YOUR TASTE For SALT is not hard-wired from birth. The excessive amount Americans eat today is a result of what Matthias Berninger, vice president of public affairs for Mars, calls an “arms race” between food producers and restaurant chains. One turns up the salt；customers get used to that；the next producer does the same thing. Overtime, the whole population's palate changes. Today Americans consume two to three times the sodium they need, and one in three Americans suffers from high blood pressure, which can lead to heart disease - which can lead to the grave.
Some public health advocates think lessening Americans' dependence on sodium will be easier than doing the same with sugar - in large part because it won't require weaning an entire nation off soda. It takes only days or weeks to recalibrate your palate. Making that happen for the American public means negotiating, essentially, a new arms treaty. Marion Nestle (no relation to the company), a professor of nutrition and food studies at New York University and one of the fiercest critics of the food industry, believes that food companies and restaurant chains could play a role in fixing the problem they've created. “The trick is to get the makers of process and pre-prepared foods to agree to gradually reduce the amount of salt in their products,” she says. “If everyone did that, nobody would notice.”
Thomas Frieden, director of the Center for Disease Control and Prevention, recently published a paper in The Journal of the American Medical Association calling for more companies to agree to voluntary sodium-reduction targets. Frieden is no stranger to this sort of crusade：He led the charge against trans fats for Mayor Michael Bloomberg while he was New York City's health commissioner. His article points to British data showing that a 15 percent reduction in sodium intake from 2003 to 2011, a result of voluntary targets Britain set in 2003, was followed by a 40 percent reduction in deaths from ischemic heart disease and stroke. “Sodium reduction,” he told me, “could save hundreds of thousands of lives and billions of dollars in health care costs.”
These kinds of recommendations were given heft in June when the F.D.A. released its sodium guidelines. “We've used educational strategies for years,” says Susan Mayne, director of the F.D.A.'s Center for Food Safety and Applied Nutrition. “But we found education alone is not sufficient.” The F.D.A. recognizes that, as with any arms-reduction deal, all parties need assurance that other parties are following the rules, too, so the agency aims to coax the sodium out of our diet slowly. It knows that every company thinking about lowering sodium has Campbell's in its rearview mirror.
Campbell's is the cautionary tale of what can happen when a company gets ahead of the competition. For years, it has wanted to demonstrate its commitment to public health, and its core product, canned soup, was a fat target for sodium reduction. Baseline levels of salt are generally so high that they're easy to make a big dent in. And with canned soup, you can do so without worrying about, say, a deflated crust. So in 2010, Campbell's reduced its soups' sodium by as much as 45 percent. Tip-off on the label or not - only some reductions were announced - customers didn't buy more. The salt back in.
Another reason to keep quiet about sodium reduction is the efforts of some groups to dispute recommended levels. No sooner had the F.D.A. reduced its guidelines than the Salt Institute, a trade organization “dedicated to advocating the many benefits of salt,” put out a news release lamenting the “government's war on salt,” calling it “malpractice” and pointing to numerous studies indicating the risks, not benefits, of lowering sodium consumption. (Frieden has said that those studies had “fundamental flaws.”)
Nestle and other multinationals have decided to tune-out in-country noise and look to the World Health Organization. “A lot of the food industry wants follow not-excellent but self-serving information,” Berninger, of Mars, says. “We believe the best and most profitable way forward is to stop the constant bickering. Just pick targets to meet.”
Bakus was feeling the pressure. At a Nestle's gathering of health experts in 2013, William Dietz, then focusing on obesity reduction at the Centers for Disease Control, pulled Bakus aside to say that pizza was a nutritional train wreck - the single greatest source of sodium for children ages 6 to 18. A paper Dietz later published in Pediatrics, the official journal of the American Academy of Pediatrics, associates pizza with higher caloric and saturated fat intake as well as higher sodium in children's diets. Bakus told me that running Nestle's pizza business made him feel as if he were walking around with a bull's-eye on his back.
