In the wake of its city-wide diabetes reduction and restaurant nutrition labeling initiatives, the New York City Department of Health is leading yet another dietary health campaign, this time one that involves a national coalition of cities, states, and medical organizations. My hat’s off to them, even though I think the demands they intend to make of the food industry are much too light and much too toothless.
The National Salt Reduction Initiative, announced on Monday, will encourage “voluntary compliance” from the processed food and restaurant industries to lower their sodium content by about 20% over the next 5 years. That’s pretty modest considering that both industries have doubled the standard sodium content of many common foods in the past 20-30 years, and that the national obesity epidemic seems to have coincided pretty nearly with that trend.
The UK’s national salt reduction campaign, which started in 2003 and serves as a model for NSRI, has government backing and its goal is 40% reduction of sodium in processed foods within 5 years, not 20%. They seem to be getting there, too.
NSRI’s coalition includes the Los Angeles Department of Health and a variety of medical organizations like the American Heart Association and the American College of Cardiology. What it doesn’t include this year, to my surprise–and, frankly, dismay–is involvement, funding or guidance from the National Heart, Lung and Blood Institute at NIH.
Ten years ago the NHLBI would have participated one way or another in encouraging this sort of initiative, but that was before the Bush years. NHLBI has been reorganized several times in the last decade. Two of its key diet-related outreach and education programs–the National Cholesterol Education Program and the National High Blood Pressure Education Program, which would have been the leading outreach proponent for NSRI–have receded from view, with perfunctory descriptions on the agency web site, no functioning links to current activities if there are any or to updated program pages, and no clear leadership or place in the agency’s organizational chart. But the need for them certainly hasn’t ended.
Voluntary compliance programs don’t have a great track record in the processed food industry. Look at the recent Smart Choices nutrition labeling program fiasco (see under, Froot Loops) from October.
Starting a national program like this with voluntary compliance as a key component means the designers don’t think there’s much way to enforce the changes other than persuasion. It also means the government doesn’t have the tools, the money, or–and here is the crux of it–the will to enforce even modest limits on sodium content. Both the AHA and the AMA have been working on the FDA for years to get salt off the “generally harmless Continue reading
Filed under: DASH Diet, Eating out, Food Politics, nutrition | Tagged: fast food, Food Politics, heart disease, high blood pressure, hypertension, John Tierney, low sodium, low-salt, National Salt Reduction Initiative, NHLBI, NIH, NSRI, nutrition labeling, NYC Department of Health, processed food, public health, restaurants, UK salt reduction | Comments Off on Getting the Salt Out: NSRI and Voluntary Compliance, Again
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