View this email in your browser

By Matthew Rees

Food and Health Fact #120: The payoff from reducing sodium consumption

Find all previously published Food and Health Facts here

Americans consume nearly 50 percent more sodium than the federal government’s recommended daily amount, according to a CDC study published in 2017. And sodium consumption levels are typically unknown, given that 70 percent of sodium is embedded in processed food or restaurant fare. (Only 11 percent comes from manually adding salt to food.)

Two weeks ago, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration proposed voluntary sodium reduction targets of 12.5 percent for approximately 160 categories of processed, packaged and prepared foods. A similar voluntary effort in the United Kingdom reduced sodium consumption by approximately 10 percent from 2000-2018. The cost of the salt reduction program was £103 million, while the reduced morbidity from cardiovascular disease generated health care savings of £310 million, according to a study published earlier this year. The total savings from the program, factoring in health care and social costs, were estimated to be £860 million.

(When buying packaged food, a general rule of thumb is to look for products where the number of milligrams of sodium per serving is lower than the number of calories.)