Sixteen food makers and restaurant chains have agreed to cut salt in products from ketchup to bacon as part of a city-led national push to trim Americans' salt consumption by 20% over five years, Mayor Michael Bloomberg plans to announce Monday.
The moves by the companies — including H.J. Heinz Co., Kraft Foods Inc., Starbucks and Subway — are part of a broad campaign to slash the salt content of the nation's food supply. Salt is a common food preservative, but Americans consume nearly twice the recommended limit of sodium each day. That raises the odds of heart attack or stroke for millions, studies show.
The initiative, modeled after a British program, is the first of its kind in the U.S., but it is voluntary and food makers can choose which products they will cut back. Most that have signed onto the initiative haven't agreed to the more sweeping changes across their whole lineups that officials want.
Kraft, for instance, will commit to cut salt only in bacon, telling the city that it ultimately hoped to "meet or exceed" targets in half its two dozen product categories, which account for 75% of the food it sells.
Mr. Bloomberg, who has also led campaigns against smoking and trans fats and pushed for calorie counts to be posted in restaurants, plans to meet with executives Monday at City Hall. "For the first time in this country, we have a broad group of public and private organizations coming together to make changes so people can have better control over the amount of salt they eat," he said.
Dr. Thomas A. Farley, commissioner of the city's Department of Health and Mental Hygiene, said the cuts are significant but that Americans have a long way to go in reducing their salt intake.
"We have changed the national conversation on salt," he said. "The conversation used to be: What's the matter with salt? And, now, the conversation is: What are the best ways to reduce the salt levels?"
In the past two years, the city has talked with roughly 400 companies. Officials hope to pick up more commitments soon.
The cuts come less than a week after a report from the Institute of Medicine called on the Food and Drug Administration to mandate standards for the amount of salt that manufacturers, restaurants and food-service companies can add to products. Voluntary efforts have fallen short, the report concluded.
The initiative's architects have set reduction targets in 62 categories of packaged food and 25 categories of restaurant food. If a company commits to a target in a particular category, the target will apply to its entire portfolio, not individual products.
Subway is examining all the components of a sandwich—the breads, the meats, condiments—and trying to cut sodium out of each to bring down the total sandwich content, said Lanette Kovachi, the chain's corporate dietician. "Taste is really our first priority," she said. "So any changes we make will not affect the flavor."
Campbell Soup Co., which has been broadly focusing on reducing salt for several years, declined to make any commitments to the city, Chor-San Khoo, Campbell Soup's senior science fellow, said in a statement. Ms. Khoo said that while the company supports the city's overall goals, "we believe the targets and timing proposed by New York City can not realistically be achieved in all of our product categories and still meet consumers' demand for great-tasting foods."
Not everyone favors Mr. Bloomberg's latest health kick. "It's an illegitimate form of government intervention," said J. Justin Wilson, a senior research analyst at the Center for Consumer Freedom, a nonprofit dedicated to consumer choice. "It's paternalism, and it's run amok."
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