Fausta's Blog

American and Latin American Politics, Society, and Culture

April 20, 2010 By Fausta

No-salt lunacy, part 2

Last month it was a NY State Assemblyman asking to regulate the amount of salt in foods.

Now it’s the whole FDA:
FDA plans to limit amount of salt allowed in processed foods for health reasons, since you’re a helpless child who can’t even figure out how much salt you need. Note the Orwellian language (emphasis added):

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.

The government intends to work with the food industry and health experts to reduce sodium gradually over a period of years to adjust the American palate to a less salty diet, according to FDA sources, who spoke on condition of anonymity because the initiative had not been formally announced.

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 legal limits would be open to public comment, but administration officials do not think they need additional authority from Congress.

“This is a 10-year program,” one source said. “This is not rolling off a log. We’re talking about a comprehensive phase-down of a widely used ingredient. We’re talking about embedded tastes in a whole generation of people.”

Of course, if they must regulate the amount of salt in food effectively, they would have ban the use of salt shakers in restaurants and public places, even when, as Ed Morrissey explains,

According to the latest research, sodium intake isn’t really a health problem for normal adults. An Einstein University study in 2008 showed no connection between cardiovascular disease risk and higher-sodium diets

Never mind the facts (hey, maybe it’ll create jobs!); give it time and the FDA will insist you get a prescription in order to use one of these:

I’ll be in Rick Moran‘s podcast tonight at 8PM Eastern to talk about this and other political items.

UPDATE
Nanny isn’t reasonable.

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Filed Under: Congress, Democrats Tagged With: Fausta's blog, FDA, Food and Drug Administration, NY A. 10129, salt, salt ban

Comments

  1. Nikki says

    April 20, 2010 at 6:47 pm

    Fausta, you are completely wrong in calling this lunacy. Salting your food is not the issue, it is the ABSURD amount of UNNECESSARY Sodium the Govt puts into our food that IS. This is a HUGE WIN FOR American’s to stay healthy!

    Please read up on the medical issues of HUGE amounts of sodium. Our diet is killing us. If we keep eating processed food with all the crap in it the Govt has allowed we will all die young anyway. My generation is the first generation that will not live longer than our parents.

    http://www.cspinet.org/new/200502242.html

    EAT single item fresh foods. Do not eat processed foods full of HFCS and Sodium. This is the first really truly healthy thing that the Govt has done. They are going to leave our food alone. It is about damn time.

  2. Fausta says

    April 20, 2010 at 7:37 pm

    Nikki,
    I can’t eat most process foods because of my blood sugar issues and my soy allergy.

    That said, what you’re telling me is that the government is causing the problem in the first place, so we’re supposed to trust their judgement instead of our own?

  3. Pat Patterson says

    April 20, 2010 at 10:59 pm

    So the Salt Police are now required to warn people to step away from that salt shaker? But I’m a little confused because Nikki claims that the government puts the salt into our food? Maybe a subsidy on salt is the answer and then after thousands of silos holding overproduced salt are built the excess can be donated to countries with thyroid problems.

  4. O Bloody Hell says

    April 24, 2010 at 1:42 am

    Nikki, nothing personal but:

    > Our diet is killing us. If we keep eating processed food with all the crap in it the Govt has allowed we will all die young anyway.

    That’s pretty much our f***ing choice, isn’t it? Who died and made you, or some government bureaucrat, the one with the power to say “no”?

    You want to convince me and others to cut back on processed food, then by all means, MAKE THE EFFORT.

    If you want to make the public conscious of some decisions we can make in regards to processed food, then by all means, MAKE THE ATTEMPT. Trust me, if the people clamor for “food with less ‘x'”, then the ones who make it will offer it for their consumption. There’s a reason for all the reduced fat potato chips out there (one reason for the increase in sodium intake, mind you! Salt hides the lack of flavor from the reduced fat) — it’s because people have been demanding low-fat foods.

    But don’t stand there and tell me “you support” someone ELSE ***telling***<i me what I can and can’t eat. Two words: FUCK OFF.

    And I mean that in the politest way possible: Mind your own damned business, and stop trying to tell OTHERS what they MUST do for “THEIR OWN BENEFIT”. No one died and made you Lord of the Diet.

    Oh, and one more point:
    > My generation is the first generation that will not live longer than our parents.

    Here’s a little secret that you will learn as time goes on — this health crap changes with the decade. The more decades you spend on this planet, the more you will see the “rules for healthy eating” change. And this is not just fine-tuning towards a “better diet”. I mean RADICAL change from decade to decade. What is “just fine” this decade will be “AWFUL” the next. There is no consistent pattern of development identifying what is good or bad. A few things stay the same, but it’s only a few. And give those three, four decades and you’ll find out probably THOSE things are good for you. My bet is that, thirty years from now, they find out that smoking a cigarette a week is GOOD for you. LOL.

    And believe me, this whole “my generation” crap is just that — crap. If there is any reason why the latest generation lives a shorter life than their parents, it’s because their parents exercised a lot while the youngest generation is much more likely to be couch potatoes even as kids. It ain’t the diet that will be causing the problem, it’s the failure to exercise adequately.

    Further, the Gen-Xers are much more likely to be smokers than the Boomers or Gen-Ys, so the chances are they’re going to bring those numbers down notably, too. I suspect they are less likely to be life-long smokers, so that won’t reduce their lifespans as much as earlier generations, but it’ll have its effects.

    =================================================
    So, in summary:

    1) Trust me. There are demagogues out there who will happily delude you and lie straight to your face about this or that to get power. Diet is just one example of it. Get a good sense of awareness of when someone stands to gain from your belief, and learn to be a bit more skeptical of claims made by such individuals.

    2) There is always a “crisis in ‘x'” going on — usually more than one. In this, you would be good to learn from H.L. Mencken: “The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary.” — once more, learn to be skeptical. I cannot stress that enough.

    3) The crap they taught you in school? Mostly subject to Sturgeon’s Revelation: “90% of everything is crud.” — Take it all with a grain of salt. Work to develop your critical thinking skills (the one thing they did their best to actively blunt in school), so you can see when “a” should mean “b”, yet “b” is clearly not so, calling “a” into doubt. This will help you learn both when someone is attempting to pull the wool over your eyes as well as when there is actual reason to be concerned.

    Let’s take a case in point:
    I recently bumped into the claim that there is a one in 10,000 chance of a “dinosaur killer” asteroid striking earth in the next 100 years. N’kay, sounds both reasonable and scary. Until you think about what those numbers mean. That means, basically, that it is a near certainty that, in the next 1,000,000 years, such an asteroid will strike. Still scary, right?

    Except that it’s been something like 60+ million years since the last one like that struck. Why is THIS million year span so flinking much more dangerous than the LAST 59-odd million year spans?

    Must be all the carbon from the Global Warming attracting more rogue asteroids… (/sarc off)

    In actuality, I don’t know the answer to that. But it makes me seriously doubt the accuracy of that 1-10,000/100yr statistic. It says that it’s probably a LOT lower than the claimed 1-10,000. And I’ve expressed that doubt in places in order to get someone to identify where I’m wrong (some factor I’m unaware of, presumably, if it IS true and accurate) or if I’m correct, and that inflated number is there to scare people into acting. My money is on the latter.

  5. Fausta says

    April 24, 2010 at 10:28 am

    Take it easy on Nikki, OBH, but you’re definitely right on this

  6. O Bloody Hell says

    April 24, 2010 at 1:25 pm

    Patterico touches on this one, too.

    Notes (surprise, surprise) that Mr & Mrs Obama don’t quite practice what they preach, diet and exercise-wise.

    “Rules for thee, but not for me”.

    I am shocked! Shocked! To find that the PotUS and the First Lady don’t eat healthy!

    Yasssss. So shocked…

  7. O Bloody Hell says

    April 24, 2010 at 1:27 pm

    P.S., I did say (and think it was clear I meant) “nothing personal”. She strikes me as likely young and naively gullible. And if she finds out what Mr. and Mrs Obama had she might start to ask herself the right questions, there.

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