Could demons and 'Pugs unite on Salt?

[Fabbs]

Is salt really this bad?
http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20100302/hl_nm/us_heart_salt;_ylt=AvxnmWTUsQ9e8nfHJi_KeyH737YB;_y lu=X3oDMTMydWw1dGtrBGFzc2V0A25tLzIwMTAwMzAyL3VzX2h lYXJ0X3NhbHQEY2NvZGUDbW9zdHBvcHVsYXIEY3BvcwM3BHBvc wM3BHNlYwN5bl90b3Bfc3RvcmllcwRzbGsDaW5kdXN0cnljcmF j

Industry crackdown on salt could save U.S. billions
Reuters
By Julie Steenhuysen Julie Steenhuysen

CHICAGO (Reuters) – Working with the food industry to cut salt intake by nearly 10 percent could prevent hundreds of thousands of heart attacks and strokes over several decades and save the U.S. government $32 billion in healthcare costs, U.S. researchers said on Monday.

Eating too much salt is a major cause of high blood pressure, which the Institute of Medicine, one of the National Academies of Sciences, last week declared a "neglected disease" that costs the U.S. health system $73 billion a year.

Several governments including the United States are looking for solutions to curb salt intake as a way to head off future heart attacks and strokes that help drain healthcare systems.

The study by a team at the Stanford University School of Medicine and the Veterans Affairs Palo Alto Health Care System in California used a computer model to measure the impact of two different scenarios for reducing salt intake on a population level -- a voluntary collaboration with the U.S. food industry and a national tax on salt.

They found the voluntary program, based on a similar salt-reduction campaign in Britain, to be the most effective.

The team estimated that a government-industry effort could cut Americans' salt intake by 9.5 percent.

"In our analysis, we found these small decreases in blood pressure would be effective in reducing deaths due to cardiovascular disease," said Dr. Crystal Smith-Spangler of the VA, whose study appears in the Annals of Internal Medicine.

The salt reduction campaign would prevent 513,885 fatal strokes and 480,358 heart attacks over the lifetimes of U.S. adults who are aged 40 to 85 today. That would save $32.1 billion in health costs during the lifetime of this group, including $14 billion in hospitalizations for strokes and heart attacks.

"The numbers of affected people are huge, so even a small decrease is significant if you have large numbers of people involved," Smith-Spangler said in a statement.

By contrast, a tax on salt would cut salt intake by 6 percent, resulting in 327,892 fewer strokes and 306,173 fewer heart attacks, the team calculated.

75 PERCENT EAT TOO MUCH SALT

As many as 75 percent of Americans consume more than the suggested maximum of 2.3 grams of salt a day, Dr. Thomas Frieden, director of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, said in a commentary in the journal.

Because three-fourths of Americans' salt intake comes from processed foods and restaurant meals, he said, it is not feasible to reduce the nation's salt intake without food industry cooperation.

"If cooperation is not voluntary, new regulations on sodium content of processed and prepared foods might be necessary," Frieden wrote.

A program in Britain to cut salt intake in foods has resulted in a 20 to 30 percent decline in salt in processed foods sold in stores since 2003. Japan, Finland, Ireland, Australia and Canada have launched similar initiatives, Frieden said.

The city of New York started a program in January to encourage food makers and restaurant chains to cut their salt use by 25 percent over the next five years.

(Editing by Mohammad Zargham)

[boutons_deux]

The corps and their poisonous crap food-like substances have addicted Ameicans to salt/sweet/grease/flavor-color-enhances. Which of course make them sick and drives them into the greedy, exorbitant hands of health care.

Americans are screwed, cornered, and drained of the $$$ no matter which way they turn.

[Marcus Bryant]

I guess we can't expect individuals to be responsible for their own diets.

Naturally the evil "corps" are to blame.

[Wild Cobra]

I guess we can't expect individuals to be responsible for their own diets.

Naturally the evil "corps" are to blame.
Naturally.

Or do you think they want to be authoritarian over health care costs, since their end plan is to have socialized health care?

[Marcus Bryant]

This is a prime example of American politics and governance as it stands today. You, as an individual, are an unimportant participant. Your liberty is tertiary, if it's even acknowledged. Your importance comes only as a member of a given group. You have ceded your individuality and liberty. Well, someone else has determined that those are not important to you.

What matters today is the perfection of the average American. The problem is, just as the grand wizards of Wall Street and DC learned that markets do not operate according to normal distributions, neither do individuals.

[boutons_deux]

"we can't expect individuals to be responsible for their own diets."

sure we can, but most people and docs are totally ignorant about health and nutrition. They've been programmed to think popping pills solves everything.

The whole objective of shitty education and corporate predation is to have ignorant, passive consumers. Ignorant people, most Americans (70% now overweight/obese) figure, because they see it on TV, and find it on the shelf in grocery store, it's "food" and healthy.

"authoritarian over health care costs"

medicare/medicaid already set the allowed reimbursement schedules.

I have a buddy with idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis and catastrophic insurance with $3K deductible, individual plan. He bought a $2800 oxygen concentrator, only to find the his insurance allowed him only $1500, meaning in order to hit a $3K deductible, he may have to spend way past $5K, up to $10K to have insurance actually help him.

And you bitch about authoritarian? Ain't nothing more brutally inhuman and authoritarian that health insurance companies.

The all-powerful health care system has America by the balls and it won't let go, ever, and esp not voluntarily. If the govt doesn't defend people from the health care assholes by going "authoritarian", it's only gonna get $$$worse and $$$worse.

[boutons_deux]

"What matters today is the perfection of the average American"

... as a passive consumer, intimidated employee, ignorant human being. A coin machine to be emptied by the corps.

[Marcus Bryant]

Naturally the state has had nothing to do with that.

[DarrinS]

Government cheese.

[ElNono]

I read something about this a few months ago here in New York. Something like restaurants were going to be mandated to include the salt amounts in their menus, IIRC. I'll have to look it up.

[ElNono]

The Shaky Science Underlying New York's Salt Assault (http://reason.com/blog/2010/01/11/the-shaky-science-underlying-n)
Jacob Sullum

Participation in New York City's new anti-salt campaign (http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/11/business/11salt.html), which aims to reduce the sodium content of restaurant and packaged food by an average of 25 percent in the next five years, is voluntary for now. But that is also how the city's trans fat ban got started; when restaurants declined to cooperate, they were forced. City officials are downplaying the possibility that recalcitrant volunteers will be conscripted. "There’s not an easy regulatory fix," Associate Health Commissioner Geoffrey Cowley told The New York Times. "You would have to micromanage so many targets for so many different products." And when have government bureaucrats ever tried to micromanage business practices?

Even if it does not become legally mandatory, the city's salt assault is astonishingly presumptuous. Because it requires the participation of restaurant chains and food manufacturers, it will, if successful, affect the diet of the entire country. Such a nationwide shift is not justified even by the standards of "public health" paternalism, since it could do more harm than good. "We all consume way too much salt," claims New York City Health Commissioner Thomas Farley. But as I noted (http://reason.com/archives/2003/07/01/the-anti-pleasure-principle) in my 2003 Reason article about the Center for Science in the Public Interest (which back in the 1970s was calling salt "the deadly white powder you already snort"), that position is more an article of nutritional faith than an established scientific proposition. Reviewing (http://www.esquire.com/the-side/MARIANI/mariani-salt-essay) the controversy over salt reduction in a 2008 Esquire article, John Mariani summed up the evidence this way:

Studies show that 30 percent of the Americans who have high blood pressure would greatly benefit from a low-sodium diet. But that's about 10 percent of the overall population—the rest of us are fine with sodium.

Furthermore, skeptics such as Michael Alderman, editor of the American Journal of Hypertension, worry that a substantial nationwide reduction in salt consumption could have unintended negative health consequences. "They want to do an experiment on a whole population without a good control," Alderman told (http://www.nydailynews.com/ny_local/2010/01/11/2010-01-11_new_city_foe_salt_plan_would_urge_whopping_25_r eduction_in_nearly_all_food_produ.html) the New York Daily News. "That's not science." In a 2000 review (http://hyper.ahajournals.org/cgi/content/full/36/5/890) of the evidence, Alderman warned:

The question...is whether the beneficial hypotensive effects of sodium restriction will outweigh its hazards. Unfortunately, few data link sodium intake to health outcomes, and that which is available is inconsistent. Without knowledge of the sum of the multiple effects of a reduced sodium diet, no single universal prescription for sodium intake can be scientifically justified.

Previous Reason coverage of New York's anti-salt crusade here (http://reason.com/blog/2009/01/29/can-a-new-york-bureaucrat-put), here (http://reason.com/blog/2009/04/07/health-fascisms-latest-front-t), and here (http://reason.com/blog/2009/09/24/mayor-bloombergs-salty-tooth).

[Wild Cobra]

I read something about this a few months ago here in New York. Something like restaurants were going to be mandated to include the salt amounts in their menus, IIRC. I'll have to look it up.
Mandating the nutritional information on the menus is ridiculous, but I can agree with mandating the information be available.

[Marcus Bryant]

So a lesser form of authoritarianism.

[word]

Just use sea-salt. It doesn't give you high blood pressure.

[boutons_deux]

"Michael Alderman, editor of the American Journal of Hypertension, worry that a substantial nationwide reduction in salt consumption could have unintended negative health consequences."

well, scare-monger dude, reduction of superfluous salt isn't elimination of necessary salt.

There's plenty of cheap-trick salt added to damn near all industrial food-like substances that there's little risk of anybody suffering from salt deficiency.

Anyway, salt deficiencies are dead simple to fix compared with all the damage done from hypertension (strokes, kidneys, etc). Estimate is that reducing salt could save $200B on national health bill.

Libertarians pretenders don't mind food suppliers adding tons of salt to everything without the customer asking, but they reflexively, stupidly object to govt (who has to pay for hypertension diseases and damage) trying to get added salt down to healthy levels.

[Wild Cobra]

Just use sea-salt. It doesn't give you high blood pressure.

LOL...

It's still mostly sodium chloride, about 85% of it by weight. Are you buying into the propaganda of commercials?

Chloride (Cl-) 55.03%
Sodium (Na+) 30.59%
Sulfate (SO42-) 7.68%
Magnesium (Mg2+) 3.68%
Calcium (Ca2+) 1.18%
Potassium (K+) 1.11%
Bicarbonate (HCO3-) 0.41%
Bromide (Br-) 0.19%
Borate (BO33-) 0.08%
Strontium (Sr2+) 0.04%
Everything else 0.01%


Sea salt and table salt have the same basic nutritional value — both mostly consist of two minerals — sodium and chloride. However, sea salt is often marketed as a more natural and healthy alternative. The real differences between sea salt and table salt are in their taste, texture and processing, not their chemical makeup.
Is sea salt better for your health than table salt? (http://www.mayoclinic.com/health/sea-salt/AN01142)

[scott]

I guess we can't expect individuals to be responsible for their own diets.

Is this a sarcastic statement? Have you LOOKED around America?

[scott]

To expand a little further, it is perfectly within the realm of free-market thinking to feel there needs to be some government interaction on diets.

People, specifically Americans, have demonstrated a clear lack of the ability to control their own diet, to the point where there is now an inefficient market equilibrium on [caloric, salt, etc.] consumption. A sub-optimal quantity of the [whatever] is being consumed, which is forcing costs upon others that do not partake in the consumption of this good. This doesn't necessarily have to be the costs associated with health care - but could rather by the cost of discomfort caused by having to sit next to a morbidly obese person on a bus or airplane for example.

Costs don’t have to be financial to be real, and there a number of real costs borne out of America’s inability to self-police our diets. Free-market economists (of which I am) all acknowledge the existence of inefficient market equilibrium any time the costs or benefits or some action are realized by some part other than those who partook in said action. This is one of the few roles that governments can play in even the least interventionist of government schemes (minimizing externalities, enforcing property rights, providing infrastructure and national security are the fundamentals of most non-interventionist government schemes).

Now, we can debate whether this is a case that merits government interaction – but don’t confuse this with totalitarian politics. This is, by its very nature, Pareto economics in order to maximize efficiency and social welfare.