The following is an excerpt from p. 75-77 of Chapter 1, “Precious Crystals: What Salt Teaches Us About Drugs” from my book, Drugism (2022):
In several previous excerpts, we have explored the various similarities and connections between historical salt taxes and today’s drug laws. Although history’s exorbitant salt taxes no longer exist, salt politics are still an area rife with debate and tension. And today’s salt politics offer a glimpse of the drug politics of the future. Just as history’s salt laws closely resemble today’s drug laws, modern salt laws will likely mirror the drug laws of the coming generations. For this reason, it is instructive to review salt politics in the modern era, even if only briefly.
In 1968, Congress created a committee to focus on public health policy. It was dubbed the Select Committee on Nutrition and Human Needs and was led by George McGovern and Bob Dole.[i] Nearly a decade later, in 1977, this committee released a report in which it recommended that people consume around 2,000 milligrams of sodium daily. However, some were concerned that this number was arbitrary and possibly even dangerously high, considering sodium’s role in heart disease, stroke, etc.
The following year, 1978, a consumer rights’ advocacy group, the Center for Science in the Public Interest (CSPI), petitioned the FDA to remove salt from the list of foods considered “generally recognized as safe,” or GRAS, by the agency.[ii] Additionally, they asked for sodium content to be labeled on packaged foods. Needless to say, such measures were greatly opposed by the private sector.
Astonishingly, in 1979, the FDA removed the GRAS status of salt. To this day, sodium chloride is absent from the GRAS list.[iii] It would be some years before sodium content was legally required to be disclosed on food packaging. But that too would happen.
In 1981, Al Gore introduced a bill to require sodium labels on food. After Proctor & Gamble and Campbell’s Soup applied political pressure to Congressional representatives, however, the bill lost any chance of passing. It was withdrawn in 1982. It was not until 1990 that sodium content became a standard part of nutrition information labels on food products.[iv]
The same year that Gore introduced his sodium label bill, a prudent meeting occurred among a handful of heads of industry. Frito-Lay executives held a forum with the president of the Shell oil company, an analyst from McKinsey & Co., and an official from R. J. Reynolds, the cigarette conglomerate.[v] They shared marketing strategies and brainstormed ways that they could all collaborate to increase profits. The result is something we all know well: gas stations with convenience shops full of junk food and cigarettes.
This dastardly combination has overtaken the continent and the world, and serves as a primary expression of legal drug dealing. Heavily salted and sweetened food is sold alongside cigarettes and beer; outside sit tanks of gas extracted from the oil fields of the world, terrorized by militaries and multinational petroleum corporations. Such sites generate dopamine, money, carbon emissions, and suffering, all in abundant amounts.
It was not until 1990 that sodium content became a standard part of nutrition information labels on food products.[vi] The removal of salt’s GRAS status and its required inclusion on nutrition labels have been, more or less, the extent of Washington’s power over the food industry as far as salt is concerned. Though there have been numerous attempts to introduce further regulation of salt content, each one has been met with heavy resistance from the private sector and the representatives they prey upon. At the federal level, none have succeeded. At the local level, two extremely modest projects have succeeded.
One of the efforts at the federal level that has flopped under corporate pressure started in 2012. It was then that the USDA announced a plan to reduce salt content in school meals over the course of eight years. The plan encountered substantial opposition from industry groups like the School Nutrition Association, an organization that gets most of its revenue from corporations such as PepsiCo, Domino’s Pizza, Kraft, etc.[vii]
In response to the USDA’s plan, the School Nutrition Association hired a DC-based law firm that has worked with McDonald’s and Kellogg. The firm, Barnes & Thornburg, helped the association file a legal complaint which effectively stopped the USDA in its tracks. As a result of this corporate pressure, Congress barred funds from being used to reduce sodium in school meals.[viii]
The USDA then delayed and/or canceled the remaining goals for salt reduction. In doing so, they presented an argument which was contradicted by their own research. The argument was a standard industry defense: use less salt and people will eat less food, which will produce more food waste. It did not matter that the USDA’s own research suggested otherwise—corporate needs took precedent. This is just one example of the ways that the salt and food industries have flexed their political muscle to halt regulation in its tracks.
Not only has industry inspired the USDA to overlook their own research, they have also inspired Congress to fund pro-business studies which contradict scientific consensus. This happened at least twice in the last decade: 2013 and 2019.[ix] All of these scenarios are just some of the many ways that today’s salt merchants—or, more accurately, the billionaire tycoons who employ them—have overtaken industry and our taste buds along with it. These and other political moves have created the context for the emergence of heart disease as the top killer today, and the death-by-salt-overdose of millions annually across the globe.
Across the world, numerous countries from Israel to Uruguay regulate their salt and food industries in ways which reduce sodium consumption.[x] Unfortunately, the US is far from the only place in which private interests have a tight grip on government.
Consider France, where the efforts of one scientist, Pierre Meneton, to raise awareness of the dangers of salt excess resulted in his reported surveillance by the French government. It is believed that the salt and food industries in France “persuaded” their government to keep a close eye on Meneton, who researches cardiovascular disease at the French National Institute of Health and Medical Research.[xi] The reason? He had estimated that overconsumption of salt kills 25,000 French citizens each year and held the salt and food industries accountable. For this he was deemed a “national security threat,” bugged, and demonized by France’s salt lobby. In Meneton’s story one can feel the spirit of the gabelle still today.
Back in the US, there have been two examples of modest but successful efforts to raise public awareness of sodium and, in turn, help reduce consumption. They have occurred in the cities of New York and Philadelphia. In both cities, chain restaurants are required to display a sodium warning icon on menu items which contain more than a day’s worth of sodium.[xii] While such meager measures cannot possibly be expected to influence the nation’s appetites, they nonetheless represent a small step forward in a landscape dominated by consumerism and private interests.
But we will need much more than warning icons on menus if we expect to address today’s relatively high rates of heart disease. One study found that rates of sodium consumption decline, on average, less than one percent per year.[xiii]At that rate, we have quite a way to go.