Salt

Obama takes aim at salt

By Helena Bottemiller Evich

The Obama administration issued sweeping salt reduction goals Wednesday for foods ranging from French fries to granola — a controversial move aimed at getting Americans to eat healthier.

The long-delayed targets released by the FDA are voluntary but put significant pressure on food manufacturers and restaurants to dial down sodium in dozens of categories of processed foods. The policy, which is sure to meet fierce opposition from industry groups and lawmakers on Capitol Hill, is the latest in a series of government efforts to clean up America’s diet.

“The Obama Administration has led many public health initiatives that will improve the way Americans eat for many years to come,” said Michael Jacobson, president of the Center for Science in the Public Interest, who has been on a crusade against salt for decades. “If industry takes these targets seriously, this initiative could have the biggest impact.”

“It’s a great first step,” said Michael Landa, former director of the FDA’s Center for Food Safety and Applied Nutrition, who has urged the administration to move forward on salt reduction. Landa believes the draft policy will carry significant weight, even if it isn’t finalized in the next administration, because the industry and its lawyers tend to take FDA guidance seriously. It will also serve as a rubric for advocacy groups keen on pushing food makers to make changes.

The FDA’s sodium reduction goals — which public health experts believe could save thousands of lives even with a nearly decade-long phase-in period — is a particularly thorny issue for many food makers, which rely on salt for taste, texture and even food safety in some products. The idea is also increasingly controversial in the scientific community as recent studies have questioned whether Americans need to cut back on salt intake.

But the public health community continues to see salt reduction as critical to improving Americans’ health and reining in tens of billions in healthcare costs.

CSPI, an advocacy group that sued FDA to prod a response to a decade-old petition seeking a salt crackdown, estimates that hundreds of thousands of lives have been lost prematurely from high blood pressure, heart attacks and other health problems linked to excessive sodium consumption. For some health groups, having FDA draw a line in the sand, even if it’s a voluntary one, is the beginning of a long process of arm-twisting and changing consumer tastes.

“We hope that industry will work cooperatively with the FDA and health experts to achieve the proposed reductions, which would benefit the health of all Americans,” said Jacobson, president of CSPI. Jacobson, who has been on a crusade to reduce salt in the American diet for decades, sees the targets as a tool to move the entire marketplace. “[I]t helps level the playing field for those companies that are already trying to use less salt in their foods,” he said in a statement Wednesday.

The announcement follows first lady Michelle Obama’s recent unveiling of the first update to the Nutrition Facts labels on food packages in more than two decades, including a controversial new requirement to list added sugars — a change many experts believe will lead food companies to reduce sugar. Last year, the FDA finalized a de facto ban on artery-clogging trans fats in a bid to prevent heart disease.

Canada, the United Kingdom and New York City have also led their own voluntary salt reduction initiatives in recent years.

The Obama administration has been working on sodium reduction for several years. In April 2010, the Washington Post wrote that a big salt crackdown would be launched later that year and “would eventually lead to the first legal limits on the amount of salt allowed in food products.”

But politics and competing priorities bogged down the policy.

The average American consumes upwards of 3,400 milligrams of sodium per day, which comes out to about one and a half teaspoons. The government has long urged consumers to limit their sodium consumption to 2,300 milligrams — and go even lower to 1,500 milligrams if they are at risk or have high blood pressure — but large, prominent studies have recently started to question whether there is adequate science to link high sodium consumption and adverse health outcomes.

In 2011, a large study published in the Journal of the American Medical Association found that going below 3,000 milligrams of sodium per day was actually associated with an increased risk of death. In the years since, prominent journals, including the New England Journal of Medicine and The Lancet have continued to publish studies suggesting that lowering salt intake might actually increase health risks.

The Institute of Medicine in 2013 concluded there wasn’t enough evidence to support sodium reduction below 2,300 milligrams.