Enlisting The Food Industry To Help Reduce Salt Intake

I'll believe it when I see it. Several years ago, France declared a doctor to be an enemy of the state for a similar campaign and had his movements shadowed (the logic being; the food industry is important to France; salt is important to the food industry; therefore trying to remove salt from products of the food industry is a strike against the state).

Hey, folks, I have high blood pressure. I could really benefit from this!:

Eating too much salt is a major cause of high blood pressure, which the Institute of Medicine, one of the National Academies of Sciences, last week declared a "neglected disease" that costs the U.S. health system $73 billion a year.

Several governments including the United States are looking for solutions to curb salt intake as a way to head off future heart attacks and strokes that help drain healthcare systems.

The study by a team at the Stanford University School of Medicine and the Veterans Affairs Palo Alto Health Care System in California used a computer model to measure the impact of two different scenarios for reducing salt intake on a population level -- a voluntary collaboration with the U.S. food industry and a national tax on salt.

They found the voluntary program, based on a similar salt-reduction campaign in Britain, to be the most effective.

The team estimated that a government-industry effort could cut Americans' salt intake by 9.5 percent.

"In our analysis, we found these small decreases in blood pressure would be effective in reducing deaths due to cardiovascular disease," said Dr. Crystal Smith-Spangler of the VA, whose study appears in the Annals of Internal Medicine.

The salt reduction campaign would prevent 513,885 fatal strokes and 480,358 heart attacks over the lifetimes of U.S. adults who are aged 40 to 85 today. That would save $32.1 billion in health costs during the lifetime of this group, including $14 billion in hospitalizations for strokes and heart attacks.

"The numbers of affected people are huge, so even a small decrease is significant if you have large numbers of people involved," Smith-Spangler said in a statement.

By contrast, a tax on salt would cut salt intake by 6 percent, resulting in 327,892 fewer strokes and 306,173 fewer heart attacks, the team calculated.