Salt Wars The Battle Over the Biggest Killer in the American Diet

How food industry lobbyists and a small group of scientists have successfully fought government efforts to reduce dangerous levels of sodium in our food.

A high-sodium diet is deadly; studies have linked it to high blood pressure, strokes, and heart attacks. It's been estimated that excess sodium in the American diet causes as many as 100,000 deaths and many billions of dollars in avoidable health-care costs each year. And yet salt is everywhere in our diets--in packaged foods, fast foods, and especially meals at table-service restaurants. Why hasn't salt received the sort of public attention and regulatory action that sugar and fat have? In Salt Wars, Michael Jacobson explains how the American food industry and a small group of scientists have successfully fought government efforts to reduce dangerous levels of sodium in our food.

Michael Faraday Jacobson is Cofounder and Senior Scientist at the Center for Science in the Public Interest. He is the author of Six Arguments for a Greener Diet and other books.

Foreword by Tom Frieden
Prologue: An Overview of the Salt Battlefield
Chapter 1 Salt: A Primer
Chapter 2 The Case for Eating Less Salt
Chapter 3 The Case Against Eating Less Salt
Chapter 4 What All the Research Means
Chapter 5 The Mouse that Roared: The Salt Institute
Chapter 6 Money and Science
Chapter 7 Less-Salty Diets around the Globe
Chapter 8 Policy Paralysis in the United States
Chapter 9 Progress at Last!
Chapter 10 Action Plan for Better Health
Chapter 11 Protecting Your Own Health
Epilogue: Salt's Lesson on Industry and Public Health
Acknowledgments
Appendix A: List of Information Boxes, Figures, and Tables
Appendix B: Abbreviations
Notes
Index
About the Author