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Hold the Salt, Please
New York City is developing quite a reputation for fighting the dietary vices of America. In 2006, New York became the first city to ban artificial trans fats in restaurant food. Two years later, the city started requiring chain restaurants to post calorie counts on their menus. This year, public health officials took on soda, launching an ad campaign that showed human fat pouring out of a bottle of soda (and accompanying it with a gruesome YouTube video). Now, the city is setting its sights on salt.
Today, New York City announced a plan aimed at cutting sodium from restaurant and packaged food by 25 percent over the next five years. Though government recommendations for sodium suggest no more than 2,300 milligrams per day, the average American consumes about 3,400. About 80 percent of that comes from processed and pre-prepared foods, which contain high levels of sodium to enhance flavor and make up for the tastes lost during processing.
High sodium intake has been shown to significantly increase the risk of stroke and cardiovascular disease. And the thing about salt is that people build up a tolerance; the more you eat, the more you need to make something taste salty. If all manufacturers were to cut back on salt, Americans might not only consume less salt in processed foods, but they might also gradually lose their taste for highly salted foods. That would have an enormous positive effect on public health. An article in the British Medical Journal from earlier this year found that reducing salt consumption by five grams at the population level could prevent 1.25 million deaths from stroke and almost 3 million deaths from cardiovascular disease.
Because most of the food in school cafeterias is processed, school lunch fare is often high in sodium. At one school I visited last year, the lowest-sodium meal contained 1250 milligrams — more than half of the daily recommended amount. The saltiest meal contained 2235 milligrams — about a day’s worth.
School meals contain so much salt in part because there are no regulations on sodium, as there are on fat and saturated fat. But perhaps the larger challenge is that most processed food is extremely high in sodium. There just aren’t many low-sodium foods available for cafeterias. States that have passed more stringent nutrition regulations for school meals have in many cases eased up on the sodium regulations because, as one cafeteria director told me, “they knew it would be impossible for us to meet those standards.”
As cities like New York move to lower salt levels in prepared foods, more companies will develop low-sodium foods. That might be the first step to cutting the salt in the lunchroom.
May 9th, 2010 at 7:18 pm
[...] 30 – 50% of schools don’t even meet the current USDA guidelines on a regular basis) and high in sodium which most schools don’t even seem to take into [...]
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