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Politics : Formerly About Advanced Micro Devices -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: one_less who wrote (562023)	4/20/2010 3:40:24 PM
From: TimF	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 1576318

The War on Salt Goes National Earlier this year, New York City Mayor and prominent food nag Michael Bloomberg announced a "voluntary" effort to reduce the salt content in restaurants and processed foods by 25%. Later, a New York State Senator proposed a ban on the use of any salt in restaurant kitchens. Now, the Washington Post reports: The Food and Drug Administration is planning an unprecedented effort to gradually reduce the salt consumed each day by Americans, saying that less sodium in everything from soup to nuts would prevent thousands of deaths from hypertension and heart disease. The initiative, to be launched this year, would eventually lead to the first legal limits on the amount of salt allowed in food products ... Officials have not determined the salt limits. In a complicated undertaking, the FDA would analyze the salt in spaghetti sauces, breads and thousands of other products that make up the $600 billion food and beverage market, sources said. Working with food manufacturers, the government would set limits for salt in these categories, designed to gradually ratchet down sodium consumption. The changes would be calibrated so that consumers barely notice the modification. The hubris here is staggering. The federal government is going to analyze the salt content in countless different types of processed food, establish limits (and based on what? How much salt is good for me? You? Someone with hypertension? I have low blood pressure; I don’t need to cut back.), and calibrate the limits so that consumers "barely notice". Give me a break. The science behind the federal government's war on salt is shaky. There is no "right" amount of daily salt consumption. Some people should cut back on salt, but others don’t need to. A study in Current Opinion in Cardiology found that people who ate low-salt diets were 37 percent more likely to die of cardiovascular disease. Dr. Michael Alderman, head of the American Society of Hypertension, America's biggest organization of specialists in high blood pressure, wrote in a review of the science in 2000: The problem with this appealing possibility is that a reduction in salt consumption of this magnitude has other—and sometimes adverse—health consequences ... Without knowledge of the sum of the multiple effects of a reduced sodium diet, no single universal prescription for sodium intake can be scientifically justified. No matter. The government will use its mighty sledgehammer anyway. stossel.blogs.foxbusiness.com