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.
Now do the same for sugar
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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!)
And rounding down shouldn’t be allowed. There’s a lot where you can see this on 2 different sizes of the same product or if they give a per serving and a per container, where the serving is zero but the larger package is non-zero.
If they say it’s zero, then it had better be actually zero.
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’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
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.
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.
Thats great, but can we do high fructose corn syrup next? That shit is just evil on multiple levels.
