Ah, salt. It gives personality to chips, balance to bread and flavor to scrambled eggs, guacamole, tomato sauce and just about everything else that comes in a can, jar or squeeze bottle. Salt is such a mealtime staple it can be hard to imagine life without a shaker on the table.
But as far back as the 1960s, physicians linked salt to high blood pressure, a major risk factor for heart disease and stroke. Today, more than 65 million Americans have hypertension -- repeatedly high blood pressure -- according to the National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute, and 59 million more have pre-hypertension, a level higher than normal that can also lead to health problems.
For decades, the American Medical Assn., American Heart Assn., American Public Health Assn., the Institute of Medicine, the World Health Organization and others have been telling people to eat less salt. Cutting 50% of the salt in our diets could save 150,000 lives a year, the AMA estimates.
These entreaties -- which have taken on renewed vigor of late -- have so far fallen on deaf ears. The average American adult consumes twice the 2,300 milligrams (about a teaspoon's worth) recommended for most adults by the Institute of Medicine and the Department of Health and Human Services' Dietary Guidelines for Americans.
To help people do what they can't seem to do on their own, in the last few years a consumer advocacy group and several medical organizations and health experts have been pushing for legislation that would regulate sodium content in the foods we buy.
They say that more than 75% of the salt we get comes from processed foods and restaurant dishes, making it easy to blow a day's allotment in a single meal without even picking up the saltshaker.
A McDonald's bacon, egg, and cheese biscuit contains 1,250 milligrams of sodium. Frozen entrees in grocery stores can easily top 5,000 milligrams. A typical serving of jarred tomato sauce packs more than 700 milligrams -- even bread often has a couple of hundred milligrams per slice.
A few researchers studying the link between salt and health say salt has been unfairly villainized. They argue that only a fraction of the population is sensitive to salt's blood-pressure-raising effects, that our fixation on salt distracts us from focusing on what's really responsible for our nation's epidemic of heart disease, namely, obesity. They say for some people, lowering sodium intake might be harmful.
