As a New York City resident, I’m proud to say that the “City that Never Sleeps” has been a trailblazer in a lot of health matters. It was the first to ban restaurants from using trans fats in their foods, and was among the first to banish smoking from bars and restaurants.
And now, New York City is about to undertake a new public health campaign: restricting restaurants from using so much salt in their foods.
It’s truly amazing the amount of salt the average person consumes. Remember, for a 2,000 calorie-a-day diet, the recommended amount is 2,300-2,400 milligrams. But the average dish at a restaurant like Macaroni Grille has more than that in one dish!
Take the healthy-sounding Seared Sea Scallops Salad as an example. That one dish has 2,860 milligrams of sodium (not to mention 91 grams of fat, 25 of which are of the saturated variety).
Yikes! You’d be better off eating a 20-piece offering of McDonald’s Chicken McNuggets (not that I’m suggesting you do that, but their nutritional statistics are far more agreeable to health than the Macaroni Grille’s nutritional nightmare).
If you’ve read my book “The Blood Pressure Miracle,” you know the impact high sodium has on one’s susceptibility to hypertension. I’d go so far as to say that it’s the biggest factor in one’s susceptibility to “the silent killer.”
Sodium is very sneaky. It doesn’t take much to go way overboard, but at the same time, it doesn’t take much to reduce the risk of hypertension among a population exponentially. Consider the analysis that found that for every gram of salt cut, approximately 250,000 hypertension cases and 200,000 deaths can be avoided over a decade!
It’s for this reason that I’m all for New York City implementing policy that will take the salt shaker out of chefs’ shake-tastic hands. Because when chefs make meals, they’re really not measuring out the amount of salt they’re putting into dishes. Their ultimate goal is to get food out quickly to customers and make sure that that the food tastes good. And salt is their avenue in which to do that. But a splash here, and a sprinkle there – combined with the salt the customer adds when it’s delivered to him or her – and it’s high time for a heart attack.
I suppose the biggest question is how to implement this plan; in other words, how will regulating sodium use be monitored so that restaurateurs adhere to the policy of cutting back on salt use. They’ll have to look toward Britain, as this initiative has been modeled on Britain’s Food Standards Agency, whose goal is to reduce the amount of salt used in restaurants by 20 percent over the next five years.
Reasonable people can argue whether or not the government should be involved in private company matters (i.e. restaurants), but the number of people with hypertension is at epidemic proportions, and it’s linked to how often people eat out at restaurants that serve sodium-saturated dishes.
As I see it, if government can require that drivers wear seat belts for their own safety and that bicyclists wear helmets for their own safety, is it really asking that much to require some sodium discretion in food preparation?
After all, the public’s health is at stake.
Sources
womenshealthmag.com
msnbc.msn.com
