(Press-News.org) The coalition government derailed a successful programme that reduced salt content added to foods by industry, argue experts in The BMJ this week.
A poor diet is the leading cause of death and disability in the UK and worldwide. Large amounts of salt, for example, are added to food by industry and eating too much can raise blood pressure, a major factor associated with strokes, heart failure and heart attacks.
The UK's Food Standards Agency (FSA), established in 2000, became a "world leader" in improving nutrition and pioneered a salt reduction programme by working closely with the food industry. It set voluntary targets, monitored progress and ensured that all major food companies aimed for the same goal.
Its overall aim was to eventually reduce salt intake to 6g/day among the adult population.
Five years after the first targets were set in 2006, salt content was reduced in foods by around 10-40%. Average salt intake at the population level fell by 15% from 9.5 g/day in 2003 to 8.1 g/day in 2011 and blood pressure and death from stroke and ischaemic heart disease decreased.
Estimates suggest that salt reduction campaigns have prevented around 9,000 deaths due to stroke and ischaemic heart disease per year and made health care savings of around £1.5bn in the UK.
Despite this success, the new coalition government formed in 2010 transferred responsibility for nutrition from the FSA to the Department of Health, which disrupted the salt reduction programme.
Then in 2011 Andrew Lansley, health minister at the time, launched the responsibility deal which made alcohol and food industries responsible for reducing alcohol and improving nutrition.
But this move was "responsible for a major step backwards in public health nutrition," argues Graham MacGregor, professor of cardiovascular medicine, and colleagues from Queen Mary, University of London.
With the new responsibility deal, specific targets for salt reduction were not set, reporting mechanisms were relaxed and the majority of non-governmental organisations withdrew from the deal because of concerns that industry interests were prioritised over public health.
This led to a committee dominated largely by industry, explain the authors, and many companies stopped or slowed down their planned salt reductions over this period, and some failed to meet targets.
New salt targets were set in 2014 following the appointment of new health minister Anna Soubry, but these were not as low as originally suggested - apparently, due to lobbying by the food industry, they explain.
In addition, there has been poor involvement in the 2017 targets by large food companies because of the lack of enforcement and proper monitoring.
The authors calculated that from 2010 to 2014, around 0.9 g/day of salt reduction was lost based on the trend of salt reduction between 2005 and 2011. If no salt reduction was achieved over this period, the lost 0.9 g/day corresponds to around 6,000 deaths from stroke and heart attack.
The food industry is the "biggest and most powerful industry in the world" and mechanisms should be in place to control it in a similar way to the tobacco industry, they argue.
They say there is an urgent need for an independent agency, similar to the FSA, with responsibility for nutrition with a transparent and effective monitoring programme that is also "free from political pressure and influence from the food industry."
They add that the agency should also aim to reduce sugars and fats in foods that would lead to a decrease in obesity, type 2 diabetes and cancer.
INFORMATION:
Calorie counts should be mandatory on all alcoholic drinks as a matter of urgency, argues a leading public health doctor in The BMJ this week.
Fiona Sim, Chair of the Royal Society for Public Health, says alcoholic drinks contribute to obesity and the law "should require restaurant menus and labels to make energy content explicit in addition to alcohol content."
She explains that, since 2011, packaged foods in the European Union have been subject to regulation requiring labelling with their ingredients and nutritional information, including energy content (calories). ...
Cocaine use causes 'profound changes' in the brain that lead to an increased risk of relapse due to stress - according to new research from the University of East Anglia.
New research published today in The Journal of Neuroscience identifies a molecular mechanism in the reward centre of the brain that influences how recovering cocaine addicts might relapse after stressful events.
Importantly, the study identifies a potential mechanism for protecting against such relapses with treatment.
The research team looked at the effects of cocaine in rat brain cells (in vitro) ...
Women diagnosed with breast cancer who previously breastfed their babies had a 30 percent overall decreased risk of the disease recurring, according to a new Kaiser Permanente study published in the Journal of the National Cancer Institute. In addition, researchers found that the protective effect of breastfeeding was more pronounced for tumors of particular genetic subtypes, including the most commonly diagnosed of all breast cancers.
The study involved 1,636 women with breast cancer who completed a questionnaire that included breastfeeding history. Additional medical ...
One life-threatening complication of lung cancer surgery is the formation of blood clots in the lungs (also called pulmonary embolism - PE) or in the legs (also known as deep vein thrombosis - DVT). Together, they would be defined as venous thromboembolic events (VTE). Several presentations at AATS 2015 shed new light on this serious problem. In the first prospective study of its kind, the incidence of VTE was found to be higher than previously reported, with a 5.4% VTE-specific mortality rate. Of concern to clinicians, most events were asymptomatic and occurred after patients ...
Children with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, or ADHD, are significantly more likely to have an eating disorder -- a loss of control eating syndrome (LOC-ES) -- akin to binge eating, a condition more generally diagnosed only in adults, according to results of a new Johns Hopkins Children's Center study. The findings, reported ahead of print April 9 in the International Journal of Eating Disorders, suggest a common biological mechanism linking the two disorders, and the potential for developing treatment that works for both.
Though many children with ADHD may ...
Current public health guidelines recommend that only gay men and people with HIV should be routinely screened for extragenital gonorrhea and chlamydia, given the high burden of these sexually transmitted infections (STIs) in this at-risk population.
However, a new Johns Hopkins Medicine study that looked at over 10,000 people who attended an STI clinic in Baltimore has found that the occurrence of gonorrhea or chlamydia in extragenital areas like the throat or rectum is also significant in women, particularly younger women. The findings will be published in the May issue ...
RICHLAND, Wash. -- A year before Albert Einstein came up with the special theory of relativity, or E=mc2, physicists predicted the existence of something else: cyclotron radiation. Scientists predicted this radiation to be given off by electrons whirling around in a circle while trapped in a magnetic field. Over the last century, scientists have observed this radiation from large ensembles of electrons but never from individual ones.
Until now.
A group of almost 30 scientists and engineers from six research institutions reported the direct detection of cyclotron radiation ...
BATON ROUGE -- Using a novel, helicopter-borne sensor to penetrate below the surface of large swathes of terrain, a team of researchers supported by the National Science Foundation, or NSF, has gathered compelling evidence that beneath the Antarctica ice-free McMurdo Dry Valleys lies a salty aquifer that may support previously unknown microbial ecosystems and retain evidence of ancient climate change.
The team, which includes LSU hydrogeologist Peter Doran and researchers from the University of Tennessee; University of California-Santa Cruz; Dartmouth College; University ...
It was unprecedented developing a mission that could fly four identically equipped spacecraft in a tight formation and take measurements 100 times faster than any previous space mission -- an achievement enabled in part by four NASA-developed technologies that in some cases took nearly 10 years to mature.
"To get to this point in time, we had to overcome a number of engineering challenges," said Brent Robertson, the deputy project manager of the Magnetospheric Multiscale (MMS) mission, led by NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, where hundreds of ...
Exposure to high levels of pollution can have a significant impact on fetal growth and development, that is the conclusion of research appearing today in the journal Environmental Health Perspectives. The study found women who were pregnant during the 2008 Beijing Olympics, when pollution levels were reduced by the Chinese government, gave birth to children with higher birth weights compared to those who were pregnant before and after the games.
"The results of this study demonstrate a clear association between changes in air pollutant concentrations and birth weight," ...
