Now that I’m done with school I’m having fun catching up with all the news that I’ve fallen behind on over the past semester.  Reading the New York Times is a special pleasure on lazy Sundays (I say this with all the authority of having a single lazy Sunday under my belt).  Sam and I brew a pot of coffee, argue over who will tackle the crossword first, and check out the headlines in the features section.  This Sunday I noticed that The Hard Sell on Salt: Under Attack, Industry Fights Back had made the front page.

Seeing a nutrition article on the front page of the Times is always nice, I like knowing that I just invested two years and several thousand dollars in an area that’s attracting lots of interest.  What really surprised me was the size of the article.  When I flipped to the continuation expecting to see a column or two, I was amazed to see a whole page dedicated to the science, politics, and economics of salt in our food.

While I love to think that people want to learn about nutrition just for the sake of increasing their knowledge, I still had to wonder why such an article would merit such a large word count.  I started thinking about the politics of salt and food and what’s going on in nutrition right now that would cause such a broad article to be useful.  Because this article was really more like a primer on the politics of sodium in food than anything else.  It explains things I’ve learned from reading Marion Nestle’s Food Politics, David Kessler’s The End of Overeating, Harold McGee’s Science and Lore of the Kitchen.  An article that distills this information is interesting, yes, but why is it pertinent?

I did some searching and discovered that the 6th and final meeting of the advisory committee for the Dietary Guidelines for Americans took place on May 12th, which means that the final Guidelines will probably be released soon (although despite my searches of the USDA website I can’t seem to find a release date for them).  The New York Times article states that the commission, “includes two studies commissioned by ConAgra suggesting that the country could save billions of dollars more in health care and lost productivity costs by simply nudging Americans to eat a little less food, rather than less salty food.”

If the Guidelines really end up saying “less food, same salt” that would be amazing.  Previously industry, who has always had a financial finger in the pie if only by funding most of the research that is reviewed by the committee, has always been against the statement “eat less” in any form.  Saying no to less sodium was a heard sell for them though, because the science has consistently shown lots of sodium in the diet can lead to high blood pressure and many chronic diseases associated with high blood pressure.

I don’t think that there’s a big conspiracy among the makers of processed foods to give everyone high blood pressure, it’s just that salt tastes good and also acts as a preservative, two things that are very important in processed food.  Once the news came out about how bad sodium was for us companies like Campbell’s even tried cutting down on salt on their own.  First they started with new lines of Low Sodium products, but they quickly realized that when something is labeled Low Sodium that everyone expects it to taste cruddy and no one buys it.  Then they began quietly retooling their regular products lines and reducing the sodium behind the scenes, sometimes by dramatic amounts.  According to a Wall Street Journal article by next summer, ConAgra Food Inc.’s Chef Boyardee canned pasta will have decreased its sodium by about 35% over the course of five years without a word on the package.

The thing is, you can only reduce the salt in processed food by so much before you lose the flavor, texture, color, and preservative properties that you need in shelf stable products.  At this point industry has been backed into a corner.  They can’t reduce salt content in their packaged foods much more without having to either replace it with something more expensive (don’t ask me what, I’m not a food chemist), or start sacrificing in the flavor department.  Neither of these options are good economically.

To me this means that we might finally see something interesting in the newest addition of the 2010 Dietary Guidelines for Americans.  Or maybe I’m just reading a little too much into a interesting New York Times article.