AMA Petitions FDA for New, Strict Sodium Regulations

On Thursday, the American Medical Association (AMA) testified before the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) that it should take immediate action to set strict limits on the permissible amount of salt in processed foods and work to better educate the public on the benefits of a low-sodium diet.

According to the AMA, the FDA must revoke the "generally recognized as safe" (GRAS) status of salt and implement regulations to limit sodium in processed and restaurant foods. Along those lines, the FDA and manufacturers need to work toward a minimum of a 50 percent reduction in the amount of sodium contained in processed foods, fast food products, and restaurant meals over the next ten years.

"The deaths attributed to excess salt consumption represent a huge toll -- the equivalent of a jumbo jet with more than 400 passengers crashing every day of the year, year after year...Most Americans consume two to three times the amount of sodium that is healthy, with an estimated 75 to 80 percent of the daily intake of sodium coming from processed and restaurant foods. Reducing the salt in our diets by 50 percent over the next ten years could save at least 150,000 lives each year...Americans don't consume large amounts of salt because they request it, but often do so unknowingly because manufacturers and restaurants put it in food...The U.S. should follow the lead of countries such as Finland and the U.K. who have taken action on salt, and seen promising results," said AMA Vice President for Science, Quality, and Public Health Stephen Havas, MD, MPH, MS.

Critics of government regulation of food ingredients say that such measures, when they come from the top-down position, are not only economically burdensome, but more importantly they are on the path of the slippery slope toward central government control of every aspect of an individual's personal life and the government takeover of all business.

They point out that no food supplier or restaurant ever got very far by poisoning its clients or patrons, and the reason for such things as high sodium content in foods is not because such businesses are immoral or indifferent to health but because the public has a large appetite for salt.

The critics favor the educational approach to induce the buying public into pressuring businesses to compete for their dollars by offering meals that contain less sodium, perhaps through the use of unrefined sea salt in place of the refined sodium chloride mostly in use now.

The critics of the type of recommendations that the AMA has made go on to say that "liberals" want to regulate people to death, depriving them of the healthiest and most important part of their lives: their freedom to make choices, even bad, ugly, or unhealthy choices. What's more, they say, such regulations are another attempt to clip the wings of what they consider is the most powerful engine of social change-the free market.

Some nutritional scientists have also been calling into question the demonizing of sodium, saying that it is but one of several interactive factors that regulate blood pressure and the health of the heart, with some people needing more of it than others. The insist that the success of Finland in dramatically reducing the frequency of heart attacks and strokes in that nation's populace had more to do with than government regulation of sodium content allowed in prepared foods.

Indeed, Finland's famed success in this matter actually came in the form of putting warning labels on processed foods and giving incentives to businesses to find salt alternatives, rather than using heavy government regulation.

Original Newswire Source:

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