Already a leader in the charge against unhealthy fats, New York City has now declared war on salt. The aim is to cut the nationwide incidence of high blood pressure, which can lead to heart attacks and strokes.
“There’s been a shot across the bow,” says , a nutrition and public health specialist at New York University. “I think salt is a huge issue that’s coming.”
Unlike the city’s bans on smoking in the workplace and the use of artificial trans-fats, using large amounts of salt won’t be illegal.
Instead, the city’s health department has launched the , which asks restaurant chains and food manufacturers across the US to pledge to slash their use of salt by specific amounts.
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Within five years, the NSRI aims to cut by a quarter the amount of sodium in processed foods, which account for four-fifths of an average American’s salt intake.
Public health enemy
Nestle believes the NSRI is a good way to start, but says that there are challenges to painting salt as a public health enemy. For one, salt use is ubiquitous, making it difficult to examine its effects in clinical studies.
, an epidemiologist and hypertension specialist at Albert Einstein College of Medicine in New York, warns that cutting salt consumption across the board could have unintended consequences. As well as reducing blood pressure, lowering salt levels can increase insulin resistance – a risk factor for diabetes – and cause heart problems, he says.
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