Subscribe to the RSS feed.New York City Looks to Salt in Effort to Save Lives
New York City’s Mayor Bloomberg has just released a plan to encourage food manufacturers and restaurant chains across the country to curtail the amount of salt in their products.
It won’t affect cafés selling salt bagels.
It won’t affect pastrami sandwiches.
It won’t affect pizza places in Brooklyn, or on Arthur Avenue.
It won’t even affect hot dog stands outside Shea Stadium - or whatever the Mets are playing these days.
All it seeks to do is encourage those large-scale food producing conglomerates, such as Wendy’s, PepsiCo and Chef Boyardee, to try to reduce the amount of sodium in their production process.
“We all consume way too much salt, and most of the salt we consume is in the food when we buy it,” said Dr. Thomas Farley, the city health commissioner, in the New York Times, who said that 80 percent of the salt in Americans’ diets comes from packaged or restaurant food, and reducing salt from those sources would save lives.
The recommendations call for a 20 percent drop in peanut butter sodium and a 40 percent decline in canned vegetables, for example.
The recommendations are also endorsed by 25 other city or state agencies and 17 national health organizations.
But unlike the city’s recent ban on trans fat in restaurant food or rules implemented last year requiring chain restaurants to post calorie information on their menus, this initiative is purely voluntary.
Food manufacturers “all fully recognize that sodium is a major health problem that they need to address,” Farley said.
As far as New Yorkers’ food favorites are concerned, Farley said the health department is not suggesting that all products be less salty. Instead, the city’s recommendations are meant to encourage companies to cut salt where it isn’t needed or just give consumers more low-salt options. He said he’s sure some processed-food manufacturers can cut salt content without making their products less tasty.
The federal government recommends that sodium intake from salt be limited to 1,500 to 2,300 milligrams a day, with the latter figure equaling about a teaspoon. But the average adult in this country consumes about 3,400 milligrams a day, a number that has been growing over the past few decades, according to the New York City Department of Health and Mental Hygiene.
But while the voluntary plan has only ben announced today, the whining has already begun.
What do you think?
Good idea?
Will there be reaction? Exaggeration?
Cries about the “nanny state” and the “slippery slope” arguments including the classic “what will they do next, ________ ?
Feel free to fill in the blank.
