Salt shaker

The New York Times, May 29, 2010

With salt under attack for its ill effects on the nation’s health, the food giant Cargill kicked off a campaign last November to spread its own message.

“Salt is a pretty amazing compound,” Alton Brown, a Food Network star, gushes in a Cargill video called Salt 101. “So make sure you have plenty of salt in your kitchen at all times.”

The campaign by Cargill, which both produces and uses salt, promotes salt as “life enhancing” and suggests sprinkling it on foods as varied as chocolate cookies, fresh fruit, ice cream and even coffee. “You might be surprised,” Mr. Brown says, “by what foods are enhanced by its briny kiss.”

By all appearances, this is a moment of reckoning for salt. High blood pressure is rising among adults and children. Government health experts estimate that deep cuts in salt consumption could save 150,000 lives a year.

Since processed foods account for most of the salt in the American diet, national health officials, Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg of New York and Michelle Obama are urging food companies to greatly reduce their use of salt. Last month, the Institute of Medicine went further, urging the government to force companies to do so.

But the industry is working overtly and behind the scenes to fend off these attacks, using a shifting set of tactics that have defeated similar efforts for 30 years, records and interviews show. Industry insiders call the strategy “delay and divert” and say companies have a powerful incentive to fight back: they crave salt as a low-cost way to create tastes and textures. Doing without it risks losing customers, and replacing it with more expensive ingredients risks losing profits.

When health advocates first petitioned the federal government to regulate salt in 1978, food companies sponsored research aimed at casting doubt on the link between salt and hypertension. Two decades later, when federal officials tried to cut the salt in products labeled “healthy,” companies argued that foods already low in sugar and fat would not sell with less salt.

Now, the industry is blaming consumers for resisting efforts to reduce salt in all foods, pointing to, as Kellogg put it in a letter to a federal nutrition advisory committee, “the virtually intractable nature of the appetite for salt.”

The federal committee is finishing up recommendations on nutrient issues including salt. While its work is overseen by the Department of Agriculture, records released to The New York Times show that the industry nominated a majority of its members and has presented the panel with its own research. It includes two studies commissioned by ConAgra suggesting that the country could save billions of dollars more in health care and lost productivity costs by simply nudging Americans to eat a little less food, rather than less salty food.

Even as it was moving from one line of defense to another, the processed food industry’s own dependence on salt deepened, interviews with company scientists show. Beyond its own taste, salt also masks bitter flavors and counters a side effect of processed food production called “warmed-over flavor,” which, the scientists said, can make meat taste like “cardboard” or “damp dog hair.”

Salt also works in tandem with fat and sugar to achieve flavors that grip the consumer and do not let go — an allure the industry has recognized for decades. “Once a preference is acquired,” a top scientist at Frito-Lay wrote in a 1979 internal memorandum, “most people do not change it, but simply obey it.”

In recent months, food companies, including Kellogg, have said they were redoubling efforts to reduce salt. But they say they can go only so far, so fast without compromising tastes consumers have come to relish or salt’s ability to preserve food. “We have to earn the consumer’s trust every day,” said George Dowdie, a senior vice president of Campbell Soup. “And if you disappoint the consumer, there is no guarantee they will come back.”

via Pushed to Lower Salt Use, Food Industry Pushes Back – NYTimes.com.

Salt shaker

Salt may be a hidden killer but as health campaigners call for regulations, the picture keeps shifting. Geoff Cumming sifts through the evidence

Give the food police credit for trying. Knocked back on calls for maximum sugar limits, junk food advertising bans and school tuckshop restrictions, some health experts now want a government clampdown on the amount of salt we eat.

A call by the United States Institute of Medicine for the Obama Administration to impose maximum limits for salt content – and progressively lower them – across a vast range of foods is the kind of intervention needed here, say the Stroke Foundation and leading researchers.

Despite quiet moves to reduce salt content by New Zealand and multinational food manufacturers in the last five years, some experts claim a national strategy is needed.

“We don’t think leaving it to industry alone will be enough,” says Stroke Foundation chief executive Mark Vivian.

“The general public can be sold the message that salt is important as a flavour and a preservative but who is saying ‘salt is killing us’? What’s the strategy around the health implications of too much salt?”

Too much salt has long been linked to high blood pressure, a leading cause of cardiovascular disease and strokes, along with obesity, smoking and excessive alcohol consumption.

Together, heart disease and strokes are our leading killers, responsible for around 32 per cent of deaths each year, ahead of cancer (28 per cent).

Yet salt has escaped the blowtorch applied to saturated fats, sugar, alcohol and tobacco as health watchdogs try to change behaviours to reduce premature deaths and soaring medical costs.

Meantime, changed diets – a trend towards more packaged and processed foods, ready-to-eat meals, more fast food and eating out – lead researchers to suspect our salt intake has gone through the roof.

They already believe our average daily salt intake is at least 50 per cent higher than the safe maximum of no more than 5.8g (just over a teaspoon) a day, and some experts argue the limit should be set even lower. Sampling of 704 blood donors in Hamilton and Dunedin in the 1990s found women were consuming an average 9.2g of salt a day and men 11.3g/day.

The problem is that most of our salt intake comes not from what we sprinkle on to home cooking but from the packaged, processed and ready-to-eat foods we are increasingly buying.

Several recent international studies have highlighted the potential to significantly reduce strokes and heart disease simply by targeting salt. Researchers argue that a national strategy to lower salt levels would be more effective than tobacco control in reducing premature deaths and reducing the billions spent on high blood pressure medication and hospital care. It is seen as a “simple” intervention which would remove the onus from individuals to cut down.

READ MORE: Pure, white and deadly – Health – NZ Herald News.

The Food and Drug Administration on Tuesday announced a gradual but potentially far-reaching effort to reduce the amount of salt Americans consume in a bid to combat high blood pressure, heart disease, strokes and other health problems that have soared to near-epidemic proportions.

The FDA’s efforts will begin by seeking voluntary cutbacks by the food industry. But ultimately, the agency may resort to regulating acceptable levels of sodium in food and beverages.

“Nothing is off the table,” said FDA spokeswoman Meghan Scott. “Everyone’s in agreement that something needs to be done….We just don’t know what it’s going to look like.”

The FDA’s decision was applauded by public health advocacy groups and scientists, who have long pointed up the link between high salt intake and a host of serious – and costly – medical problems.

But it was also criticized by some industry groups, and some conservative political leaders denounced it as another government assault on personal freedom.

The deliberate pace sketched by the FDA, and the absence of any immediate plans to issue regulations, were in contrast to a strongly worded report concurrently released Tuesday by the Institute of Medicine, the health arm of the National Academy of Sciences.

The institute declared that expeditious “regulatory action is necessary” because efforts to educate the public about the perils of excessive dietary salt and voluntary sodium-cutting efforts by industry have failed, although the institute called for such regulations to take effect gradually.

On a daily basis, Americans consume almost 50% more than the roughly one teaspoon of salt recommended as a maximum by the federal government’s 2005 Dietary Guidelines for Americans, according to the institute’s report.

Sodium intake is “simply too high to be safe,” said Dr. Jane E. Henney, former commissioner of the Food and Drug Administration and chairwoman of the institute committee that produced the report. “Clearly, salt is essential.… We need it. But the level we’re taking in right now is far beyond the maximal levels we need.”

The 14-member panel’s findings, more than a year in the making, come on the heels of a welter of studies tallying the health and economic costs of excessive salt intake.

Researchers from the Harvard School of Public Health predicted that, if dietary sodium consumption declined to the levels recommended in the 2005 federal guidelines, some 90,000 deaths could be averted yearly.

A Rand Corp. study published in September estimated that reducing American sodium intake to recommended levels could save $18 billion yearly in treatment for hypertension, stroke, renal disease and heart failure associated with excessive salt consumption.

“There is now overwhelming evidence that we must treat sodium reduction as a critical public health priority,” said Dr. Walter Willett, chairman of the Harvard School of Public Health’s department of nutrition.

Willett, who was a key figure in the recent federal initiative to drive trans fats from the U.S. food supply, noted how quickly the U.S. food industry adapted to those new rules, and called for that industry’s “best creative minds to bring similar leadership” to the bid to reduce sodium.

But the head of the salt lobby blasted efforts to curb salt consumption as unwarranted and overly broad.

“It’s not scientifically sound,” said Lori Roman, president of the Salt Institute. “They’re talking about some very drastic reductions. They could be harming people.”

Another key industry trade association, the Grocery Manufacturers Assn., took a more measured approach.

It said in a statement that food makers already offer low- or no-sodium versions of many items. “We look forward to working with the U.S. Food and Drug Administration to develop a national sodium reduction strategy that will help the consumer,” the group said.

The FDA’s decision to press food makers to reduce salt caps a 30-year campaign by the Center for Science in the Public Interest. The center sued the FDA in 2005 to try to force the agency to reclassify salt as a food additive subject to regulation.

Salt currently is categorized as a substance “generally recognized as safe,” hence not regulated in food products.

Center director Michael Jacobson urged the FDA to adopt mandatory limits on salt swiftly, and then phase them in slowly. A gradual phase-in is considered crucial so that consumers do not notice a taste difference in foods with diminished amounts of salt.

While public health advocates like Jacobson hailed the clampdown, libertarian skeptics of government viewed it as another sign of a nanny state run amok.

“It’s another encroachment on people’s personal freedom,” said Gary Howard, spokesman for Campaign for Liberty, a libertarian advocacy group formed in the wake of Texas Rep. Ron Paul’s 2008 presidential campaign.

“They’ve already gotten into people’s medical care,” Howard said. “Where will they go next? Will they mandate exercise?”

Food and Drug Administration calls for salt cutbacks – latimes.com.

Before surging obesity rates made villains of trans fats and sugars, salt was the big nutritional bad guy in the American diet, linked to hypertension, heart disease and stroke
.

Then waistlines expanded and expanded some more, and the focus shifted.

Now, aware that Americans’ salt consumption has risen by 50 percent over the past 40 years largely because of an increased reliance on a diet of processed and restaurant foods, public health experts and politicians are attempting to put the spotlight back on salt and its harmful health effects.

Last month, New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg asked restaurants and foodmakers to consider voluntarily reducing the salt content in their foods by 25 percent over five years. A few days later, San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom, who suggested last fall that the city find a way to scale back sugar consumption, said he was looking into Bloomberg’s proposal, too.

Meanwhile, a UCSF doctor released a study suggesting that regulating the salt content in foods could save up to $24 billion a year in health care costs.

“We’re living in such a high-salt environment now. It requires a public health approach to reducing salt rather than an individual approach,” said Dr. Kirsten Bibbins- Domingo, co-director of UCSF’s Center for Vulnerable Populations at San Francisco General Hospital and lead author of the salt study.

“Salt was one of those things we put on the back burner and ignored for a while,” she said. “But we’re recognizing that reducing salt by even a small amount will have a widespread beneficial effect.”

Good and bad of salt

Salt is a dietary mineral made up mostly of sodium, which the body needs in small amounts. It maintains the proper balance of fluids in the body, for one thing. But it’s easy to get too much sodium, especially for people who already have high blood pressure.

Black people and people older than 50 tend to be particularly sensitive to too much sodium. Public health experts say 50 to 70 percent of Americans should be controlling their sodium intake and keeping it below 2,300 milligrams, or about a teaspoon of salt, a day.

Doctors have known about the relationship between sodium and high blood pressure for more than 100 years, which is why salt was one of the first major targets in campaigns to prevent heart disease. But more recent research has shown that other factors – especially obesity – play a larger role in causing high blood pressure and, in turn, heart disease and stroke.

Losing 20 pounds, for example, can lower systolic blood pressure by 15 to 20 points, research has shown. Americans consume an average of about 3,400 milligrams – or roughly a teaspoon and a half – of salt a day, but cutting sodium to the recommended maximum of 2,300 milligrams can shave two to eight points off the systolic blood pressure.

With that in mind, it makes some sense to focus on helping people lose weight – by cutting out trans fats and scaling back carbohydrates – rather than reducing their salt intake, said Eric Hernandez, a registered dietitian with the Community Health Resource Center, a nonprofit affiliate of California Pacific Medical Center.

“In the hierarchy of nutrition and risky foods, there are others ahead of salt,” Hernandez said.

Ironically, Hernandez pointed out, the relatively recent focus on weight loss has probably contributed to people increasing the amount of salt they eat, especially in the form of premade meals designed to be low-fat and low-calorie. When food manufacturers take out the fat, they often add salt to make them taste better.

That leads to the main problem when it comes to reducing sodium: Americans don’t have a lot of control over how much salt they eat. As much as 80 percent of the salt in a typical American diet comes from processed or restaurant foods; only about 10 percent of salt intake comes from food people prepare and season themselves, and the remaining 10 percent comes from the sodium found naturally in foods.

Cooking at home helps

Simply cooking more often at home would help most people reduce their salt intake, said Dr. T. James Lawrence, a hypertension expert at Kaiser Permanente in San Francisco. But sodium is prevalent in food products most people would never think of – cereal and bread, for example. And two products that look and taste very similar can have very different sodium levels.

It’s impractical to ask most people to keep count of their sodium intake throughout the day, Lawrence said. It’s almost impossible to get the sodium level of prepared restaurant foods. He tends to tell patients to read labels when they shop and compare the sodium content of similar foods, just to make sure they’re buying the product with the lowest level.

It won’t take long for most people to adjust to diets of lower salt.

“Many people are used to a high-sodium diet, so things lower in sodium taste a little bland to them at first,” Lawrence said. “But our taste buds get used to the change over a period of a few weeks. If you have a potato chip covered in salt, and then you reduce the salt by one-third, it’s still pretty salty.”

Read more: http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2010/02/14/MNEB1BS6EO.DTL#ixzz0fxtas5yF

Health experts urge Americans to hold the salt.

Salt shaker

The Boston Globe, Karen Weintraub, February 1, 2010

Sure, a big deli pickle is salty. So is a strip of bacon or handful of chips. But who knew that a single serving of milk or yogurt has about 5 percent, or around 120 mg, of the recommended daily allowance of sodium? And a slice of bread – one slice, not a sandwich – has nearly 10 percent of the RDA.

Now, led by a New York push to cut salt consumption nationwide, health departments and advocacy groups around the country are pressuring restaurants and food manufacturers to cut back. Last month, the National Salt Reduction Initiative, which includes the Massachusetts Department of Public Health and the Boston Public Health Commission, announced it hoped to reduce Americans’ total salt intake by at least 20 percent over the next five years. At the same time, some researchers are questioning whether cutting salt consumption for everyone is necessary or even wise.

To meet its 20 percent goal, the national initiative has set two- and four-year voluntary targets for gradually reducing salt levels in 61 categories of packaged food and 25 classes of restaurant food.

Americans eat at least twice as much salt as they should, according to the initiative. By slowly dialing back the salt content of foods, consumers won’t even notice the difference, public health officials promise.

“It’s pretty hard for any of us to avoid’’ foods like milk, bread, and breakfast cereal, said Dr. Kirsten Bibbins-Domingo, an associate professor of medicine and epidemiology at the University of California, San Francisco. Bibbins-Domingo said her patients sometimes speak with pride about replacing fast food and chips with healthier alternatives such as vegetable soup. But “from a pure sodium basis, they would have been better off eating the potato chips,’’ she said, because soups are often so salt-laden.

(Many people use the terms salt and sodium interchangeably, though there are types of salt that do not contain sodium. There are about 2,300 mg, or 2.3 grams, of sodium in the average teaspoon of salt.)

A typical cup of commercially prepared soup easily contains the equivalent of a quarter teaspoon of salt – usually the smallest of a set of measuring spoons. So does one tuna sandwich on white bread with mayo. Even raw chicken is loaded up with salt by processors, Bibbins-Domingo said, as a preservative, but also to increase its water weight and therefore its cost.

Most food could be just as safe and tasty with less salt, according to the initiative.

A number of companies, such as the Campbell Soup Co., Kraft Foods, and Unilever, had already committed to reducing the sodium in at least some of their products.

“Campbell’s has done a pretty good job of reducing sodium levels and if Campbell’s can do it, other companies can do it, too,’’ said Julie Greenstein, deputy director of Health Promotion Policy for the Center for Science in the Public Interest, a nutrition advocacy group that has long lobbied for salt reduction.Continued…

via There’s a push to reduce the amount of salt in foods. How much will it help, or hurt? – The Boston Globe.

In a report that may bolster public policy efforts to get Americans to reduce the amount of salt in their diets, scientists writing in The New England Journal of Medicine conclude that lowering the amount of salt people eat by even a small amount could reduce cases of heart disease, stroke and heart attacks as much as reductions in smoking,obesity and cholesterol levels.

Go to the The New England Journal of Medicine for the full article.

If everyone consumed half a teaspoon less salt per day, there would be between 54,000 and 99,000 fewer heart attacks each year and between 44,000 and 92,000 fewer deaths, according to the study, which was conducted by scientists at University of California San Francisco, Stanford University Medical Center and Columbia University Medical Center.

The report comes as health authorities at federal, state and municipal levels are considering policies that would have the effect of pressuring food companies to reduce salt in processed foods, which are considered to be the source of much of the salt Americans eat.

Last week, New York City announced an initiative to urge food manufacturers and restaurant chains to reduce salt in their products nationwide by 25 percent over the next five years. California, according to an author of the study, Kirsten Bibbins-Domingo, an associate professor of medicine and epidemiology at University of California, San Francisco, is considering setting salt limits on food the state purchase for schools, prisons and other public institutions.

A panel appointed by the Institute of Medicine, the widely respected independent research arm of the National Academies of Science, is close to issuing a report that will make recommendations about reducing salt intake, including actions government and manufacturers can take.

Dr. Bibbins-Domingo also said the Food and Drug Administration was considering whether to change the designation of salt from a food additive that is generally considered safe to a category that would require companies to give consumers more information alerting them to high levels of salt in food. An F.D.A. spokesman was unable to say Wednesday whether such discussions were taking place. “We are actively looking at how to improve the nutrition content of the American content,” he said.

“For 40 years in this country we’ve been trying to get individuals to reduce the amount of sodium we consume and it hasn’t worked,” said Cheryl A. M. Anderson, an assistant professor of epidemiology and international health at Johns Hopkins University and a member of the Institute of Medicine panel.

“We need to collectively come together and approach the problem with a combination of efforts, including changing the food supply,” said Dr. Anderson, who also is a co-author of an editorial about the study in The New England Journal of Medicine. “This type of evidence really helps us support that movement toward not just relying on the individual to do something that is really difficult, limit salt.”

The study involved a computerized model that analyzed previous studies to estimate the benefits of salt reduction on lowering blood pressure and the lowered blood pressure’s effect on decreasing heart disease, stroke and heart attacks.

The researchers found that everyone would benefit from less salt, but people at higher risk for heart problems — blacks, people with hypertension and people over 65 — would benefit most.

Not every expert in the field of salt science was persuaded.

Michael Alderman, a professor of medicine and epidemiology at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine, said the research was “based on the assumption that there would be no other effects of reduced sodium, but that’s not so.” He said that salt reduction could lead to insulin resistance and imbalances of hormones in the adrenal and kidney systems, and that clinical trials comparing these effects with the benefits of lowering blood pressure needed to be conducted.

Dr. Norman K. Hollenberg, a professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School, questioned the assertion that the benefit of salt-reduction policies would be as great as antismoking policies.

“If we’re going to change something, smoking would be No. 1,” Dr. Hollenberg said. “Salt intake would come somewhere well below it.”

Dr. Bibbins-Domingo said that for many people the decrease in blood pressure would be modest, which is why, she said, “many physicians have thrown up their hands and said, ‘I’m not going to advise my patients to reduce salt because it’s too hard for patients and the benefits for any individual are small.’

“But small incremental changes in salt, such as lowering salt in tomato sauce or breads and cereals by a small amount, would achieve small changes in blood pressure that would have a measurable effect across the whole population,” she said. “That’s the reason why this intervention works better than just targeting smokers.”

via Big Benefits Are Seen From Eating Less Salt – NYTimes.com.

William, Neuman, The New York Times,  January 10, 2010

First New York City required restaurants to cut out trans fat. Then it made restaurant chains post calorie counts on their menus. Now it wants to protect people from another health scourge: salt.

On Monday, the Bloomberg administration plans to unveil a broad new health initiative aimed at encouraging food manufacturers and restaurant chains across the country to curtail the amount of salt in their products.

The plan, for which the city claims support from health agencies in other cities and states, sets a goal of reducing the amount of salt in packaged and restaurant food by 25 percent over the next five years.

Public health experts say that would reduce the incidence of high blood pressure and should help prevent some of the strokes and heart attacks associated with that condition. The plan is voluntary for food companies and involves no legislation. It allows companies to cut salt gradually over five years so the change is not so noticeable to consumers.

“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, whose department is leading the effort. Eighty percent of the salt in Americans’ diets comes from packaged or restaurant food. Dr. Farley said reducing salt from those sources would save lives.

Since taking office, Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg, who just began his third term, has gained a reputation as an advocate for healthy living, initiating prominent campaigns against smoking and harmful trans fats. To combat obesity, he has campaigned for calorie labeling on restaurant menus and warned consumers about sugary soft drinks.

The city’s salt campaign is in some ways more ambitious and less certain of success than the ones it waged against smoking and obesity. For one thing, the changes it prescribes require cooperation on a national scale, city officials said, because major food companies cannot be expected to alter their products for just the New York market.

And removing salt from many products can be complicated. Salt plays many roles in food, enhancing flavor, preventing spoilage and improving shelf life. It helps bread to rise and brown.

The city’s campaign against salt resembles its push to cut trans fat from restaurant foods, which began with a call for voluntary compliance. When that did not work, the city passed a law to force restaurants to eliminate trans fat.

But city officials said it would be difficult to legislate sodium reduction.

“There’s not an easy regulatory fix,” said Geoffrey Cowley, an associate health commissioner. “You would have to micromanage so many targets for so many different products.”

He said officials hoped the campaign would work through public pressure. Companies that complied would benefit from good publicity.

The city has been discussing the program with the food industry since late 2008, yet only a few companies appear ready to jump on board. One of those is A.& P., the supermarket chain.

“We think it’s a very realistic set of criteria that our suppliers can adhere to,” said Douglas A. Palmer, vice president for store brands at A.& P.

He said the company expected to embrace the city’s salt reduction goals for the hundreds of store brand products it sells under labels like America’s Choice and Smart Price in 435 supermarkets throughout the Northeast and Mid-Atlantic regions. In Manhattan, the chain operates under the name Food Emporium.

Subway, the fast food sandwich chain, also said it expected to commit to the city’s salt guidelines at its nearly 23,000 stores across the country.

Lanette R. Kovachi, Subway’s corporate dietitian, said the company has reduced salt in stores in several other countries, including Britain and Australia, in response to government programs there.

“We view these as achievable goals,” she said.

The company’s best-selling item, a six-inch turkey sandwich, is already below the city’s five-year average target for lunch meat sandwiches in restaurants. But the chain also has a six-inch spicy Italian sub whose salt content is well above the city’s goals.

On Monday, after a year of consultations with industry, the city will release preliminary targets for sodium content. After a review, the city will unveil final targets in the spring and ask companies to commit to the program.

The system proposed by the city is complex, with reductions ranging from 10 to 40 percent for 61 classes of packaged foods and 25 classes of restaurant foods.

It would measure the average salt content of a company’s entire line of a particular type of product, like canned vegetables, breakfast cereals or frozen dinners, adjusted to give greater weight to products with the highest sales. That would allow companies to maintain a range of sodium levels but would create incentive to cut back on salt in the most popular items.

While most food companies say they agree at least with the goal of reducing salt, some medical researchers have questioned the scientific basis for the initiative, saying insufficient research had been done on possible effects. While agreeing that reducing salt is likely to lower average blood pressure, they say it can lead to other physiological changes, some of which may be associated with heart problems.

An elaborate clinical trial could weigh the pluses and minuses of cutting salt in a large group of people. But that would cost millions, and it has not been done.

Dr. Michael H. Alderman, a professor at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine, said the city’s initiative, if successful in reducing salt, would amount to an uncontrolled experiment with the public’s health.

“I’m always worried about unintended consequences,” he said.

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.

Several major companies, including some that have been leaders in reducing salt, said they would not join the city initiative.

“One of the things we want to bring across to New York City is that sodium reduction does not always follow a prescribed time or prescribed progress,” said Chor-San Khoo, vice president for global nutrition and health at the Campbell Soup Company. “There’s no one size fits all.”

Campbell has already made significant reductions in the amount of salt in many of its products, including many canned soups, V8 beverages and Pepperidge Farm breads.

“We will continue to reduce sodium as long as there’s consumer acceptance in the marketplace,” Ms. Khoo said.

ConAgra, which makes a wide array of products, including Hunt’s canned tomato products and Chef Boyardee packaged meals, said it would continue with previously announced plans to cut the sodium in its portfolio of products by 20 percent by 2015.

“We don’t have plans to join other organizations’ pledges,” the company said.

via Citing Hazard, New York Says Hold the Salt – NYTimes.com.

Salt shaker

Unilever has announced plans to cut the salt content across its global range of 22,000 products with an eye on achieving the five grams daily maximum salt intake recommended by the World Health Organization.

Unilever announces ‘holistic’ salt reduction strategy.