Campbell Soup Drops the Salt Scare Fanatics

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He's a phony--fake indignation at chimerical threats is his stock in trade

Are you seriously so out of it that you dont know that there are multitudes of Americans who are pissed off about government and government supported intrusion into the market place? You paint yourself as a fool when you carry on as if it is just me. You paint yourself as an asshole when you keep claiming that what I say is fake, but then we have well known for a long time what you are, plenty of people comment on it.

But you are a ******* idiot.

That's 'bated breath, you idiot.

plenty of people comment on it.

Isn't Michelle Obama's campaign paid for by the government?

Say, Chicken Little . . . got that evidence that the government forced Campbells' to change their recipe?

The government’s latest dietary guidelines encourage Americans to reduce sodium intake from an average of about 3,400 milligrams a day to 1,500 to 2,300 milligrams per day. As part of her campaign against childhood obesity, Michelle Obama has urged processors to step up efforts to reduce salt, sugar and fat in foods targeted at kids.

So far, the FDA has said it is not currently working on regulations, nor has it made a decision to regulate sodium content in foods yet.

"Over the coming weeks, the FDA will more thoroughly review the recommendations of the IOM report and build plans for how the FDA can continue to work with other federal agencies, public health and consumer groups, and the food industry to support the reduction of sodium levels in the food supply," the agency said in a statement. "The Department of Health and Human Services will be establishing an interagency working group on sodium at the Department that will review options and next steps."

Two members of Congress urged the Food and Drug Administration on Tuesday to move quickly to limit the amount of salt in processed foods, calling the matter a "public health crisis" that demanded a swift response from government.

"I understand they want to do it in a phased kind of a deal, but I don't want it to be too long," said Sen. Tom Harkin (D-Iowa), chairman of the Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee. "This is crying out for change that's long overdue."

Rep. Rosa DeLauro (D-Conn.) agreed, saying in a conference call with Harkin and reporters: "I don't want this to take 10 years. . . . This is a public health crisis."

Their comments came after the release Tuesday of a report of experts, convened by the Institute of Medicine, that found that most Americans are consuming dangerous levels of sodium and that voluntary efforts by the food industry to reduce salt have failed. The report recommended that the FDA immediately launch efforts to limit salt levels over a period of years to allow consumers to adjust to less salty food.

The Food and Drug Administration is planning an unprecedented effort to gradually reduce the salt consumed each day by Americans, saying that less sodium in everything from soup to nuts would prevent thousands of deaths from hypertension and heart disease. The initiative, to be launched this year, would eventually lead to the first legal limits on the amount of salt allowed in food products.

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FDA readies first legal limits on amount of salt in foods
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The government intends to work with the food industry and health experts to reduce sodium gradually over a period of years to adjust the American palate to a less salty diet, according to FDA sources, who spoke on condition of anonymity because the initiative had not been formally announced.

Officials have not determined the salt limits. In a complicated undertaking, the FDA would analyze the salt in spaghetti sauces, breads and thousands of other products that make up the $600 billion food and beverage market, sources said. Working with food manufacturers, the government would set limits for salt in these categories, designed to gradually ratchet down sodium consumption. The changes would be calibrated so that consumers barely notice the modification.

The legal limits would be open to public comment, but administration officials do not think they need additional authority from Congress.

"This is a 10-year program," one source said. "This is not rolling off a log. We're talking about a comprehensive phase-down of a widely used ingredient. We're talking about embedded tastes in a whole generation of people.

Is salt bad for us? In just the past few months researchers have published seemingly contradictory studies showing that excess sodium in the diet leads to heart disease, reduces your blood pressure, or has no effect at all. We called Scientific American advisory board member Marion Nestle, a professor of nutrition, food studies, and public health at New York University and the author of Food Politics, to help parse the latest thinking regarding salt and heart health.


[An edited transcript of the interview follows.]

I understand this area is controversial.

Hugely.

Could you take us through some of the controversy?

If you talk to any kidney specialist or anybody working on hypertension they will tell you that the first thing they do is try to lower the amount of salt their patients are eating because it helps with blood pressure control. But if you do a clinical trial where you try to put large amounts of people on a low-salt diet, you just don't see much difference between the people who say they eat a lot of salt and the people who say they don't eat a lot of salt. In clinical trials the relationship doesn't show up.

Why not?

Two reasons: One that it's impossible to put a population of people on a low-salt diet. Roughly 80 percent of the salt in the American food supply is in foods before people eat them—either in processed food or in restaurant food. Because so much salt is added to the food supply and because so many people eat out, it's impossible to find a population of people who are eating a low-salt diet. They basically don't exist.

In the one comparative epidemiological study they did some years ago—the Intersalt study—they managed to find two populations of people in remote areas of the jungle someplace who weren't eating a lot of processed foods and who weren't eating in restaurants. They were on a low-salt diet, and they never developed hypertension.

So in that trial did they put one group on a high-salt diet and put one on a low-salt diet?

No, no, no. It wasn't a comparative trial. They just looked at the amount of salt that populations were eating and the amount of hypertension that they had. Only in these two populations were there very low rates of hypertension. With everybody else, the salt intake was so high that they couldn't see any difference between high and higher.

So except for people living in the jungle somewhere, there aren't any populations on Earth that are eating a low amount of salt?

Not anymore. Maybe we used to be, but not anymore. We have a global food supply, so it's impossible to do a really careful study.

What's the other issue?

Not everybody responds to a low-salt diet. There's a proportion of people in the population who are sensitive to salt—if you lower their intake of salt, then their blood pressure goes down. There's another (probably larger) percentage of the population who doesn't respond. They are people who can eat as much salt as they want and still their blood pressure is low.

So you have this curious anomaly where whenever you do a clinical trial you get these complicated, difficult-to-interpret results that don't show much of an effect. But everybody who works with patients who have hypertension think they do better [on a low-salt diet]. And every committee, body and group that has ever in my lifetime considered whether salt has anything to do with hypertension says, "yes," and has recommended salt reduction as a public health measure. That's the curious situation that we are in.

There's one other wrinkle and has to do with people's taste for salt. Campbell's soup, for example, just announced yesterday that [they] can't sell low-sodium soups and so they're adding salt back. And part of the reason they can't sell it is that if you're on a high-salt diet, food that isn't salty tastes terrible to you. And if you're on a low-salt diet it takes three to six weeks to get accustomed to being on a low-salt diet, and then everything you eat tastes salty. And so the more salt in the food supply the more salt people need to bring the flavor you associate with salt. That complicates things, too.

So from a public health standpoint, if you want to deal with the percentage of the population that seems to be extremely responsive to a low-salt diet, what you want to do is get the sodium level in the food supply as low as you can. And that makes the people who sell salty food go nuts. And it makes the people who like salty foods go nuts. They think the food tastes bland. And so there are different stakeholders in this system who have very different views, and that accounts for the level of passion, I think, in a situation where the science is murky.

Couldn't you just make the case that people should eat fewer processed foods?

Well what about restaurants? I'm a food professional. I eat out professionally.

Well chefs need to make their food taste good—otherwise people won't go to their restaurant.

No, they need to make the food taste good by their standard. And chefs, because they're dealing with a great deal of salt in their food, tend to raise the sodium level. It just goes up and up and up and up. As they get more used to a certain level of salt taste, it no longer tastes salty to them and they have to raise it. So the pressure is to raise the salt in the food supply. And reducing it is very difficult.

So you advocate regulation to limit the amount of salt in restaurants?

Yeah, I do. Certainly for processed food. I think everybody would be healthier if they ate less salt. You can always add salt if you don't think it's salty enough, whereas I can't take it away if it's presented to me. And that's the dilemma. And the ferocity of the arguments gets into the whole question of personal responsibility and "nanny state" and all of these other enormous debates that really don't get at the public health question. And the public health question is hard to resolve because the science is really difficult to do.

Couldn't you imagine a study where you look at sodium levels in urine, which is a direct measure of salt intake, and correlate that with hypertension?

Yeah they've done that, and they don't see any difference in hypertension rates. The reason is that the baseline [level of salt intake] is so high that it doesn't make any difference. To suggest that people get down to 1,500 milligrams a day—the recommended level—would be really really hard, and that level may be too high. And it's unclear that that's the right level because you can't do a really decent dose response, and because people vary so much.

Will there ever be a good study?

I don't know!

Is it possible that this represents the limits of science? It's black hole event horizons and salt intake?

It may be. It very well may be. Or the science that we have is completely adequate and we already have the answer. I was once at a sodium meeting at which there were a bunch of statisticians. And I left with the statisticians and they said that "anyone who thinks that salt has anything to do with hypertension is delusional." And that was on the basis on the clinical trials that show so little. And yet every single committee that has dealt with this question says, "We really need to lower the sodium in the food supply." Now either every single committee that has ever dealt with this issue is delusional, which I find hard to believe—I mean they can't all be making this up—[or] there must be a clinical or rational basis for the unanimity of these decisions.

But that's the thing—these committees should be able to point to the evidence that supports their recommendations. But they seem to rely so much on anecdote and individual experience.

Or on some clinical trials that everybody argues about. Everybody argues about every clinical trial no matter what the conclusion. So I find the whole thing completely fascinating. I don't think anybody can underestimate the difficulty of doing nutritional research. Because people aren't eating just sodium. They're eating sodium in food. And it may be that high-sodium diets are a marker for some other things in the food supply or it may be that the physiological differences are so profound that you just don't get clean results. That human variation is so great. I don't know the answer to that. I just know it works for me. That's anecdotal. With an "n" of one

If you divide the observational studies into two piles—"coffee is good for you" and "coffee is bad for you"—the bulk of the flimsy evidence falls on the good-for-you side. More to the point, there just isn't any persuasive evidence that coffee is harmful, says Wellons, even though people have been drinking it for centuries. That's not to say coffee can't produce a minor array of inconveniences. Caffeine at doses of 65 mg or more can help relieve headaches, but habitual caffeine use can spur chronic headaches, too. Coffee makes you more alert, but it can also provoke insomnia, anxiety, and even tremors at high doses. Regular drinkers seem to have a decreased risk of developing diabetes, but for anyone who already has the disease, a hefty cup of coffee can make things worse. Up to three cups of coffee per day may slightly lower the risk of heart attack, but drinking a large dose might also trigger a heart attack if you're already at risk.
Rest assured, we'll see more conflicting research in years to come. There's nothing especially remarkable about coffee that makes it difficult to study. Scientists could get more convincing answers if they ran intervention trials—by assigning a bunch of people to either drink coffee or abstain from it for years or decades, and then checking which group got more cancer and other diseases. But such studies take lots of money and time, and they're unlikely to happen because they're so expensive. (Industry has little incentive to bankroll this research, and the government seems to have more pressing priorities.) Instead, we're bound to get more headline-grabbing observational data that hint at what we already think we know: Coffee is scary and wonderful.

The government’s latest dietary guidelines encourage Americans to reduce sodium intake from an average of about 3,400 milligrams a day to 1,500 to 2,300 milligrams per day. As part of her campaign against childhood obesity, Michelle Obama has urged processors to step up efforts to reduce salt, sugar and fat in foods targeted at kids.

So far, the FDA has said it is not currently working on regulations, nor has it made a decision to regulate sodium content in foods yet.

Companies were told to agree to voluntary programs or else risk even more onerous government regulation.

So you acknowledge that government has not forced anyone to change anything

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So you acknowledge that government has not forced anyone to change anything

I never accused the government of forcing salt standards, because government has not done this.....yet, though the UK government has from what I hear.

Faced with pressure to ease up on sodium, big players in the food industry, such as Kraft Foods, Heinz and Unilever have responded by recently joining the National Salt Reduction Initiative (NSRI), which aims to slash salt content in retail and foodservice throughout the country by 20% in five years.
Again, next to this, Campbell’s renegade approach seems irresponsible. Surely the company should continue to encourage a healthier consumer base which, presumably, will stick around longer to enjoy its products? This is especially since research shows that our perceptions of saltiness and taste intensities can change over a relatively short period of time. In plain speak, this means that if Campbell's perseveres with the lower salt offerings and convinces its customers to do the same, diners will quickly grow accustomed to the more modestly seasoned soups.
But, maybe we shouldn't be so quick to condemn Campbell's new strategy. After all, recently published pro-sodium studies suggest that food manufacturers across the board should actually be following Campbell’s lead. Contrary to everything we’ve been previously fed, a high-profile scientific paper by The Cochrane Library, came to the following straight-stalking conclusion: “cutting down on the amount of salt has no clear benefits in terms of likelihood of dying or experiencing cardiovascular disease”.
The paper, published last week in the Journal of Hypertension, reviewed seven studies, which in total included 6489 participants, a number which, the authors say, provides sufficiently reliable results. The study - led by Professor Rod Taylor from Peninsula College of Medicine and Denistry in the UK, found no evidence to support the theory that a reduction in salt intake decreases cardiovascular disease or all-cause mortality in those with normal or raised blood pressure. Astonishingly, it also concluded that salt reduction could be detrimental to health. In people with congestive heart failure, salt restriction actually increases the risk of death from all causes, the paper claims.
If this all sounds a little sketchy to you, especially since salt has been demonized no end until now, there’s more research to support the idea that we should give the tasty mineral a break. You might recall a perplexing study published in the May issue of the Journal of the American Medical Association. It surmised that people who eat lower amounts of sodium are more likely to die from cardiovascular disease and that, among those with normal blood pressure, sodium intake didn’t lead to high blood pressure.

I DON'T WANT THE FREEDOM TO BE POISONED BY HUGE FOOD CONGLOMORATES. YOU CAN STICK THAT FREEDOM UP YOUR ******* ARSE.