Dietary Sodium and Food Labels
Dr. Appel: What is very important is that in order to accomplish a reduced sodium intake, people have to be cognizant of the sources. Although you mentioned some of them, one of the key sources is cereal and bread products. That is where about a third to 40% of our sodium typically comes from. In aggregate, because they are consumed so frequently, they provide the largest amount of sodium that we consume.
Dr. Black: If you were to train a patient to read food labels, I think it's pretty easy to read the cholesterol and saturated fats. What do you tell them about the sodium on the food label?
Dr. Appel: One of the things to do is to look at food labels within a product series. If you're interested in prepared spaghetti sauces, you can get spaghetti sauces that have huge amounts of sodium (over 900 mg per serving), you can get ones that have about 300 mg per serving, and some have 50 mg per serving. It's important to look within a label class. Typically, I say to try to avoid any product that has over 300-400 mg per serving, because that will give you a big bang for the buck. In terms of cereals, I think you can aim for even less. You could aim for products that have less than 100 mg per serving. There are differences by food category.
The key to success is going to be changes by the food industry to reduce the amount of sodium that they routinely provide in their products, because it's not going to be by training 5 billion individuals to reduce sodium intake by reading food labels. The way we are going to accomplish sodium reduction is through changes in the food supply.
Dr. Black: As I understand it, that has been recently successful in the United Kingdom, thanks to Graham MacGregor, who has been able to influence food companies to gradually reduce the amount of sodium. People don't taste it after a while. I remember some classic studies from the 1970s where they gradually reduced the sodium that people ate, and within a month, foods that they used to like tasted too salty. I think that's the way we have to go. It is a key public health issue if we want to prevent strokes and other diseases.
Thank you very much, Dr. Appel. I really appreciated talking with you. I'll see you at a meeting soon.
Dr. Appel: Great. Thanks so much, Henry.