Proposed targets for industry could be more ambitious, says CSPI

The Food and Drug Administration today proposed new 3-year, voluntary sodium reduction targets for 163 categories of foods, which, if achieved by the food manufacturing and restaurant industries, would bring Americans’ sodium consumption to safer levels, according to the nonprofit Center for Science in the Public Interest. The nutrition and food safety watchdog group has been urging the FDA to reduce sodium in the food supply for more than three decades and most recently filed a citizen petition seeking such limits in 2023. 

The majority of sodium in the American diet comes from packaged and restaurant foods, so these targets are crucial to helping Americans reduce their sodium consumption. Excess sodium chloride, or salt, consumption increases the risk of high blood pressure, heart attack, stroke, and kidney disease. 

The FDA describes the new sodium reduction targets as Phase II of an effort beginning in earnest in 2021, when the FDA finalized voluntary targets for the industry across 163 categories of foods over a two-and-a-half-year period. At the time, the agency estimated that, if fully achieved, those initial targets would reduce Americans’ sodium consumption from approximately 3,400 milligrams of sodium per day to about 3,000 mg per day, though not nearly as low as the 2,300 mg recommended by the Dietary Guidelines for Americans. Full compliance with the new draft guidance would further reduce average intake to 2,750 mg per day. CSPI would like to have seen the FDA set a more aggressive target. 

The agency also released what it calls a Preliminary Assessment of Progress made from 2010 to 2022. The FDA asserts that 40 percent of food categories are within 10 percent of their Phase I targets. Their data also show that, across all food categories, more categories showed decreases (52 percent) than increases (34 percent) in their sales-weighted mean sodium content, although the magnitudes of decreases and increases are unclear. Most of the decreases in sodium content in the US food supply appear to have occurred in packaged foods as opposed to in restaurants, where nearly half of food categories increased in sodium, more than the fraction that decreased. Overall, CSPI says that this could represent modest progress over the FDA’s baseline of 2010. However, a complete assessment of these data will require data on trends and the magnitudes of increases and decreases over time, along with fuller category-by-category disclosure than what the FDA has so far provided. 

“It’s as if the food manufacturing industry is setting us up for failure,” said CSPI president Dr. Peter G. Lurie, noting that little of Americans’ sodium exposure comes from the saltshaker or home cooking.  

CSPI has been urging the FDA to reduce sodium in the food supply since 1978, when the organization first filed a petition asking for labeling of and limits on sodium in packaged foods. In 2005, after decades of inaction on the part of the FDA, CSPI re-petitioned the agency  to set mandatory upper limits on sodium on packaged and restaurant food. In 2015, CSPI sued the FDA over its failure to act, which prompted the FDA to propose voluntary 2- and 10-year sodium reduction targets for processed and restaurant foods in 2016. CSPI withdrew its lawsuit at that time.  In 2021, the FDA finalized the first of those targets and is here proposing what could be considered intermediate targets, as CSPI requested in its most recent petition. 

The Biden-Harris administration has endorsed the idea of long-term sodium reduction targets. Its National Strategy on Hunger, Nutrition, and Health, released in advance of a White House conference on those topics in 2022, recommends “facilitating sodium reduction in the food supply by issuing longer-term, voluntary sodium targets for industry.” This draft guidance is consistent with that commitment, according to CSPI.  

“The targets proposed today by the FDA are a definite step in the right direction, but could have been more ambitious,” Lurie said. “But success will only be achieved if we go beyond targets to enact a comprehensive strategy that involves outreach to industry, especially the restaurant industry, as well as monitoring the industry’s progress and reporting in detail to the public which food companies and restaurants are making progress with their products, and which remain the worst offenders.”  

 

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