Companies cut salt, sugar in packaged foods; urge them to do more

I’ve written extensively about how I had to change my food shopping habits to get the salt, fat and sugar out of the items I buy. Most processed foods contain more salt than any normal person woudl need, let alone someone who has heart issues as I do.

Salt can lead to stomach cancer, one more reason to get it out of your diet. — Too much salt will be in processed and restaurant foods for years to come.

Where once I’d shop at a store or two, I now buy food at a variety of stories, cherry-picking the low- and no-salt products where I can find them since not even major food stores seem to carry them all.

A ray of good news broke through that food store clutter, recently, though. A new survey, albeit done by the processed food business itself, found that global consumer goods companies cut the salt and sugar in about 20% of their products in 2016.

The survey went to 102 companies which reported cutting salt and sugar in 180,000 products.The report comes from the Consumer Goods Forum, which as I said is a food industry group.

Good news, thank you multinationals, but overall I’ll take it with a grain of…well not salt. Twenty percent leaves a lot of other products with too much salt, fat and sugar. And reducing does not mean reducing to acceptable levels necessarily either.

But all that said, keep going, get the salt out!

John