Eating Liberally asks about salt
The ever curious Kerry Trueman, Eating Liberally’s kat, wants to hear more about Bloomberg’s salt assault. And well she might. Today’s New York Times has a bunch of letters weighing in from all points of view. Here’s how our conversation went:
(With a click of her mouse, EatingLiberally’s kat corners Dr. Marion Nestle, NYU professor of nutrition and author of Pet Food Politics, What to Eat and Food Politics 
Kat: New York City’s new initiative to persuade food manufacturers and restaurants to voluntarily reduce the salt in their foods by 25% over the next five years is eliciting the usual outrage from the “nanny state” naysayers, for whom excess salt consumption is yet another matter of personal responsibility.
But as you noted last Monday, “nearly 80% of salt in American diets is already in packaged and restaurant foods and if you eat them at all you have no choice about the amount of salt you are getting.” Many Americans consume more than double the daily recommended intake of sodium, contributing to thousands of deaths and billions in medical costs annually.
Mayor Bloomberg equates the food industry’s overuse of salt to such health hazards as asbestos. But Mark Kurlansky, author of Salt: A World History, insisted to WNYC’s Amy Eddings that this analogy is false because “we could reduce our salt intake on our own, if we wanted to.”
Technically, this is true, if you’re willing and able to eliminate packaged foods from your diet, stop eating out, and start cooking all your meals from scratch. Unfortunately, the percentage of folks who have the time, inclination, and resources to do this is roughly on a par with those who think that Wall Street’s robber barons earned those big bonuses.
The food industry maintains that it would gladly reduce the sodium in its products–and some are doing so surreptitiously–if only consumers conditioned to crave super salty foods would be more willing to accept reduced sodium products.
The “invisible hand” of the market can’t seem to let go of the salt shaker. Mayor Bloomberg’s proposal is a step in the right direction, but do you think it will achieve meaningful reductions, or will we ultimately end up having to regulate salt?
Dr. Nestle: I love nanny-state accusations. Whenever I hear them, I know either that food industry self-interest is involved or that the accuser really doesn’t understand that our food system already is government-regulated as can be. These kinds of actions are just tweaking of existing policy, in this case to promote better health.
At issue is the default. Right now, companies have free rein to add as much salt to their processed or prepared foods as they like. The makers of processed foods do focus-group testing to see how consumers like the taste of their products. They invariably find that below a certain level of salt–the “bliss” point—their study subjects say they don’t like it. Soups are a good example. A measly half-cup portion of the most popular Campbell’s soups contains 480 mg of sodium or more than a full gram of salt (4 grams to a teaspoon).
To someone like me who has been trying to reduce my salt intake for years, those soups taste like salt water. That’s because the taste of salt depends on how much you are eating. If you eat a lot, you need more to taste salty. If you are like me, practically all processed and restaurant foods taste unpleasantly salty.
So what to do? I say this is indeed a matter of personal choice and right now I don’t have one. If I want to eat out at all, I know I’m going to feel oversalted by the time I get home.
I want the default choice to be lower in salt. Nobody is stopping anyone from salting food. You don’t think your food tastes salty enough? Get out the salt shaker.
But let me make two other comments. One is that the amount of salt we eat is so far in excess of what we need that asking food makers and sellers to cut down can hardly make a dent in taste. A new Swedish study just out says that young men consume at least twice the salt they need and the authors are calling on government to require food makers to start cutting down.
And yes, the science is controversial and not everyone has blood pressure that goes through the roof when they eat something salty. But lots of people do. And almost everyone has blood pressure that goes up with age. As a population, we would be better off exposed to less salt in our diets.
Some food makers are already gradually cutting down on salt, but quietly so nobody notices. If every food company were required to do that, everyone would get used to a less salty taste and we all might be able to better appreciate the subtle tastes of food.
My guess is that Bloomberg has started a movement and we will be seeing much more effort to lower the salt intake of Americans. As I see it, this is about giving people a real choice about what they eat.
Correction, January 22: Juli Mandel Sloves of Campbell Soup correctly points out that I am in error. A serving of soup is 8 ounces, not 4, even though the label says that a serving is half a cup. How come? Because the can is to be diluted with another can of water, making it 21 ounces divided by 2.5 servings per can, or about 8 ounces. Complicated, no? But this means the sodium content is 480 mg per cup, not half cup, despite what the label says. I apologize for the error. But here is an excellent reason to redesign the Nutrition Facts label, alas.
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[...] This post was mentioned on Twitter by Marion Nestle, StweetSmart. StweetSmart said: "Eating Liberally asks about salt" and related posts: Food PoliticsThe ever curious Kerry Trueman, Eating Liberall… http://bit.ly/8ECrj3 [...]
I’ve read that it takes about a year for your tastebuds to re-acclimate to a low salt/no processed foods diet (and it’s definitely easier to do in the summer months, when there’s more fresh produce). After that re-acclimitization, it’s a real shock to eat anything packaged/processed (or many restaurants). These days, my eating out is limited to small, local/independent restaurants (often Japanese); places that eschew the high salt content that seems to come with chain restaurants.
The idea, though, that the food makers would gladly give up all the extra salt in food if the poor consumer just wanted it is really… well, silly. After all, the food makers are the ones who trained people to find all that extra salt acceptable in the first place!
Couldn’t restaurants and processed food makers substitute potassium for the sodium and achieve the same result without the negative side effects of a high sodium diet? Or am I missing something in my understanding of high sodium diets? I’ve been surprised when eating some foods to find they actually have low sodium levels, but are still very salty. Closer inspection often reveals higher levels of potassium.
Anyone care to weigh in? Marion- any thoughts?
I’ve noticed some products using sea salt to reduce sodium content and that seems to help some too. It seems to take less sea salt to achieve the “desired saltiness”. Some of Campbell’s soups are doing this and my admittedly salt loving mother even likes them.
I made the switch to mostly fresh foods 6 years ago due to kidney failure and yes, it does take time to cook from scratch and patience to learn how to work in a kitchen. But in a few months, my taste buds become acclimated (and I even began tasting food in all its natural glory, imagine that), I became comfortable cooking quickly and without much forethought, and I realized that salt is one of the many flavors out there that one can use to spice up a meal. I find that the way in which we overuse salt mostly masks the way food tastes instead of enhancing it.
Cooking from scratch is more about knowledge than money. Once you feel at ease with a pot, some kale, and a dash of curry powder, you know you can make anything from whatever is in your fridge. And it is interesting that soup is one of the products that people will not buy in a low sodium version due to taste, or lack of it. I find soup to the easiest dish to make and people who are soup addicts find the fresh taste of homemade soup better than anything in a can. It is quick and you can practically use any ingredients you have laying around. Buying the right tools, like an immersion blender, will make your cooking process even easier.
Salt has just become a safety blanket. We are all capable of eating fresh and healthy, no matter what budget we are on. But as with most monumental changes, we must supplement the sodium reduction with an education on how to make it feasible and delicious.
What I’d like to see is a big groundswell for actual cooking. Everyone claims not to have time for it, but they apparently have 4 hours a day to watch TV or play in the X-Box. Our priorities are completely screwy! What could possibly be more important that what we use to fuel our minds and bodies?
(For the record, though, I love salt. But I also do cook almost everything we eat, so my love of salt is really nothing like Nabisco’s. Proof: I often have to cheat a little before I give blood by jogging around so my PB will be high enough.)
I find myself struggling with people who claim to not have the time to shop for and prepare food. I believe that providing my body with good fuel is one of the most important things I do in a day, and I gladly devote the time and effort to doing it well. If that means I don’t have time to watch television or surf the internet or any of the many other things we choose to label “important,” well, I know what will make me healthier in the long run. When we abdicate this most elemental personal responsibility to others, there are almost always going to be consequences that we might prefer to avoid.
Full disclosure: I love salt, but I also use a wide range of other seasonings, because I love variety. I find I can use less salt by playing with spices and herbs and other aromatics. And, yes, I cook nearly everything we eat at our house.
And kudos to Emily for her comment about real cooking. Ditto.
[...] Now before we continue in this discussion, let’s get a bit serious, or at least scientific, for a moment. If you have had your finger on the food media pulse lately, you know about the BPA blow up (surprise, it’s bad for you) and NYC’s movement to lower the sodium content in manufactured goods and chain restaurant menus. Basically, in sum, studies are showing that food in cans, while providing a cheap and quick meal solution, aren’t particularly good for us, especially in the long term. And while I do not know how much soup Americans consume annually, I do know that we have become addicted to the over-salted taste and convenience of canned goods. According to Dr. Marion Nestle: [...]
I wanted to take a moment to respond to this posting as a representative of Campbell Soup Company. Campbell has been gradually and silently reducing the sodium in our products since the 80s. In fact, since 2005 we’ve increased our reduced sodium options from 25 to over 110 products, and expanded beyond soup.
These efforts include reducing the sodium content of our Campbell’s condensed kids soups not just once, but twice in the past few years by up to 45 percent and cutting the sodium in our top-selling Campbell’s Tomato soup by 32 percent this year.
I’d like to clarify that our condensed soups contain 480 mg of sodium per one-cup serving prepared (half cup of condensed soup reconstituted with the same amount of water). In addition, we have 90 soups that meet FDA/USDA criteria for healthy foods and also are low in fat, saturated fat, no trans fat.
Sodium reduction remains Campbell’s number one strategic priority. Our goal is not just to lower sodium, but make sure we offer the great-taste people expect from us. That’s one of the biggest challenges in sodium reduction – but we work every day to meet that challenge head-on.
Bloomberg needs to pay more attention to hygiene. Workers step on and handle food surfaces whil supposedly protecting us by cleaning. Kids spread filth by clothes swabbing floors. Pigeons fly around delis crapping. One guy threw away food when the container fell to the floor then put the empty container in the pantry without cleaning it. Today’s workers thingk hygiene is silly. They used to teach you about these things in grammar school but today it seems patronizing.