Salt reduction is now considered universally as a desirable step to avoid serious health afflictions like CVD, blood pressure and kidney diseases. Policy makers, world over, have an arduous task in making people reduce the salt intake at home from levels as high as 10-12 gm a day and therefore are targeting the processed food industry to cut down on use of salt in their processed foods. The recent report that even marginal reduction of salt intake can have dramatic benefits on a national scale gives further hope for continuing this campaign persuading people to reduce salt in food preparations with out compromising seriously on taste.
The team's results were derived from the Coronary Heart Disease Policy Model, a computer simulation of heart disease among U.S. adults that has been used by researchers to project benefits from public health interventions."A very modest decrease in the amount of salt, hardly detectable in the taste of food, can have dramatic health benefits for the U.S.," said Kirsten Bibbins-Domingo, PhD, MD, lead author of the study, UCSF associate professor of medicine and epidemiology and the co-director of the UCSF Center for Vulnerable Populations at San Francisco General Hospital."It was a surprise to see the magnitude of the impact on the population, given the small reductions in salt that we were modeling," Bibbins-Domingo added.
If the results of above studies are so dramatic, there must be conscious efforts to intensify the salt lowering campaign with well designed "message delivering" format in order to reach the essence of the message. Industry will certainly respond to such causes voluntarily but their action can be further facilitated through financial incentives for marketing low salt foods progressively.
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