Every five years the American public gets a newly tweaked directive on what we’re supposed to be eating.

And every five years the American public largely ignores it.

For example, the 2005 Dietary Guidelines for Americans recommend we eat 2 1/2 cups of vegetables and 2 cups of fruit a day. But according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, only about 14 percent of adults are even coming close.

Special interest groups, however, watch the guidelines closely and are speaking out. Just last week, nearly 50 speakers from industry and the science and health communities went to Washington to provide oral comments on the proposed guidelines for 2010, which will be released at the end of the year.

The proposed recommendation to reduce salt intake dramatically drew a statement from Morton Satin, Salt Institute vice president of science and research, that “no modern society consumes so little salt.”

The Healthy Eating Pyramid displayed here is the one created by Harvard School of Public Health, and is the only pyramid solely based on scientific evidence.

Dr. Richard Feinman, on behalf of the Nutrition and Metabolic Society, invited members of the federal Dietary Guidelines Advisory Committee to a debate on the guidelines’ proposed decrease in saturated fat consumption, saying that carbohydrates eaten with saturated fats were the real problem. The Weston Price Foundation, which advocates the healthful properties of fat from pastured animals, also took issue.

A dietary supplements industry group called the Council for Responsible Nutrition objected to the proposed statement that “a daily multivitamin/mineral supplement does not offer health benefits to healthy Americans.” The council said the committee’s report implies “it’s reasonable to allow people to live with nutrient inadequacies.”

If the guidelines are largely ignored by the average American, why do health and industry groups care so much about influencing them?

“I think to a certain extent they are followed,” said Weston Price Foundation President Sally Fallon, whose organization also supports the consumption of whole, rather than processed, foods. “Schools who get federal money and prisons are supposed to be following them for their menus.”

Have questions about the new food guidelines? Many do. Reporter Monica Eng answers some of them at Trib Nation.

Dr. Robert Post, deputy director of the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Center for Nutrition Policy and Promotion, said all public comments are taken into consideration along with scientific reviews and lively debate within the committee’s meetings.

He noted that last month the department debuted something called the Nutrition Evidence Library, a new online resource cataloging the latest science on nutritional matters and the ways the USDA interprets it to create policy.

But some observers still worry that the guidelines may be too influenced by industry concerns.

“I believe that by supporting low-fat products and grain products, rather than actual low-fat foods and whole grains like quinoa and teff, they are just trying to support the food industry,” said Adele Hite, a University of North Carolina public health graduate student who represented the Committee for a Healthy Nation during last week’s meeting.

The USDA started giving out nutritional advice more than 100 years ago with a table of food composition and dietary standards that later morphed into food shopping guides for various income levels. In 1992 the agency developed the food pyramid, an image in which horizontal bars represented food groups.

In 2005 the pyramid was given a new look (and renamed My Pyramid) in which the bars were replaced by vertical stripes that some argued made it hard to read at a glance.

“The new pyramid is not so much an information image as something to send people to the mypyramid.gov Web site,” explained USDA spokesman John Webster.

“While making it, there was a concern that it was not specific enough,” Webster said. “But as we added more information it started to look like a Christmas tree. Finally we said we can’t continue to add more information and still make it meaningful, and so decided to put the information on the Web.”

Congress mandates that a committee on the dietary guidelines convene every five years to review the latest science and state of the American diet to make adjustments, but the pyramid usually does not change as often. It will likely get another makeover in early 2011 as part of the national Let’s Move campaign against childhood obesity.

The main changes proposed for the dietary guidelines include reducing daily sodium intake from 2,300 milligrams to 1,500 milligrams, reducing the percentage of saturated fat in the diet from 10 percent to 7 percent, reductions in foods with added sugars and an avoidance of artificial trans fats altogether. The report also highlighted the importance of vitamin D, calcium, potassium and dietary fiber, and it recommends eating 8 ounces of seafood a week.

Because most Americans already consume more sodium than was recommended in the last version of the guidelines, the new target of 1,500 milligrams is likely to pose formidable challenges to American consumers, not to mention food processors who rely on sodium as a flavor enhancer, preservative and binder.

Some experts acknowledge that although the proposed guidelines may force manufacturers to reformulate processed foods for schools and prisons that follow the standards, they may have little effect on what consumers eat at restaurants or at home.

“I think people ignore them when it comes to eating more fruits and vegetables and reducing refined sugars, but they will listen when they see the permission to eat six to 11 servings of grain per day,” Fallon said.

The proposed 2010 guidelines are the first to acknowledge America’s dire obesity epidemic and the roles environment and communication play in actually getting the public to follow the suggestions.

They cite “powerful influences that currently promote unhealthy consumer choices, behaviors and lifestyles” in our environment and call for cooperation with the Department of Health and Human Services to encourage improvements in areas including health, nutrition and physical education in schools; greater financial incentives to purchase, prepare and consume healthful food; more health-promoting foods and portions offered in restaurants and by manufacturers; and more exercise-friendly communities.

Among the questions the committee considered for this year’s guidelines was how much and what kinds of fish consumption it could endorse given the latest research on mercury contamination.

Unlike the current food pyramid, the government’s latest proposed advice takes into consideration the health threats posed by mercury, a toxic metal that taints certain types of fish and can trigger learning difficulties in children and neurological and heart problems in adults.

The proposed guidelines reflect a 2004 joint advisory from the Food and Drug Administration andEnvironmental Protection Agency that cautions young children, pregnant women, nursing mothers and women of childbearing age not to eat swordfish, shark, king mackerel and tilefish because of high mercury levels. It also advises those groups to consume no more than 12 ounces of fish a week, including no more than 6 ounces of canned albacore tuna.

An online version of the current food pyramid continues to recommend swordfish and tuna, four years after the Tribune first reported on the government’s contradictory advice. The National Academy of Sciences has sharply criticized the government for not doing enough to advise consumers about which fish are safest to eat, a job that has fallen to nonprofit health groups.

Based on the government’s own testing, Consumers Union, the publisher of Consumer Reports magazine, says the chances that any type of canned tuna will contain high levels of mercury are great enough that pregnant women should never eat it.

“You can get all of the benefits of fish and avoid the dangers of mercury by eating low-mercury fish,” said Jean Halloran, the group’s director of food policy initiatives. “It’s been distressing to see the government isn’t doing a better job helping women make smart choices.”

The seafood industry has argued that advising women about high- and low-mercury types of fish would scare them away from eating seafood altogether. Yet a 2008 federal study found a decline in the number of women nationwide with high levels of the toxic metal in their bodies, even though those women were eating the same amount of seafood. The finding suggested that consumer advisories about mercury had started to work.

via Food pyramid: New dietary guidelines coming from U.S. government – chicagotribune.com.

As California contemplates legalizing the sale of marijuana, the real war over intoxicants in this country is, as always, over alcohol.

Since Prohibition ended in 1933 with the 21st Amendment to the Constitution — which repealed the 18th Amendment authorizing the ban on alcohol — states, counties and municipalities have see-sawed back and forth over alcohol sales. States are still passing laws on the sale of alcohol on Sundays, and municipalities and counties are still voting on whether to permit local alcohol purchases.

But as an addiction psychologist and alcohol epidemiologist, I am more interested in another debate over alcohol: whether it can be good for you. This issue arises every five years as the United States issues new dietary guidelines, including for alcohol consumption. In 1990, the Dietary Guidelines for Americans firmly declared that alcohol “has no net health benefit, is linked with many health problems, is the cause of many accidents and can lead to addiction. Their consumption is not recommended.”

But in 1995, based on the results of studies identifying subjects who drank and did not drink and then following their health outcomes over time, the guidelines modestly declared — amid a sea of information about the dangers of drinking — that “alcoholic beverages have been used to enhance the enjoyment of meals by many societies throughout human history” and that “current evidence suggests that moderate drinking…is associated with a lower risk for coronary heart disease in some individuals.”

A firestorm resulted over these words, led by the late Sen. Strom Thurmond (R-S.C.), a notorious teetotaler. Somehow, the section came through intact, to the amazement of a member of the committee writing the guidelines, Marion Nestle, then-chairwoman of the Department of Nutrition, Food Studies and Public Health at New York University. “It’s a miracle, a miracle,” she told the New York Times. “It is a triumph of science and reason over politics. The committee process was very contentious, but the outcome makes the fuss seem worthwhile.”

Well, the same forces are back doing battle for the 2010 edition of the guidelines. In the intervening years, quite a bit of evidence has accumulated to take the statement of alcohol’s benefits even further. The 2010 guidelines’ alcohol section group is headed by epidemiologist Eric Rimm of Harvard Medical School, where he is a co-director of the Health Professionals Follow-Up Study that has tracked doctors’ and nurses’ health outcomes and drinking for decades. But the opposition this time around is not teetotaler Southern politicians.

According to the experts charged with creating the alcohol section, strong evidence indicates that “the lowest mortality risk for men and women [occurs] at the average level of one to two drinks per day, [and] is likely due to the protective effects of moderate alcohol consumption on CHD [coronary heart disease], diabetes and ischemic stroke as summarized in this chapter.”

In other words, people who have a couple of drinks daily live the longest! Adding what for some is insult to injury, the group also noted: “Moderate evidence suggests that compared to non-drinkers, individuals who drink moderately have a slower cognitive decline with age.” Moderate drinkers not only live longer, they are more alert while doing so!

Despite these proposed additions to the guidelines, the overwhelming burden of the alcohol section is to portray the negative health, psychological and addictive effects of alcohol. But this has not been enough to avoid a sharp blowback from medical, public health and addiction professionals, who have started a campaign to limit these recommendations out of a fear their impact “would likely be to encourage greater daily consumption of alcohol, discourage appropriate caution about using alcohol for health benefits, and open the door for the alcohol industry to misrepresent federal alcohol consumption guidelines to consumers.”

And so it goes — the war over alcohol in America continues ad infinitum.

via Alcohol and the Dietary Guidelines for Americans – latimes.com.

The evening’s menu featured grass-fed, antibiotic-free beef over pasta, fresh seasonal vegetables and fresh organic peaches — items right at home in the city’s finest restaurants.

Instead, the dishes were prepared for visitors, staff and bed-bound patients at Swedish Covenant Hospital.

The Northwest Side hospital is one of 300 across the nation that have pledged to improve the quality and sustainability of the food they serve, not just for the health of their patients but, they say, the health of the environment and the U.S. population.

For many of these institutions, the initiative includes buying antibiotic-free meats. Administrators say they hope increased demand for those products will reduce the use of antibiotics to treat cattle and other animals, which scientists believe helps pathogens become more resistant to drugs. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimate that antibiotic-resistant infections kill 60,000 Americans a year.

Although the U.S. doesn’t keep national records on antibiotic use in animals, the Union of Concerned Scientists estimates that up to 70 percent of all antibiotics used in the U.S. are administered to healthy animals to speed growth and compensate for crowded living conditions. Some of these drugs, such as penicillin and tetracycline, are also used to treat sick people.

Last week, as a congressional panel debated the nontherapeutic use of antibiotics in agriculture, Rep. Jan Schakowsky, D-Ill., presented a petition organized by the nonprofit coalition Health Care Without Harm and signed by more than 1,000 health care professionals supporting the Preservation of Antibiotics for Medical Treatment Act. Introduced by Rep. Louise Slaughter, D-N.Y., it would phase out the nontherapeutic use in animals of seven types of medically important antibiotics.

Last month the Food and Drug Administration also released draft guidelines for the “judicious use” of antibiotics for growth promotion in animals. The CDC and the U.S. Department of Agriculture support the FDA’s guidance, which states that “using medically important antimicrobial drugs for production or growth enhancing purposes … in food-producing animals is not in the interest of protecting and promoting the public health.”

Meat producers respond that there is not enough evidence to definitively link human antibacterial-resistant infection to animal use.

“The CDC, FDA and USDA all say that they believe there is a link, but we don’t know,” said Dave Warner, spokesman for the National Pork Producers Council. “They believe it, so they are going to ban these products because of a belief and not a scientific fact?”

Hospital administrators who have signed on to buy antibiotic-free meat say they hope to use their purchasing power to discourage the use of antibiotics in agriculture. According to the Association for Healthcare Foodservice, the institutions spend about $9.6 billion on food and drink a year.

An early adopter of healthier hospital menus, Swedish Covenant’s director of nutrition, Maria Simmons, started serving grass-fed antibiotic- and hormone-free Tallgrass beef nearly five years ago. While the hospital’s purchases of other sustainable foods have fluctuated with budgets and availability, this item has been a constant.

Simmons said the hospital uses the beef in one menu item a day served to patients and in the cafeteria, including “meat sauces, Salisbury steaks, meatloaf, beef stew and in our Korean seaweed soup.”

Diane Imrie, director of nutrition services at Fletcher Allen Health Care in Vermont, also started serving antibiotic-free beef at the hospital in recent years as part of her plan to switch to local, seasonal, sustainable food.

“When we started a sustainability council at the hospital a few years ago, antibiotic reduction was one of the first things on my list,” she said. “I think it has the most impact on farming, the environment and public health.”

Imrie estimated that her food costs rose about $67,000 last year when she switched to antibiotic-free chicken from conventional. “But that’s also about the same cost as treating a single MRSA infection,” she said, referring to drug-resistant staphylococcus bacteria.

Like Simmons, Imrie said she has found inventive ways to offset the cost of the antibiotic-free meats, such as choosing ground beef and stewing cuts instead of more expensive options. Simmons said the beef she buys ranges from 50 cents to $1 more a pound.

Simmons also said she is able to negotiate with vendors because the hospital buys food in large amounts. “Once they realize the volume and the fact that you will keep buying this, they work with you,” she said.

Carolyn Lammersfeld, national director of nutrition at Cancer Treatment Centers of America, oversees a menu full of organic, antibiotic-free chicken, beef and dairy at the organization’s facilities across the country.

Using the ingredients is primarily a response to patient demand, Lammersfeld said, but the centers are also “watching the controversy over the nontherapeutic use of antibiotics and their potential to cause resistant strains of bacteria.”

via Hospitals buy antibiotic-free meat, citing drug resistance concerns – chicagotribune.com.

CSPI, July 15, 2010

Scientists Question Whether Federal Nutrition Assistance Funds Should Be Used to Buy Obesity-Promoting Sugar-Sweetened Beverages

Should Taxpayers Subsidize Soda? ~ Newsroom ~ News from CSPI ~ Center for Science in the Public Interest.

According to a recent Nestlé ad campaign aimed at parents, a drink called Boost Kid Essentials was so good for children that it could keep them from getting colds and missing school.

But on Wednesday, the Federal Trade Commission said the ads were deceptive and announced that Nestlé had agreed to stop making the claims.

The move was the second in two months aimed at deceptive advertising by a major food manufacturer for products meant for children. A commission official said that the agency was taking a close look at the proliferating number of health claims made for all types of products on supermarket shelves.

“Food companies are marketing more of what they call functional foods,” said Karen Mandel, a staff lawyer for the trade commission. The term refers to foods with added nutrients that companies claim can bring health benefits to people who eat or drink them.

“If the claims are not substantiated, that’s what we’re looking for, to make sure the claims are truthful,” Ms. Mandel said.

The action Wednesday involved Boost Kid Essentials, a nutrient-laden beverage made by Nestlé HealthCare Nutrition that comes with a straw containing probiotic bacteria, which is similar to the live cultures in yogurt. Many people say they believe that probiotic bacteria aid digestion and provide other benefits.

According to the commission, the television and magazine ads and the Web site and packaging for Boost Kid Essentials made a series of claims that the probiotics in the straw could strengthen children’s immune systems, protecting them from colds and diarrhea and keeping them from missing school.

But the commission said there was not enough scientific evidence to back up the claims.

Nestlé said in a statement that the settlement “provides clarity regarding new advertising standards applicable to health benefit claims for Boost Kid Essentials and similar products.”

Ms. Mandel said the action was based on existing regulations and did not represent a new enforcement standard.

Nestlé did not admit wrongdoing as part of the settlement and the company was not fined.

The trade commission’s action came about six weeks after it announced that Kellogg had agreed to stop making a claim that nutrients added to its Rice Krispies cereal helped bolster children’s immunity to illnesses.

That agreement expanded on a 2009 settlement with the company over exaggerated health claims for another cereal, Frosted Mini-Wheats, which the company had advertised as “clinically shown to improve kids’ attentiveness by nearly 20 percent.”

Marion Nestle, a nutrition professor at New York University who is not related to the Nestlé company, said that with the recent actions, the F.T.C. had begun to take an unusually active role in policing health claims on foods. “I would consider this groundbreaking,” she said.

via Nestlé Will Drop Claims of Health Benefit in Drink – NYTimes.com.

How do you prevent a deadly disease that is projected to afflict one third of all Americans born today and is caused largely by hard-to-change habits such as too much soda and snacks and too little physical activity?

You could combine the broccoli and cauliflower in the school cafeteria for more colorful eye appeal. Put out 30 basketballs in gym class instead of two. Teach the wonders of water for 15 weeks straight (and remove everything else from vending machines).

Those changes – along with hundreds of others, large and small – signficantly reduced several major risk factors for type 2 diabetes, researchers concluded last week after studying the most comprehensive attempt yet to attack the epidemic through the schools.

Lifestyle prescriptions – you should eat a balanced diet – are notoriously difficult to stick with. But these limits were impossible to avoid.

“Instead of selling candy for a fund-raiser, they were selling carnations. And those are the sort of things that made it holistic across the environment,” said Wayne Grasela, senior vice president for food services in the Philadelphia School District, where six middle schools took part in the three-year national program.

The plan was to intervene early, before diabetes develops – and at a young enough age to learn new habits that could prevent or reduce obesity, a major risk factor for the disease. Numerous physicians helped craft the program, but all the action took place in the schools.

“They are already there. They already take physical education and they already eat lunch in the school,” explained Barbara Linder, who oversaw the study for the National Institutes of Health.

So researchers set about changing the school.

In gym, for example, “instead of doing layups, with most kids standing in line, we had things set up so balls were being passed back and forth while they waited,” said Gary D. Foster, director of Temple University’s Center for Obesity Research and Education, who chaired the national study.

Dumbbells, jump ropes, and medicine balls were distributed to groups, with rotations every 45 to 90 seconds to keep everyone moving. Pop music was played so that gyms were seen as “fun places to be with cool things to do,” Foster said.

In the cafeteria, the standard pizza was replaced with the same manufacturer’s whole-grain, lower-fat version. That shaved nearly 100 calories per slice and the kids didn’t notice, said Amy Virus, a registered dietician at Temple who coordinated the study’s nutrition component.

Nothing but water – not even 100 percent fruit juice – was stocked in vending machines. “Did they miss the juice? Sure, in the beginning,” Virus said, “but they got used to it. And they were buying the water.”

Supporting the effort were posters in classrooms (kids dancing, kids eating fruit), decals sent home over Christmas (TAKE THE FAMILY TV TURNOFF CHALLENGE!) and postcards in summer (“Be active for 60 minutes every day.”), even a healthy version of Jeopardy!, with 25 cards in English and Spanish.

An estimated 24 million Americans have diabetes, a chief cause of kidney failure, limb amputations, blindness, heart disease, and stroke. Although type 1 diabetes is caused by an auto-immune disorder, type 2 – more than 90 percent of the cases – is often linked to lifestyle factors that lead to weight gain and a gradual loss of the ability to control blood sugar.

Once rare before adulthood, type 2 diabetes has been rising steadily in children. Blacks and Hispanics are at particularly high risk; the government now projects that half of all babies born in those minority groups will develop diabetes later in life.

The new program was designed by researchers at seven major universities and targeted schools that enrolled high percentages of poor and minority students.

They began the interventions in 21 schools – three in each city – in the fall of 2006, when the students were in sixth grade; another 21 schools were designated as controls. A total of 4,603 students completed the study in June 2009, at the end of eighth grade.

Analysis showed that there were significantly greater reductions in several diabetes risk factors – body-mass index scores, average insulin levels, and the percentage of students with the largest waists – at the intervention schools vs. the controls.

All those differences were more pronounced among the 50 percent of students who were overweight or obese to begin with. Within that group, the interventions were associated with 21 percent lower odds of being obese at the end of eighth grade, the researchers reported.

The results were published last week online in the New England Journal of Medicine.

via Battling the bulge | Philadelphia Inquirer | 07/05/2010.

The Guardian, Randeep Ganesh, July 7 2010

Beer companies, confectionery firms and crisp-makers will be asked to fund the government’s advertising campaign to persuade people to switch to a healthier lifestyle and, in return, will not face new legislation outlawing excessively fatty, sugary and salty food, the health secretary, Andrew Lansley, announced today.

In a move condemned by campaigners as the government “rolling over on their backs in front of the food lobby”, Lansley told a conference of public health experts that he wanted a new partnership with food and drink firms. In exchange for a “non-regulatory approach”, the private sector would put up cash to fund the Change4Life campaign to improve diets and boost levels of physical activity among young people.

The time had come, said Lansley, to accept that “lecturing or nannying” people to change their behaviour did not work. He said business people “understand the social responsibility of people having a better lifestyle and they don’t regard that as remotely inconsistent with their long-term commercial interest”.

Lansley added: “No government campaign or programme can force people to make healthy choices. We want to free business from the burden of regulation, but we don’t want, in doing that, to sacrifice public health outcomes.”

Health campaigners said they were “horrorstruck” at Lansley’s remarks. “This is nothing other than a bare-faced request for cash from a rich food and drink industry, to bail out a cash-starved Department of Health campaign. The quid pro quo is that the department gives industry an assurance that there will no regulation or legislation over its activities,” said Tam Fry, a spokesperson for the National Obesity Forum.

The forum took issue with claims by the health secretary that his hands were tied on many aspects of food regulation, including the level of saturated fats, because of European rules. Fry said this was “simply untrue”. “Denmark, America have all used laws, or the threat of laws, to get the industry to move.”

Conceived by Labour, the Change4Life campaign was costed at £75m over three years and was already backed by industry, with high street names such as Tesco, Coca-Cola, Nestle and Pepsi all offering expertise and support. However, Lansley is proposing a radical scaling back of the public contribution to allow “charities, the commercial sector, and local authorities to fill the gap”.

Alan Maryon-Davis, the outgoing president of the Faculty of Public Health, said that legislation had worked in the case of cutting back smoking and “saved us from ourselves”.

“Personally, I mistrust the notion of seeing public health campaigns being sponsored by companies that clearly sell products which are not the healthy option”.

Speaking to reporters after his speech to the Faculty of Public Health conference in central London, Lansley said Change4Life would also be expanded, to cover alcohol misuse which costs the NHS £17bn a year – the same as obesity, which now affects one in four Britons.

He said that in conversations with the food industry before the election, they had been anxious about their products being “stigmatised as junk food”. He said he did not want to “close companies out” by trading allegations of “good food and bad food”.

“It’s perfectly possible to eat a bag of crisps, to eat a Mars bar, to drink a carbonated soft drink, but do it in moderation, understanding your overall diet and lifestyle. Then you can begin to take responsibility for it.”

The food industry said it welcomed the new move and was keen to work in partnership with the government. “We agree that in complex debates, such as obesity, the best solutions will be delivered through a shared social responsibility and not state regulation,” said Julian Hunt, the Food and Drink Federation’s director of communications.

No anti-junk food laws, health secretary promises | Society | The Guardian.

The worldwide epidemic of Type 2 diabetes is a “public health humiliation,” the editors of the esteemed medical journal The Lancet argue in this week’s diabetes-themed issue.

The journal’s lead editorial argues that Type 2 diabetes is largely rooted in reversible social and lifestyle factors that a medical approach alone is unlikely to solve.

“The fact that Type 2 diabetes, a largely preventable disorder, has reached epidemic proportion is a public health humiliation,” the editorial says.

The issue includes studies, which will also be presented at this week’s meeting of the American Diabetes Association in Orlando, Fla., that describe advances in drugs as well as a greater understanding of the disease and the control of blood glucose levels.

“But there is a glaring absence,” the editorial argues, ” no research on lifestyle interventions to prevent or reverse diabetes. In this respect, medicine might be winning the battle of glucose control but is losing the war against diabetes.”

The journal calls for a collective approach to boost opportunities for physical exercise and reduce the abundance of calorie-rich foods.

Reducing the burden of diabetes requires a major change in diet and routine, the editorial argues. The authors praise First Lady Michelle Obama’s Let’s Move campaign, which includes nutrition, activity and child health components.

The editorial also endorses the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s new guidelines, which aim to shift Americans’ eating habits toward plant-based diets.

Urban recreation that is readily accessible, affordable and includes safe areas for children is also a must, particularly in Asia and sub-Saharan Africa, which are experiencing large migrations from rural areas to urban centres, the editors noted.

via CBC News – Health – Type 2 diabetes a public health disgrace: Lancet.

Ninety percent of Americans are eating more salt than they should, a new government report reveals.

In fact, salt is so pervasive in the food supply it’s difficult for most people to consume less. Too much salt can increase your blood pressure, which is major risk factor for heart disease and stroke.

“Nine in 10 American adults consume more salt than is recommended,” said report co-author Dr. Elena V. Kuklina, an epidemiologist in the Division of Heart Disease and Stroke Prevention at the U.S. Centers for Diseases Control and Prevention.

Kuklina noted that most of the salt Americans consume comes from processed foods, not from the salt shaker on the table. You can control the salt in the shaker, but not the sodium added to processed foods, she said.

“The foods we eat most, grains and meats, contain the most sodium,” Kuklina said. These foods may not even taste salty, she added.

Grains include highly processed foods high in sodium such as grain-based frozen meals and soups and breads. The amount of salt from meats was higher than expected, since the category included luncheon meats and sausages, according to the CDC report.

Because salt is so ubiquitous, it is almost impossible for individuals to control, Kuklina said. It will really take a large public health effort to get food manufacturers and restaurants to reduce the amount of salt used in foods they make, she said.

This is a public health problem that will take years to solve, Kuklina said. “It’s not going to happen tomorrow,” she stressed.

“The American food supply is, in a word, salty,” agreed Dr. David Katz, director of the Prevention Research Center at Yale University School of Medicine. “Roughly 80 percent of the sodium we consume comes not from our own salt shakers, but from additions made by the food industry. The result of that is an average excess of daily sodium intake measured in hundreds and hundreds of milligrams, and an annual excess of deaths from heart disease and stroke exceeding 100,000.”

“As indicated in a recent IOM [Institute of Medicine] report, the best solution to this problem is to dial down the sodium levels in processed foods,” Katz added. “Taste buds acclimate very readily. If sodium levels slowly come down, we will simply learn to prefer less salty food. That process, in the other direction, has contributed to our current problem. We can reverse-engineer the prevailing preference for excessive salt.”

The report is published in the June 25 issue of the CDC’s Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report.

For about 70 percent of adults, salt intake should be limited to 1,500 milligrams (mg) a day, but only 5.5 percent of these adults meet that level, according to the report.

For others, the recommended amount of daily salt intake is less than 2,300 mg a day, according to the report.

Reducing your salt intake is not only important for people with high blood pressure, Kuklina said. It’s good for everybody, “even if you don’t have hypertension,” she said.

There are some things people can do to reduce their salt intake, Kuklina said. You can eat fewer processed foods and focus on fresh and frozen foods. You also can read the product labels to see how much salt is in the food and opt for low-sodium foods, she said.

Also, Kuklina advises rinsing canned vegetables and beans in water to remove salt.

The data for the report was collected from 3,922 individuals who took part in the 2005-2006 National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey.

Samantha Heller, a dietitian, nutritionist and exercise physiologist, commented that “nearly 80 percent of our sodium intake comes from processed, restaurant, frozen and prepared foods.”

Research suggests that reducing sodium intake to 2,300 mg/day for healthy folks and to 1,500 mg/day for people with high blood pressure, who are middle-aged, older or black will reap substantial health benefits, Heller said.

“Food companies have indicated that they will lower the sodium in some of their products, but it will take time before that happens, and only some products will have lowered sodium. The truth is that dropping our intake to 1,500 to 2,300 milligrams a day is difficult to do and unrealistic for most people,” she said.

Consumers will be best served by cooking more foods at home. It saves money and helps reduce the intake of dietary sodium, saturated fats, trans fats, refined carbohydrates and excess calories, Heller said.

“Any reduction in dietary sodium is a move in the right direction,” she added. “We can help ourselves by increasing our awareness of where sodium is hidden in foods, reading food labels — look for milligrams of sodium per serving — ignore the percent on the label — checking the sodium in the foods served at restaurants we frequent when it is available and taking charge of our health and what we eat by making more of our meals at home.”

via Most Americans Get Too Much Salt.

What to do about the obesity epidemic? Here’s a thought: Substitute “tobacco” for “junk food.” That provides a pretty clear road map about what government authorities should be doing to safeguard public health.

Unfortunately, officials are instead just reheating the same old leftovers.

Dietary guidelines issued recently by the U.S. Department of Agriculture basically say Americans need to ease up on the salt, sugar and saturated fats, and instead eat more fruits and veggies.

In fact, more than two-thirds of adults over 20 are either overweight or obese, the CDC says. About a third of all American kids fall into that category.

“It’s not that we’re morons and have no idea what’s good for us,” said Harold Goldstein, executive director of the California Center for Public Health Advocacy, a nonprofit organization. “It’s the world around us. We’re influenced to eat by our environment.”

In other words, we might know in our heads that a Twinkie or a chocolate shake is a heart attack waiting to happen. But our gut just can’t resist the siren call of all that tasty sugar or fat. And so we eat.

And eat.

And eat.

Food and beverage companies have long argued that if their products are used in moderation, they don’t pose a danger to public health. They also say it’s unfair to blame them for causing the obesity epidemic.

“If we really want to solve this national public health challenge, we must focus on educating Americans through comprehensive approaches that include nutrition education based in fact and focusing on total diet and exercise,” Susan Neely, head of the American Beverage Assn., said in a statement.

Personal responsibility is certainly a factor — no one forces us to stuff our faces. But Goldstein and other health advocates say consumers are brazenly manipulated by an industry that spends billions of dollars annually getting us to consume what it knows is bad for us.

“Up to now, it’s been a complete free-for-all, with the food industry convincing us to eat more and more of their high-fat, high-salt, high-sugar products,” Goldstein said. “It’s time that this was addressed through public policy.”

And tobacco regulation shows the way.

The rate of adults who smoke peaked at 45% in 1954, according to Gallup. It remained around 40% through the early 1970s and then started dropping as awareness about the dangers of nicotine grew, and as state and federal officials enacted anti-smoking programs.

Today, the adult smoking rate is about 20%. The same percentage applies to older teens, while about 6% of younger teens are smokers, according to the CDC.

The answer seems obvious: If we want to protect ourselves from a deadly epidemic of heart disease, diabetes and other ailments, just as we’ve taken steps to protect ourselves from an epidemic of lung cancer, we need to act.

And that means strict — some might say draconian — measures to reduce consumption of what’s bad for us, and aggressive campaigns to get us to eat and behave in a healthier fashion.

“It doesn’t seem at all draconian to me,” said Toni Yancey, a professor of health sciences at the UCLA School of Public Health. “We need to change social norms to make certain foods less appealing, just as we made it less appealing to smoke.”

We’re already removing sugary sodas and junk food from schools, and we’re doing it to help kids be healthier. Surely the same rationale applies to the rest of society.

I’m not saying we close down all McDonald’s and Burger King outlets. I’m saying we significantly limit advertising and sponsorship by companies selling, as Goldstein put it, high-fat, high-salt, high-sugar products.

This has worked for tobacco. It’s worked (on a largely volunteer basis) for alcohol. It can work for junk food.

Yancey said a good place to start would be government buildings — eliminate all bad-for-you foods and beverages. Instead, make healthful alternatives available. Gradually, if the political will can be found, expand the junk food ban to all workplaces, just as smoking bans spread from the public to the private sector.

Meanwhile, we need to step up wellness efforts to get people to make healthier choices and exercise more. These programs should be funded by levies on the foods that contribute most to obesity, and the obvious place to start is soda.

The beverage industry fiercely opposes such ideas. The chief financial officer of Coca-Cola Co., Gary Fayard, said at an industry conference this month that soda makers need to band together to fight any new taxes on their products.

Researchers at Harvard University say soft drinks are a “major driver” of obesity in the United States, and that raising the price of a can of soda by about a third could cut consumption by as much as 26%.

Tax money could also be put to better use.

“Because we subsidize corn, it ends up as high-fructose corn syrup,” Yancey said. “Why not subsidize healthy foods instead?”

I asked her what she thinks the obesity rate will be 30 years from now.

“I think it will be even higher,” Yancey replied. “Adults will be fatter.”

But if we act now, she said, future generations of kids won’t be exposed to all the cues and temptations that contribute to runaway waistlines.

“Hopefully they’ll be less fat,” Yancey said. “That’s where we’ll turn the tide.”

Obesity and junk food: Taking a cue from tobacco control – latimes.com.