Disease Proof

A couple months ago DiseaseProof blogged about the dangers of salt and how the American Medical Association was calling for a slash in the nation's sodium intake. Salt is one of those standard American foods Dr. Fuhrman strongly warns against:

Any excess salt added to food, outside of what is contained in natural foods, is likely to increase your risk of developing disease. Salt consumption is linked to both stomach cancer and hypertension.1 For optimal health, I recommend that no salt at all be added to any food. The famous DASH study clearly indicates that Americans consume five to ten times as much as they need and that high sodium levels over the years has a predictable effect on raising blood pressure.2 Just because you don’t have high blood pressure now doesn’t mean that you won’t. In fact, your probably will have high blood pressure if you keep eating lots of salt over the years.

Today Melanie Warner of The New York Times follows up the nation’s salt situation:

The nation’s largest doctors’ group, the American Medical Association, is going after the government and the food industry to reduce what it sees as a persistently high level of salt in many processed foods.


At its annual meeting in late June, the medical association recommended that the Food and Drug Administration limit the amount of salt that food companies are allowed to add to products.

Specifically, the medical association, which had never before called for regulation of a food ingredient, asked the F.D.A. to revoke salt’s long-time status as a substance that is “generally recognized as safe,” a classification that warrants little oversight. Instead, the F.D.A. should regulate salt as a food additive, the medical group said.

If the recommendation were adopted, packaged-food companies would have to adhere to limits on allowable sodium levels for various categories of food, and speed up the search for an alternative to salt as a preservative and flavor enhancer.

Despite the growing consumption of sodium, in the same article, the food industry claims to be working on it:

“The industry has paid great attention to overall sodium levels,” said Robert Earl, senior director of nutrition policy at the Food Products Association, a lobbying group representing packaged food manufacturers. “It has responded over decades by creating reduced-, low- or no-sodium products, as well as making changes that the consumer never sees.”


Despite such efforts, American sodium consumption has not declined in recent years. The government’s dietary guidelines say that the average young adult should eat less than 2,300 milligrams of sodium a day and that the threshold should be 1,500 milligrams for certain people — those with high blood pressure, African-Americans (who are at higher risk for hypertension) and anyone middle-aged or older. Yet, on average, Americans consume more than 3,300 milligrams of sodium a day, compared with 3,100 milligrams in 1994, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

About three-quarters of the salt Americans consume comes from processed food, according to the Department of Agriculture. No more than 10 percent comes out of the salt shaker, and another 10 percent is contained naturally in foods.

1. Joosens, J.V., M.J. Hill, P. Elliot, et al. 1996. Dietary salt, nitrate and stomach cancer mortality in 24 countries: European Cancer Prevention (ECP) and the INTERSALT Cooperative Research Group. Int. J. Epidemiol. 3:494-504.

2. Obarzanek, E., F.M. Sacks, T.J. Moore, et al. 2000. Dietary approaches to stop hypertension (DASH)—sodium trial. Paper presented at Annual Meeting of the American Society of Hypertension, May 17, New York, NY.