Salt Institute: New dietary guidelines on sodium will increase obesity and health risks for Americans (PR)

NEWS RELEASE

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
July 8, 2010
Phone:  703-549-4648
morton@saltinstitute.org

Salt Institute: New dietary guidelines on sodium

will increase obesity and health risks for Americans

Washington, DC -- At the Oral Comment Meeting of the Dietary Guidelines Advisory Committee, held today at USDA headquarters, the Salt Institute cautioned that instead of improving the health of consumers, the 2010 Dietary Guidelines will result in confusion and unintended consequences.  Reduced salt in food will fuel the obesity epidemic as individuals will consume more to satisfy their natural sodium appetite and their hunger for taste satisfaction.  It will also lead to other serious unintended health risks.

Salt Institute Vice President of Science and Research, Morton Satin said that the Dietary Guidelines have become far more a reflection of activist ideology than sound science. “The purpose of the 5-year review process is to objectively examine all the new evidence before making recommendations, yet, before the process began, key Committee members openly stated the expected outcomes regarding salt, thereby compromising the process and making any final recommendations a forgone conclusion,” Satin said.

The recommendation of 1,500 mg sodium amounts to less than 4 grams of salt per day.  Available data confirms that there is no modern society that consumes so little salt, thus making the Dietary Guidelines recommendation a trial on more than 300 million Americans.  Population-wide interventions to reduce health risks can only work when there are no negative health consequences – which is clearly not the case with salt reduction. Elevated renin-angiotensin-aldosterone activity, the body’s natural hormonal response to reduced salt intake, will drive the population’s health risks to higher levels.  Peer-reviewed evidence further suggests the possibility of unintended consequences such as cognitive impairment, adverse infant neurodevelopment and increased attention deficits and falls in the elderly, resulting from insufficient salt intake. 

Satin went on to state, “Previous Guidelines made rigid recommendations on fat, portraying them as scientifically sound, yet had to be withdrawn when the actual science proved them wrong.  I believe this grim lesson will be repeated once more with salt. Healthy humans, all around the world, consume salt within a relatively narrow range, controlled by their natural physiological control mechanisms. Trying to trump biology with flawed policy is pure folly.”