New York City's Plan to Reduce Salt in Packaged Foods, Restaurants

The city of New York City will attempt to reduce the amount of sodium used in restaurants and in packaged foods by 25 percent during the next five years. Within time, this plan will become a nationwide effort in the hopes to reduce the preventable health risks that are created by too much consumption of sodium in one's diet. It is estimated that there are approximately 800,000 deaths yearly nationwide and up to 23,000 deaths just in the New York City area alone due to strokes and/or heart attacks caused by too much sodium in one's diet. (1) To my mind, this is a great effort in preventing Americans from having such detrimental health problems when hypertension, strokes and heart attacks can be prevented simply by cutting down on the amount of sodium used.

For decades, we have known that too much sodium in one's diet can be a contributing factor in creating hypertension which can then further lead to triggering either strokes or heart attacks. The recommended daily intake for sodium is 2,400 mgs. (2) yet our diet often far exceeds that amount, and many times we may be unknowingly consuming that daily amount in just one meal. This can especially be true when it comes to a steady diet of eating fast foods or prepackaged convenience foods.

If one wants to know what 2,400 milligrams a day amounts to, according to the here

Taco Bell was guilty of high sodium content in their foods as well, such as theire Regular Style Taco Bell Bean Burrito, which has 1,200 mgs. of sodium(4). The worse offenders however seem to be Red Lobster, Chili's and Olive Garden where one might assume they were eating healthier meals. The online article with video cites the Red Lobster's Admiral Feast as containing a whopping 7,106 mg. of sodium, which is three days worth of sodium content; Chili's Chicken Fajitas has 6,916 mg of sodium; and Olive Garden's Chicken Parmigiana has 5,735 mg of sodium. And just think these statistics are just for one meal at any of these restaurants.

So far I've been citing fast food restaurants as being guilty of high sodium content in their foods, however, other restaurants may also be guilty of having high levels of sodium in their foods, more notably and probably Oriental type restaurants. Oriental food is loaded with sodium/salt due to the generous usage of the condiment soy sauce which is used in just about everything as a flavoring. Soy sauce can have over 1,000 mgs. of sodium in just one tablespoon, and think how much soy sauce you then might be adding to the food once it's served to you.

I then also decided to explore the sodium content of a few prepackaged foods. They didn't fair much better. For instance Lean Cuisine, which boasts of reduced fat content in its frozen dinners, if one goes to the Lean Cuisine web site most of their dinners have up to 650 mgs of sodium. Do you love DiGiorno Four Cheese Pizza? That has 830 mgs. of sodium in one serving, and let's face it, if your a pizza lover like I am, one rarely has just one slice of pizza. (5)

As healthy as I like to think I am when it comes to preparing home cooked meals, and by not adding salt while cooking, I too may have inadvertently been consuming way too much salt without my knowing it. One example I can give is my habit of adding a bouillon cube to enhance flavor in my soups or stews. When I recently looked at the nutrition label of Maggi's Beef Flavor Bouillon, half a tablet contains a whopping 1,230 mgs. of sodium. After all my research I've done about sodium, you can bet that from now on, I'm going to change my cooking habits drastically.

Ask yourself this question, how much sodium is in your diet? The answer might surprise and even shock you as it did for me. The bottom line is that we should all be a lot more conscientious about the food we eat in general, and while many of have been reducing the fat content of foods, we should also be aware of how much sodium is in our diet.

I think it's highly commendable that New York City is initiating a program to reduce sodium content in foods in restaurants and prepackaged foods, however, my one criticism is that this should have been done a long ago. The reason I say this is that we may have gotten too used to a higher-than-normal usage of sodium in our diets.