On Wednesday, the Food and Drug Administration released a draft voluntary guidance for the food industry aimed at phasing out excess salt in processed and commercially prepared food over a span of 10 years.
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Average sodium intake in the U.S. is approximately 3,400 mg/day.
“We consume probably more than 50 percent more sodium than we really need for our diets”, Effron said. According to NACS, the FDA is focusing on encouraging food manufacturers whose products make up a significant portion of national sales to adopt the new guidelines.
The new proposed guidelines are voluntary, so companies will not have to follow them. The draft, which is open for comment from the public, provides two- and 10-year targets for sodium reduction, giving producers time to rejigger recipes and for diners to become accustomed to the taste of lower sodium levels.
If these target sodium levels are reached over the next 10 years, some of the biggest sodium drops in packaged foods could be in certain sauces and frozen breakfast foods, according to Live Science’s calculations.
The US FDA is planning to bring down the everyday consumption of sodium to 2,300 mg per day by the end of the next decade. “Experts at the Institute of Medicine have concluded that reducing sodium intake to 2,300mg per day can significantly help Americans reduce their blood pressure and ultimately prevent hundreds of thousands of premature illnesses and deaths”.
The agency notes that Americans eat far too much sodium, which has been linked to increases in heart disease and other health issues. The targets are meant to be an average for products sold in that category, but also to take into account product sales, meaning that more weight is given to popular products.
The Center for Science in the Public Interest has been suing to try to get the FDA to mandate lower salt levels in food. “And, it helps level the playing field for those companies that are already trying to use less salt in their food”, said CSPI president Michael Jacobson. The draft targets factor in data on consumer preferences, as well as current industry efforts to reduce sodium.
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If sodium intake was reduced by 40 percent by 2026, the FDA estimates, 500,000 deaths from high blood pressure could be prevented and about $100 billion in health care costs could be eliminated.
