FDA Is Urged To Toughen Rules on Salt

A consumer group prodded the Food and Drug Administration yesterday to regulate salt as a food additive, arguing that excessive salt consumption by Americans may be responsible for more than 100,000 deaths a year.

The government has long placed salt in a "generally recognized as safe" or GRAS category, which grandfathers in a huge list of familiar food ingredients. But in an FDA hearing yesterday, the Center for Science in the Public Interest (CSPI) urged the agency to enforce tougher regulations for sodium.

Doing so "lays the foundation for saving tens of thousands of lives per year," said CSPI Director Michael Jacobson in an interview after the hearing. It "just has tremendous potential to health and to cut health-care costs."

The nanny state is picking up steam, seeking to restrict salt from your diet. Silly me. I always thought that if I were eating too much salt, I would be responsible for making decisions to address the issue. I guess that government believes they know better than you do how much salt is too much. Can sweeping regulations apply to everyone, since each individual has different salt needs?

FDA Is Urged To Toughen Rules on Salt