The agency wants to lower how much salt we consume over the next three years to an average of 2,750 milligrams per day. That’s still above the recommended limit of 2,300 mg.
The Food and Drug Administration on Thursday laid out fresh goals to cut sodium levels in packaged and processed foods by about 20%, after its prior efforts to address a growing epidemic of diet-related chronic diseases showed early signs of success.
The FDA in October 2021 had set guidelines to trim sodium levels in foods ranging from potato chips to hamburgers in a bid to prevent excessive intake of salt that can trigger high blood pressure, a major risk factor for heart disease and stroke.
The agency is now seeking voluntary curbs from packaged-food makers such as PepsiCo, Kraft Heinz and Campbell Soup. The companies did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
This is so dumb. You can’t fix this problem at the packaging level. You have to convince people to eat less, or eat smarter.
You definitively can fix many things at the product level
Food in Europe is generally less bad for you due to regulations
They’ll up the chloride content by 40% to compensate, though.
I bet they just put 20% less food in the package.
Unironically, yes. A common substitute for table salt (sodium chloride NaCl) is potassium salt (potassium chloride KCl).
The good news is that the health problems with table salt is the, not the chloride. Potassium actually has the opposite effect on the body, so a higher potassium intake would actually help treat a high sodium intake.
Fun fact: potassium chloride is what the United States has primarily used in lethal injection which has been used to execute 1400 people since 1976.
I’m absolutely going to hear some Karen later repeat this fact as a reason to protest against ‘government crackdowns on salt’ or something, aren’t I?
They are killing our roads!
“Swimming pools are bad! They’re full of water, which LESBIAN TERRORISTS use to DROWN CHRISTIANS!”
It’s also what we use to salt our roads.
How about 50%. Also do sugar and probably saturated fat. Also ban high fructose corn syrup.
And some dyes, bread additives, BVO, etc. commercial food processing in the US is a bit of a mess.
The US FDA has addressed BVO finally, even though everyone else already stopped. https://www.fda.gov/food/cfsan-constituent-updates/fda-revokes-regulation-allowing-use-brominated-vegetable-oil-bvo-food
Also also, can we revisit nutritional information on the packages? Make the serving sizes more easy to understand to humans, I’m not measuring out cups, ounces, or grams of food. Every container should have a label, even if it came in a bigger package. Sweeteners should be combined into parentheses too so the ingredients don’t look like “water, flour, glucose, sucrose, dextrose, maltose, high fructose corn syrup, sugar” (now with less sugar!)
How many bites per megabite?
Depends, are you a hard drive or a router?
Normally i route food down the Hershey Highway, but when yer mom/sister/(18+)daughter is around i can be a hard drive.
ban high fructose corn syrup.
Won’t happen as long as the corn subsidies are in place. Corn is literally everywhere and the US is probably #1 in the world in terms of converting corn into things that aren’t corn.
I went to visit family recently, and they were sipping on a carton of Bright and Early by HI-C with an orange on the label. I had to look. Ingredients: High-fructose corn syrup, citric acid. NO JUICE
Disgusting.
Do we already know what manufacturers would replace it with to maintain flavour? Eg in the past when manufacturers had to cut down on fat, they’ve replaced it with sugar and hydrogenated oils?
Food? Maybe their product doesn’t need to be addictive but can instead include a higher percentage of food ingredients
That’s certainly a possibility, but I’m not sure it’s the most likely one in America, so I’d like to better understand the consequences
Mostly potassium salt, although with some other recipe changes to account for the different flavor.
The good news is that potassium is well understood nutritionally. Most Americans do not get enough of it. To a first approximation, it is anti-sodium health wise, so it is a double win in that it both reduces sodium intake, and counters the effect of a still high sodium intake.
They should be putting fats back in and cutting out carbs/sugars
I like chips and guac, but every time I go to the store and the low sodium chips are out of stock…I don’t buy chips.
Once you get used to it the regular ones are disgustingly salty.
For sure, and my grocery is frequently out of their fresh pico de gallo, trying to push me to buy their ketchuppy sugar-filled “salsa” with infinite shelf life
I also don’t buy chips
I grew up in a low salt household and now I’m extremely sensitive to salts, so most chips are a no-go for me
Casa Sanchez (if available in your area) makes great tortilla chips that are noticably lower in salt than other brands. They aren’t marketed as low sodium, but because they aren’t super coated in salt like, for example Tostitos, it’s the only brand I buy. They also taste way better imo
I’ve been raising the cocoa % on the chocolates I buy and I’m on 80% now. I had a regular bar recently that was gifted to me and I could barely take a bite because it was so excessively sugary. Unfortunately I can’t go any higher than 80% as it is not sold here (expensive imports only) but I definitely would if I could, and honestly I would recommend anyone to try this starting at 40%.
I feel like I recall a story about a chip company that slowly reduced their salt content by like 50% over a number of years and literally no one noticed or complained.
I definitely saw another story about how they were researching pyramid-shaped salt crystals because they have higher surface area to volume, and with cuboid salt you wind up swallowing it before the whole thing even dissolves, so you’re not even getting a theoretical flavor experience, it’s just going straight into your gut.
We eat too much salt. It’s absurd.
Salt is not an issue if you’re healthy and drink enough water. Our problem is we’re not healthy and don’t drink enough water…we eat chips and drink coke with it.
I drink like 8L of water a day, run four days a week, but I am confident that Ruffles are going to be the death of me, they’re just too good to care about the years at the end of my life.
Dill pickle lays here… I feel your pain
I’d caveat it’s not unhealthy if you sweat a lot, drink lots of water, AND consume a level of dietary potassium 2x that of your sodium intake, which pretty much nobody is. (and disclaimer I’m no doctor).
Sodium and potassium work together with opposite functions via the sodium-potassium pump. Too much salt leads to water retention within cells. That’s the best case scenario so long as you’re drinking lots of water. Too much salt absent of potassium will send blood pressure up due to vasoconstriction.
Potassium helps the body regulate fluid retention and helps to concentrate urine while helping with vasodilation of blood vessels (among many other important functions).
Just learning all this as I’ve taken a deep-dive on this stuff for my own health as well as my mom’s.
I’ve read this a lot but have no idea how to increase potassium. There’s only so many bananas you can eat and clearly one every day is not enough
Even if there’s a salt substitute with potassium, I’m not sure the point when there’s no problem with salt you intentionally add. Especially since I rarely do
Getting large amounts of potassium is definitely tough, and for me it basically comes down to eating a lot of green salads, potato, banana, and coconut water.
I confess I’ll also add some potassium citrate to my water here and there to get a little more. But I don’t advise that unless you know what you’re doing.
Can confirm, source: I eat ~7000mgs/day
*cries in spironolactone*
Embrace tradition, eat an entire jar of pickles in one sitting.
I dust pickled jalapenos with flour and airfry/broil them 👍
It’s not just the chips that are the problem (although many brands are so salty they burn my mouth) , everyone knows they’re salted.
Hopefully this includes the chicken nuggets and other prepared foods that not everyone realizes are high in sodium
As someone who has always been on a low-sodium diet, but who nonetheless has a hankering for processed food, thank fuck.
Everything has become so ridiculously salty, if you aren’t already used to the salt, that it’s largely inedible. It would otherwise be really good, but holy shit.
If we can get people consuming less salt in some places, they will want less in other places as well, maybe food as a whole will be less salty… that would be a win in every single way for everyone. Everyone who regularly eats with me tends to want less salt in their food overall as a result, so I know it works, and it doesn’t even take that long.
Now do the same for sugar
Agreed, corn syrup shouldn’t be added to almost all food on the taxpayers’ dime.
Cut sugar by 75% and we’re getting somewhere.
a former coworker sat and tried to convince me that sugar is neither bad for you nor addictive. the sugar lobby psychological manipulation propaganda machine is the behemoth that has to be dismantled before any meaningful change can even be attempted
this coworker was an instructional academic librarian who included confirmation bias and how to avoid it in her teaching
Sugar is NOT bad for you. Too much of anything is what’s bad.
Drinking too much water can kill you.
100% of the people that come in contact with dihydrogen monoxide die.
yea, the whole “everything is bad for you if you do enough of it to kill yourself!” is a pretty common response. and yes, that’s true. there IS a threshold for everything. one cigarette won’t kill you either.
one cigarette won’t kill you either.
Interesting. The fearmongers at school told us it could.
Agreed but the cigarette analogy is not really accurate.
Sugar is arguably good for you in moderation. We evolved to seek out sugar in the form of fruits, berries, etc. Quick energy, fast acting carbohydrates etc.
Can’t think of how this translates to a single cigarette lol.
I think you’re conflating natural occurring sugars to manmade sugars.
The natural sugars in fruits is okay. Adding 75-80% of the daily value of man made added sugars to ONE drink are what we are talking about.
Nicotine helps with neural degeneration and things like dementia and alzheimers.
We evolved to seek out sugar because it is energy dense in a time when food wasn’t plentiful
Today we have more food than we know what to do with
Processed sugar is arguably never good for you, even in moderation.
“In moderation” being the key part. As in, not selling drinks and snacks that are like 30% sugar
Agree 100%. And arguably “in moderation” is much lower than people might want it to be. Plus most of this stuff is processed with high fructose corn syrup trash.
HFCS is literally just liquid sugar.
As in, not selling drinks and snacks that are like 30% sugar
On the flip side, those snacks and drinks are ideal for athletes.
I wouldn’t want to stop having those foods available, simply because the majority of the population are idiots when it comes to fueling their bodies.
People need to have some self control, ffs.
Agreed but the cigarette analogy is not really accurate.
why not? if you’re going by “too much of anything is bad for you,” then doesn’t it follow that “NOT too much of anything isn’t necessarily bad for you”?
so yea, one soda won’t kill you = true. also one cigarette won’t kill you = true.
what i’m getting at is that your “argument” isn’t one
The human body doesn’t need nicotine to survive
i never said it did, nor did i imply that it’s good for you
The human body also doesn’t need added sugars to survive.
That’s like saying arsenic isn’t bad for you, but too much is.
Sugar is indeed bad for you. Like any refined carbohydrate.
Too much sugar as it happens is an insanely small amount. Most people have had too much sugar before they’ve left the house in the morning.
We need carbohydrates, but as it happens we only need a little and we can get everything we need from a few servings of green vegetables.
Arsenic actually does seem to have a role in the human body. We might need 12-25 μg per day.
Huh. TIL.
Lead? Heroin?
I stand by my point, refined sugar isn’t even arguably good for you. A handful of jolly ranchers won’t kill you but it’s not a good source of carbohydrates.
No arguing about it. You need sugar to live. You should be getting it alongside other nutrients in regular food.
You don’t need soda to live. Empty calories are what’s bad.
You need some carbohydrates.
In no universe do you need refined sugar. You absolutely don’t need hundreds of grams of carbohydrates a day. Your body needs less than 100 grams a day and that’s being generous.
You can literally get all the carbohydrates your body needs from green vegetables or a single piece of fruit.
Yeah except that every can of coke is too much, and most people don’t have a problem with water addiction
And fat!!
Now that trans fats are gone, the best way to improve fats is you can’t just add sugar and call it low fat.
Fats aren’t bad for you like sodium and sugars are.
Sodium and sugar are not “bad” for you. Sodiums/salts are arguably an absolute necessity for brain function lol (electrolytes). It’s the too much that is the bad part. There’s natural sugar in fruits and stuff, which you already know. Blanket statements like “sugar is bad” are dumb.
Maybe if the issue wasn’t soo widespread, but the manufactured over abundance has tipped the scales enough that simple statements of sugar/sodium being bad for you (even if not entirely correct) are a step in the right direction.
No, you are wrong and so is your ridiculous statement.
even if not entirely correct
It’s not that it’s “not entirely correct”, it’s entirely incorrect. Full stop.
We evolved to seek out sugar. Originally in the form of fruits and berries and whatnot, as its an efficient fast acting carbohydrate for quick energy. It is good for you. Period.
Over consumption due to over abundance and the capitalist profit motive not giving a shit about the consequences on people’s health, because muh profits, is why people eat to much of it.
Your solution is to blatantly lie, which is dumb and wrong. Lying is not a step in the right direction ever.
Educate people, and hold capitalists accountable, in the form of violent regulation. You ain’t gonna do that cuz you have no power and never will. Lying is dumb. Sugar is good for you in moderation.
Exactly what someone with a sugar addiction would say lol
Yeah because searching for berries all day is exhausting, ordering a pizza and 2l of coke is not you muppet.
But that doesn’t make sugar bad. It makes too much sugar bad, which seems to be what they were saying. Albeit, ineloquently. **Insert thought terminating insult.
Sigh, ok.
Tell the intern to order three more semis of corn syrup.
I was frustrated by the lack of low sodium options in processed foods before I cut them out entirely.
I don’t know who the fuck is eating this garbage but I think whoever they are does not care about sodium
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Who cares about sodium, can we get rid of high fructose corn syrup? I mean reducing sodium sounds good, but it’s not even on the same playing field
Also stuff like sodium nitrate and other fantastic chemicals that make food last for 100’s of years
How else are we gonna ensure a stable supply of post-fallout Mac & Cheese, InstaMash, Salisbury Steak, and Cheezy Poofs?
