Flurry in the Big Apple
Forecast for New York City: flurries. While many New Yorkers may worry more about whether salt is being used to keep their streets safe, city health commissioner Thomas Frieden is concocting a plan to put less of it in their diets.
Today's New York Times carries a story by Kim Severson, "Throwing the book at salt
" which describes Frieden's effort to reduce salt in packaged foods and restaurant meals with an aim to reduce salt intake by 25% over the next five years. He's talked to the food industry (mentioned) and the Salt Institute (unmentioned) and warns: "If there's not progress in a few years, we'll have to consider other options, like legislation."
Severson continues to point out the campaign will be "difficult for Dr. Frieden, both practically and politically."
It's actually more difficult than Frieden and his cardiovascular advisor Sonia Angell imagine. Severson quotes Angell presuming that salt intake is a matter of taste: "We've creatd a whole society of people accustomed to food that is really, really salty. We have to undo that." The plan is for "stealth" reductions in the salt content of processed foods "based on one in the United Kingdom (where) targets for sodium reduction will be set for certain food categories."
All this in blithe ignorance of the evidence. Well, not really ignorance, self-deception. Last week, the Salt Institute met with Dr.Frieden and his senior staff and laid out the problems he's facing, none of them "political" but all "practical" since the campaign is based on pseudo-science. The Institute confirmed its representation in a letter, as usual, posted on its website
. The letter warns that Frieden's disregard of the science amounts to "using the citizesn of New York as a grand experiment of this generally-believed but as-yet untested hypothesis."
The Institute told Frieden that sodium-reduced diets raise the blood pressure in a significant number of people and will increase in most people insulin resistance, sympathetic nervous system activity and activate productin of renin and aldosterone, well-demonstrated to increase their risk of teh very cardiovascular events your program is intended to reduce." Bottom line: "Salt reduction may actually increase the risk of a significant portion of those New Yorkers who adopt your recommendations since teh lower sodium intake stimulates these known physiologic factors for heart attacks, congestive heart failure and metabolic syndrome."
The Institute lamented the predictable but "unintended consequences" since the medical literature is discovering more and more adverse impacts of salt reduction. "Since it is your mandate to improve the public health of the citizens of New York, we remind you that it si these physiological facts, not political policies that will ultimately determine health outcomes," the Institute warned.
Frieden's campaign also ignores strong evidence that the UK model has been a total waste of money and has achieved no sodium reduction and that medical evidence shows that humans' salt appetite is "hard-wired" in the brain, not a behavioral choice. Unmentioned in the letter was a new study released just yesterday showing that the "human brain makes snap decision on fat content" -- the headline on a new study in NeuroImage
.
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