Take It With a Grain of Salt

The Center for Science in the Public Interest has filed a lawsuit demanding that the Food and Drug Administration stop treating salt as an ingredient "generally recognized as safe." CSPI wants the FDA to force food manufacturers to reduce the salt content of their products. It also wants the government to require conspicuous warning labels for foods with high salt content and force restaurants to disclose the amounts of salt in their dishes.

CSPI calls salt a "silent killer," blaming it for 150,000 deaths a year. But as Steve Milloy, proprietor of junkscience.com, noted last year, the science concerning salt's impact on hypertension remains equivocal, and there is scant evidence that the general population would benefit from consuming less. Gary Taubes reviewed the long-running debate over salt's health effects in a 1998 Science article that is still well worth reading.