23-Feb-2022 | Market Research Store
The Food and Drug Administration is asking the food sector to lower the amount of salt in the products during the growing diet-related preventable health conditions. The agency has announced this updated guideline last October. However, the updated recommendations are likely to lower the average sodium consumption by 12% nationally over the next 2.5 years.
Even during the Covid-19 pandemic, heart-related conditions continue to be the growing cause of death. But the point is many of them can be prevented with the help of a healthy diet.
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However, it is an effective initiative, but the agency is likely to see much more depth in the landscape in the years to come and lowering sodium consumption can offer much more health benefits, says the FDA's acting commissioner, Dr Janet Woodcock.
"Too much sodium is making people sick. It's leading to hypertension, and that causes both heart disease, strokes, and even kidney damage, and it's preventable," Woodcock told in an interview.
She further stated that the agency is likely to emphasize promoting the food sector to change. However, she also says that it is unrealistic to expect such a huge behavior change because people do not have control over sodium levels in processed and packaged food. She even highlighted that even kids and toddlers have much of the sodium intake in the United States. Furthermore, she said the people themselves cannot cut on their sodium consumption as it is present in the food they buy.
Every day around 1800 people die because of heart disease in the United States. But unlike the Covid-19 virus that kills a person quickly, heart disease is associated with long-term unhealthy eating habits.
Nowadays, Americans are consuming around 3400 mg of sodium in a day on an average which is highly exceeding and surpassing the government’s latest recommendation on sodium diet, which is around 2300 mg of sodium in a day.
However, if Americans can lower their sodium intake every day, it could prevent around 4,50,000 cardiovascular cases, which amounts to roughly $40 billion in healthcare costs for over 20 years as per the statement given by American Heart Association.
The proposed 12% downtrend is a crucial step in the right direction, said Dariush Mozaffarian, a cardiologist and the dean of the Friedman School of Nutrition Science and Policy at Tufts University. But he is expecting more initiatives on lowering the consumption and cutting down the sodium intake to around 2300 mg in a day.