulations to limit availability and reduce consumption.	“Restricting the sale of alcohol to certain locations or specific places really will be very good”—health researcher
Alcohol taxation Implement increased or revised taxes on alcohol to discourage consumption.	“introduce some taxes that can discourage some consumption among at least some population”—health researcher “evidence has shown that if we increase taxes on these products like the sin taxes, then access or consumption tends to reduce. But for a very long time, Ghana hasn’t been able to increase taxes on these things until recently, early part of this year when there was a major breakthrough by stakeholders, civil society organisations, researchers and different stakeholders that push for that to happen.”—health practitioner “as for alcohol I think that we can impose some level of taxes on them. But if you look at our setting, a lot of the populace don’t take the expensive alcohol, it is the cheap alcohol our populace takes especially … it’s mostly the poor and the vulnerable who are taking some of the cheapest forms of alcohol we have in the country”—policymaker
Educational campaigns and health awareness campaigns: Provide educational programmes to promote healthier dietary choices and reduce alcohol intake.	“we need to educate people and gradually cause a behavioural change as to what they are supposed to or how they process those foods to reduce the amount of salt in there before consumption.”—health practitioner “I don’t think the education has come out very strongly. It’s something we can do more of because we all know salt is a major risk factor for hypertension too”—policymaker
Mandatory nutrition labelling: Require nutrition labelling to inform healthier food choices.	“we want to produce policies that will help, including mandatory nutrition labelling … we can get our front-of-pack labelling maybe policy and food marketing restriction policy, these two policies once we get these two policies out of that project, we can do so much”—policymaker
Mass media campaign Use mass media channels, such as TV, radio and social media, to promote healthier dietary behaviour.	“public campaign. So, that is where our gap is; we are not doing much. If you open your mass media, any of them, radio, TV, even social media, or the print media, you don’t see much as far as our campaign to healthy living, and all of these risk factors”—public health agency
Minimum age to purchase alcohol: Enforce a minimum age requirement for alcohol purchases to reduce underage drinking.	“you have to show something, there’s an identification to prove that indeed you are below 18 years but we don’t have that implemented yet. So probably it’s something that the government would want to look at”—public health agency
Sodium reformulation Work with local producers to implement sodium reformulation in food products to reduce overall sodium intake.	“companies or organisations that do processed foods and follow these guidelines, are taxed lower than companies who use more salt and all that. So yeah, I think it will be good.”—health researcher
Dietary guidelines: Develop and promote food-based dietary guidelines to encourage healthier eating habits.	“If you look at the dietary guidelines that was recently developed … it is something that is starting or emerging to support government, come out with these guidelines to make sure that we have these standardised measures in place to guide what we eat or to help us actually really understand what is good food and what is not good food.”—health practitioner