Food makers pressured to cut sodium
Tue, 20 Nov 2007 02:25:35 GMT
By LAURAN NEERGAARD, AP Medical Writer
WASHINGTON - Think cooking the perfect Thanksgiving dinner is stressful? Something else is far more likely to raise your blood pressure: salt hidden in all those goodies. Don't blame the chef. Much of that salt was hidden from him or her, too.
Americans eat nearly two teaspoons of salt daily, more than double what they need for good health — and it's not because of the table salt-shaker. Three-fourths of that sodium comes inside common processed foods like stuffing mix, gravy, and yes, pumpkin pie.
Even raw turkey, which is naturally low in sodium, sometimes is injected with salt water before it reaches the store, a lot more salt than a home cook might sprinkle on. You have to read the brand's fine print to tell.
Now public health specialists are pressuring the Food and Drug Administration to require food makers to cut the sodium. In a hearing set for next week, they will call the government intervention crucial to fighting heart disease.
"There's just a growing scientific consensus that current levels of salt in the diet are one of the biggest health threats to the public," says Michael Jacobson of the Center for Science in the Public Interest, a consumer advocacy group that filed the FDA petition triggering the meeting.
"This is truly urgent," adds Dr. Stephen Havas of the American Medical Association. "We need to act."
The AMA says cutting in half the sodium in processed and restaurant foods within 10 years could wind up saving 150,000 lives annually.
The grocery industry knows there's a problem: Food makers and CSPI put aside their differences for an unprecedented, closed-door meeting on how to reduce sodium last month. And the salt content of many foods has inched down in recent decades.
But manufacturers argue they don't have tasty ways to make deeper cuts in salt, and fear consumer backlash if they slash it.
"There's a tremendous need for investment by government and industry to come up with salt alternatives," says Robert Earl of the Grocery Manufacturers Association. "There are just very few that exist that work and perform well in foods."
That's an excuse, argues Havas. Scientific studies show people get accustomed to eating less salt in mere months, and then usually find their old foods too salty.
One in three U.S. adults has high blood pressure, and almost 1 billion people worldwide. Hypertension in turn is a leading cause of heart attacks, strokes and kidney failure. And while being overweight and inactive raises blood pressure, too much salt is a big culprit as well.
Government guidelines set 2,300 milligrams of sodium a day as the safe upper limit. We don't need that much: The Institute of Medicine says just 1,500 mg a day, a little less for older adults, is enough to regulate the body's fluid balance, the mineral's job.
Yet the average American consumes between 3,300 and 4,000 mg of sodium a day.
Thanksgiving dinner alone can easily reach those limits: Stuffing can harbor up to 600 mg of sodium a serving, plus 300 for gravy. If you bought the salt-added turkey, plan on 490 mg. A biscuit can mean 350, although a dinner roll might have half that. Pumpkin pie doesn't seem salty, but one popular brand has 300 mg a slice.
Cooking from scratch can slash those numbers — homemade cornbread for stuffing, for example, has little salt — and there are even reduced-sodium broths to make gravy.
But many processed foods don't need all their salt.
"We could fairly easily take 18 to 20 percent out of food without consumers knowing," says Patty Packard, nutrition manager at giant ConAgra Foods.
ConAgra has started doing that, beginning with kid-popular brands. Chef Boyardee, for instance, went from an average of 1,100 mg of sodium per serving in 2003 to 900 mg today. Over four years, ConAgra estimates it has removed 2.8 million pounds of salt from a list of products — kids brands, Banquet, Marie Callender's — without consumer complaint, possibly because it hasn't publicized the change.
"We know consumer perception is, if it's lower in sodium it doesn't taste good," Packard says. "If you told people ... they're going, 'Oooh, what'd you do to my Chef Boyardee?'"
Technology also can help. Better ways to freeze vegetables brought the sodium level of frozen peas down from almost 500 in the 1960s to less than 100 today — unless you buy them with high-salt butter sauce.
But other foods have gotten saltier. For example, between 2004 and 2007, average sodium in sliced cheese rose 35 percent, and frozen pizza saw a 23 percent jump, CSPI found.
It's not just a U.S. issue. Britain has a major government campaign under way to reduce salt consumption by one-third by 2010. In catchy TV ads, a shopper shouts, "Full of it!" as she tosses aside high-sodium foods, and a mound of salt crushes a grocery cart. Next year, Britain begins checking if manufacturers are meeting new reduced-sodium targets for different types of food.
Finland places a "high-salt" label on foods that are, and has seen sodium intake decrease by 40 percent in three decades — along with a big drop in strokes. The World Health Organization this year called for worldwide sodium reduction in processed foods, plus consumer education on cutting the salt.
Here, the FDA won't say how quickly it will decide whether to intervene or let industry gradually cut the salt on its own.
"Regulation is one option, but it may not be the best one," says FDA food-additive chief Dr. Laura Tarantino.
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Lauran Neergaard covers health and medical issues for The Associated Press in Washington.
AIDS cases drop but bad data to blame
Tue, 20 Nov 2007 02:51:27 GMT
By MARIA CHENG, AP Medical Writer
LONDON - The number of AIDS cases worldwide fell by more than 6 million cases this year to 33.2 million, global health officials said Tuesday. But the decline is mostly on paper.
Previous estimates were largely inflated, and the new numbers are the result of a new methodology. They show AIDS cases in 2007 were down from almost 39.5 million last year, according to the World Health Organization and the United Nations AIDS agency.
Although the decline is largely due to revised numbers, U.N. officials said it still showed the AIDS pandemic was losing momentum.
"For the first time, we are seeing a decline in global AIDS deaths," said Dr. Kevin De Cock, director of WHO's AIDS department.
The two agencies will issue their annual AIDS report Wednesday after convening an expert meeting last week in Geneva to examine their data collection methods.
Much of the drop is due to revised numbers from India — which earlier this year slashed its numbers in half, from about 6 million cases to about 3 million — and to new data from several countries in sub-Saharan Africa.
Previous AIDS numbers were largely based on the numbers of infected pregnant women at clinics, as well as projecting the AIDS rates of certain high-risk groups like drug users to the entire population at risk. Officials said those numbers were flawed, and are now incorporating more data like national household surveys.
U.N. officials could not rule out future downward corrections. WHO and UNAIDS experts reported 2.5 million newly infected people in 2007. Just a few years ago, that figure was about 5 million.
While the global AIDS numbers are falling, there are huge regional differences. Sub-Sarahan Africa remains the epicenter of the epidemic. AIDS is still the leading cause of death in there, where it affects men, women and children. Elsewhere in the world, AIDS outbreaks are mostly concentrated in gay men, intravenous drug users, and sex workers.
But the U.N. said progress was being made, and that the global epidemic peaked in the late 1990s.
"There are some encouraging elements in the data," said De Cock. He said the dropping numbers were proof that some of the UN's strategies to fight AIDS were working.
Not everyone agrees. Some critics have accused the U.N. of inflating its AIDS numbers, and say the revised figures are long overdue.
"They've finally got caught with their pants down," said Dr. Jim Chin, a clinical professor of epidemiology at the University of California at Berkeley. Chin is a former WHO staffer and the author of "The AIDS Pandemic: The Collision of Epidemiology with Political Correctness."
He said that it was difficult to tell whether the lowered numbers were evidence that AIDS treatment and prevention strategies were working, or whether the decrease was just due to a natural correction of previous overestimates.
Even with the revised figures, "the numbers are probably still on the high side," said Daniel Halperin, an AIDS epidemiologist at the Harvard School of Public Health. Halperin attended the WHO/UNAIDS meeting last week that reviewed the figures, and said that the estimates were getting closer.
Chin and Halperin said AIDS officials may be reluctant to admit that fewer people are infected because it may translate into less funding for efforts to fight the disease.
"On the one hand, it would be a mistake to radically decrease funding for HIV," Halperin said. "But on the other hand, why not put more money into family planning or climate change?"
Other experts said that even with the decreased figures, much more is needed to stop the AIDS pandemic.
"We are still failing to respond to the crisis," said Dr. Paul Zeitz, executive director of the Global AIDS Alliance. "The overall prevalence of AIDS may have stabilized, but we are still seeing millions of new infections and it is not time yet to step back from this battle."
Condoms for inmates a tough sell
Tue, 20 Nov 2007 01:32:47 GMT
By DAVID CRARY, AP National Writer
NEW YORK - To activists concerned about AIDS and prisoners' rights, it's an urgent, commonsense step that should already be nationwide policy — letting inmates have condoms to reduce the spread of sexually transmitted diseases behind bars.
Yet their efforts have run headlong into a stronger political force: Authorities' desire not to encourage inmates who flout prison rules against sex. Only one state, Vermont, and five cities regularly hand out condoms to inmates. Mississippi does so only for inmates receiving conjugal visits from their spouses.
Left out are the vast majority of America's 2.2 million prisoners — many held in facilities where sex between men is common and the risk of STDs is far higher than in the general population.
"I realize this is not a comfortable topic for many people, but it's one we simply cannot afford to ignore," said Rep. Barbara Lee, D-Calif. "When more than 90 percent of incarcerated people return to our communities, taking a head-in-the-sand approach to the fact that our prisons have become a breeding ground for HIV/AIDS poses a serious public health risk."
Despite such warnings, recent efforts to expand behind-bars condom access have gone almost nowhere. Prison officials contend that condoms can be used to conceal drugs, and law-and-order politicians scoff at what they depict as a step that would encourage both consensual and coercive sex.
"Removing the freedoms of criminals is in itself a deterrent," said California Assemblyman Paul Cook. "Allowing condoms into prisons simply sends the wrong message and confirms what we all suspect: Our prison system has serious and severe behavioral and inmate-control issues."
A measure introduced by Lee in Congress this year to allow condom access in federal prisons has made little headway. A bill in Illinois failed to clear a legislative committee in March. And a bill in California was vetoed last month by Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, who said the proposal conflicted with prison regulations banning sexual activity.
Yet Ron Snyder, an HIV-positive Californian who served 19 months in the state's prison systems for embezzlement, said sex was widespread despite the rules. Some inmates used rubber gloves as makeshift condoms, and some supervisors allowed romantically involved men to share cells, he said.
Schwarzenegger, in his veto message, offered a ray of hope to advocates of condom access. He described it as "not an unreasonable public policy" and instructed corrections officials to assess the feasibility of a pilot program at a yet-to-be-selected state prison.
Snyder predicted a "tough struggle" to extend any such program systemwide because of staff attitudes. Many of the correctional officers are from rural areas, "and they assume men don't have sex with men," he said. "They just don't understand the picture."
California already is home to two of the local condom programs, at jails in Los Angeles and San Francisco. New York, Philadelphia and Washington, D.C., also have programs — New York's dates back to 1987.
In Los Angeles, the condoms are distributed by an activist group, the Center for Health Justice, only in a special unit reserved for gay men who ask to be assigned there. San Francisco, for nearly 20 years, has allowed prisoners to be issued condoms by the health staff; distribution was expanded in April in the form of a condom-dispensing machine placed in a jail recreation hall.
Mary Sylla, the Center for Health Justice's policy director, said there have been no security problems in either city.
"If there was a case of somebody doing something horrible with a condom, we would have heard about it — it would be all over the corrections community," she said. "But it doesn't happen."
Though disappointed by Schwarzenegger's veto, Sylla is hopeful that a pilot program will indeed get started in the state prison system. She said corrections officials already had visited the Los Angeles unit to see that local program in action.
But Sylla acknowledged that the cause is tough to promote.
"It's easy to make fun of," she said. "People don't like to think about prisoners having sex, even though everybody knows it goes on."
Vermont's Corrections Department, although it holds relatively few HIV-positive inmates, has been making condoms available in prisons since 1992 — even though sexual activity remains officially prohibited.
"It's a courageous position that Vermont took then and continues to have now," said the department's health services director, Dr. Dolores Burroughs-Biron.
Under the program, inmates are granted a single condom at a time if they request one from a nurse. Burroughs-Biron said there had been no reports of any security problems.
But corrections officials insist there are dangers. Glenn Goord, New York State's former corrections commissioner, told the Legislature that inmates use condoms to transport drugs within prison grounds. He also said condoms might embolden prison rapists, who could use them to avoid leaving DNA evidence after their assaults.
There is no authoritative U.S. data on the extent of HIV behind bars, but the federal Centers for Disease Control did conduct a detailed study in Georgia which found that 856 male inmates — about 2 percent of the state's total — were HIV-positive, and that 76 of them apparently got the virus while in prison.
The CDC report, published last year, suggested that lawmakers consider the condom policy.
Patrick Sullivan, the CDC epidemiologist who led the study, said sex among inmates was common in Georgia despite being prohibited. He said many of the sexually active inmates used condoms — or some improvised substitute — even though they were considered contraband.
In several foreign countries — including Canada, Australia and much of Western Europe — condoms have been freely distributed to prisoners for years without security problems.
Though activists are convinced condom access would reduce STD transmission, they are cautious in making specific health claims.
"I don't know how we'd ever be able to prove how much they reduce HIV," said Ron Snyder, who now works for the Center for Health Justice. "But if we could affect one or two people who wouldn't bring it back to their women when they get home, that's dramatic impact right there."
USDA revokes OK for Tyson chicken labels
Tue, 20 Nov 2007 05:12:06 GMT
By MARCUS KABEL, AP Business Writer
Tyson Foods Inc. plans to revise labels that say its fresh chicken is "raised without antibiotics" after the U.S. Department of Agriculture said it made a mistake in approving labels that use that term.
The world's largest meat processor said it has been in discussions with the USDA since at least September about the label it introduced this summer in a major marketing campaign for its fresh chicken.
According to a Nov. 6 letter from the USDA, the agency told Tyson it had mistakenly overlooked a feed additive, called ionophores, used for Tyson's chicken when it approved the no-antibiotics label. The USDA's Food Safety and Inspection Service has a long-standing policy of classifying ionophores as antibiotics, according to the letter.
But Tyson said Monday that ionophores are not antibiotics and that the U.S. Food and Drug Administration does not consider them antibiotics.
"We stand by the truthfulness of our product labels and remain fully committed to our Raised Without Antibiotics chicken program. We also expect no disruption in service to our customers," the Springdale, Ark.-based company said in a statement.
The letter, which was not immediately made public, was reported Monday by The Wall Street Journal. Amanda Eamich, a spokeswoman for the Food Safety and Inspection Service, confirmed that the agency told Tyson Foods to remove the label.
"It was a mistake on our part and we are now correcting it," she told The Associated Press.
Tyson spokesman Gary Mickelson said the company plans to submit for USDA approval a new label that still says "raised without antibiotics" but adds some qualifying language about ionophores.
The USDA has given Tyson a temporary stay of 45 days from Nov. 6 to submit a new label and new arguments, to change its feed formula, or to stop using the label.
Tyson said the additional wording it plans will state that no ingredients have been used that could create antibiotic resistance in humans.
"Ionophores are not used in human medicine and do not contribute to the development of antibiotic resistance to important human drugs. They remain in the intestinal tract of the animal and do not carry over into the meat consumed by humans," Tyson's statement said.
The company said ionophores are permitted by the federal government in chicken feed as a preventive measure against coccidiosis, an intestinal illness.
The USDA's Eamich said Tyson could take several steps, such as removing the label, changing the feed formulation or just changing the label's statement in any way so it is accurate and "not misleading."
"We're open to any process the company submits, and we will evaluate it with documentation they provide," she said.
Tyson announced in June it would no longer use antibiotics to raise chicken that is sold fresh in stores and would promote the new product as part of a $70 million advertising campaign.
Tyson, the country's second largest chicken producer after Pilgrim's Pride Corp., said at the time that fresh chicken makes up less than 10 percent of the company's sales, which also include pork and beef.
A number of other Tyson products, like chicken nuggets and other frozen items, are not sold under the "Raised Without Antibiotics" label.
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Associated Press writer Christine Simmons in Washington contributed to this report.
Want to lose that baby weight Get some sleep
Mon, 19 Nov 2007 19:23:58 GMT
WASHINGTON -
Researchers presented a conundrum to
new mothers on Monday, saying that women who want to lose the
extra weight gained in pregnancy should try to get more sleep.
They found that mothers who slept five hours or less a day
when their babies were six months old were three times more
likely than more rested mothers to have kept on the extra
weight at one year.
&;We've known for some time that sleep deprivation is
associated with weight gain and obesity in the general
population, but this study shows that getting enough sleep --
even just two hours more -- may be as important as a healthy
diet and exercise for new mothers to return to their
pre-pregnancy weight,&; said Erica Gunderson of Kaiser
Permanente, which runs hospitals and clinics in California.
Gunderson and colleagues studied 940 women taking part in a
study of prenatal and postnatal health at Harvard Medical
School in Boston.
The women who slept five hours or less a night when their
babies were six months old were more likely to have kept on 11
pounds of weight one year after giving birth, they
found.
Women who slept seven hours a night or more lost more
weight, they reported in the American Journal of Epidemiology.
The researchers acknowledged this may pose a dilemma to new
mothers, given that infants sleep so fitfully.
&;With the results of this study, new mothers must be
wondering, 'How can I get more sleep for both me and my baby?'
Our team is working on new studies to answer this important
question,&; said Dr. Matthew Gillman of Harvard Medical School
and Harvard Pilgrim Health Care.
(Reporting by Maggie Fox; Editing by Will Dunham and John
O'Callaghan)