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Doctors and nutritionists are clamoring for action against the overuse of salt. Says Dr. Henry Blackburn of the University of Minnesota Medical School: "Scientists have a social obligation to advocate cutting down on salt as a low-risk way of producing a more healthy population." Americans in general are becoming highly conscious of dangers that may lurk in their food. Saccharin, nitrates, sugar, cyclamates have all come under suspicion. Few are as committed on the salt issue as Food Columnist Craig Claiborne, who turned from salt addict to antisalt agitator after his own hypertension was detected. When it comes to the demon crystal, Claiborne goes straight to the point. Says he: "They should label salt just as they do cigarettes, saying that it is injurious to your health."
How to get food packages labeled, not as injurious to health but simply for their sodium content, is now the concern of the public health care establishment, including such groups as the American Medical Association, the American Heart Association, the National Heart, Lung and Blood Institute and the U.S. Food and Drug Administration. Says A.M.A. Nutritionist Stephanie Crocco: "Our immediate concern is helping people who already have hypertension to cut back, but we are also worried about anyone whose salt consumption is well above average." For those who have hypertension, reducing salt intake (and losing weight) can often lower blood pressure. It can also prevent incipient cases from getting worse.
This week in Washington, D.C., the A.M.A. is holding a national meeting, where doctors, nutritionists and Government watchdogs are threshing out the practical details of labeling with representatives of the food-processing industry. The aim: to work out the best way to organize and expedite both sodium labeling and reduction of sodium in packaged foods. The keynote speaker will be one of the prime movers in antisalt politics, Food and Drug Administration Commissioner Arthur Hull Hayes.
Before being appointed to his job last year, Hayes, 48, was for eight years director of a hypertension clinic in Hershey, Pa. There he observed the baneful effects of salt and learned to his frustration that patients ordered by their doctors to go on low-salt diets were unable to comply, even if they tried. Says he, "I might tell the Pennsylvania Dutch, for instance, that they could have their sauerkraut if they watched their sodium from other foods." But, he notes, they couldn't tell how much was in the other foods.
The reason is that salt and sodium lurk in unlikely places (see chart). Limiting salt is not just a matter of giving up pickles, pretzels and anchovy pizzas, or throwing out the salt shaker. A single serving of instant chocolate pudding can have twice as much sodium as a small bag of potato chips, and a scoop of cottage cheese three times that of a handful of salted peanuts. Thanks in part to the sodium in baking powder and baking soda, baked goods and cereals are the No. 1 source of sodium in the diet of many Americans. Preservatives such as sodium benzoate and sodium nitrite and flavorings like monosodium glutamate (MSG) also contribute. Even vitamin C is often added to foods in the culpable form of sodium ascorbate.