Attention, label watchers! Now that the Food and Drug Administration’s Nutrition Facts food labels are commonplace on grocery items, have you noticed anything disturbing, some might say shocking?
Forget the fat, saturated fat and cholesterol for a moment. Check those soups and salad dressings for sodium. Look at low-fat foods, too, and start adding it up.
There’s a cellar full of salt in what we eat-especially processed food-and the nutrition labels make it pretty plain. Here are a few examples:
– A serving of Newman’s Own pasta sauce contains 8 percent of the daily value for fat but 29 percent of the DV for sodium.
– Henri’s Low-Fat Creamy Cucumber Salad Dressing, with 3 percent of the DV in fat, has 18 percent in sodium.
– Lean Cuisine’s Chicken Piccata lists 9 percent of the DV for fat, but 23 percent of the DV for sodium.
– Perfect Recipe Organics Tomato Basil Soup has no fat, no cholesterol, 7 percent of the DV for fiber and 17 percent of the DV for sodium.
– A cup of Post’s Fruit & Fiber cereal with dates, raisins and walnuts will supply 5 percent of a day’s fat, but 11 percent of the sodium.
– Even a Pepperidge Farm hamburger bun has a 10 percent share of the daily sodium quotient.
That’s 108 percent of a day’s sodium. It doesn’t take long to surpass 2,400 milligrams, the recommended limit for a day’s sodium consumption.
But is that 2,400 milligram figure realistic? And is it dangerous to exceed it?
Most nutritional and medical organizations, including the National Institutes of Health and the American Dietetic Association, recommend keeping a tight rein on sodium consumption, especially because it may play a role in raising blood pressure, which leads to heart disease. But others in the scientific community have questioned whether sodium is a problem for most people or even directly related to blood pressure.
“I can say that in the last 20 years, nothing has happened scientifically that lends data to the notion that the salt risk is overplayed,” says Dr. Jeremiah Stamler, professor of preventative medicine at Northwestern University Medical School and a well-known expert in hypertension.
“One sure thing is that habitual excessive salt intake has been implicated in elevated blood pressure and blood pressure problems,” says Stamler, a member of a team of scientists who conducted the huge Intersalt Study of 10,000 people in 52 cultures in the late 1980s.
On the other hand, Dr. David McCarron, professor of medicine and co-director of the Nephrology, Hypertension and Clinical Pharmacology division at Oregon Health Sciences University in Portland, says:
“This salt thing has gone from science to politics. No one wants to back off from the salt’s-bad-for-you stance, even though at the last American Society of Hypertension meeting there was mounting evidence that 50 to 60 percent of the people just don’t get a change in their blood pressure when they lower salt, even in the short run. And even when they do try to follow a low-salt diet, people just can’t adhere to it.”
He also says that there now is evidence that a diet very low in salt may actually increase the risk of cardiovascular disease for reasons unrelated to hypertension.
McCarron does not endorse eating more salt, but he thinks the current standards may be unreasonably low. High blood pressure, he believes, may involve the interaction of several electrolytes in addition to sodium chloride, such as magnesium and potassium salts and especially calcium, an element that may play a much greater role in high blood pressure than previously thought.
Certainly calcium and sodium are interrelated in the body, says Dr. Robert Heaney, a physician and professor of endocrinology at Creighton University in Omaha.
“We excrete all the excess sodium we take in, typically through the kidneys,” says Heaney, an expert on calcium nutrition. “And when the kidneys handle sodium, they sweep calcium out with it. We’ve known that for 35 years.”
High salt intake always means high calcium loss. Most Americans, especially women, can’t afford that.
“What I tell folks is that we all eat much more sodium than we need and that any attempt to reduce it will only be beneficial,” says Christine Rosenbloom, professor of nutrition at Georgia State University, Atlanta, and a spokeswoman for the American Dietetic Association.
“But people don’t have to panic and restrict salt,” she says. “They just should be aware of how much they are getting at the table and in a lot of the processed foods. To put it into perspective, the body needs only about 500 milligrams a day: One teaspoon is 2,300 milligrams. So you can see where we get more than we need.”
