Sodium content in major brands of US packaged foods, 2009

Abstract

Background Most Americans consume more sodium than is recommended, the vast majority of which comes from commercially packaged and restaurant foods. In 2010 the Institute of Medicine recommended that manufacturers reduce the amount of sodium in their products. Objective The aim was to assess the sodium content in commercially packaged food products sold in U.S. grocery stores in 2009. Design With the use of sales and nutrition data from commercial sources, we created a database with nearly 8000 packaged food products sold in major U.S. grocery stores in 2009. We estimated the sales-weighted mean and distribution of sodium content (mg/serving, mg/100 g, and mg/kcal) of foods within food groups that contribute the most dietary sodium to the U.S. diet. We estimated the proportion of products within each category that exceed 1) the Food and Drug Administration’s (FDA’s) limits for sodium in foods that use a “healthy” label claim and 2) 1150 mg/serving or 50% of the maximum daily intake recommended in the 2010 Dietary Guidelines for Americans. Results Products in the meat mixed dishes category had the highest mean and median sodium contents per serving (966 and 970 mg, respectively). Products in the salad dressing and vegetable oils category had the highest mean and median concentrations per 100 g (1072 and 1067 mg, respectively). Sodium density was highest in the soup category (18.4 mg/kcal). More than half of the products sold in 11 of the 20 food categories analyzed exceeded the FDA limits for products with a “healthy” label claim. In 4 categories, >10% of the products sold exceeded 1150 mg/serving. Conclusions The sodium content in packaged foods sold in major U.S. grocery stores varied widely and a large proportion of top-selling products exceeded limits, indicating the potential for reduction. Ongoing monitoring is necessary to evaluate the progress in sodium reduction.

Increasing public support for food-industry related, obesity prevention policies: The role of a taste-engineering frame and contextualized values

“…Respondents were asked to identify on a five-point ordinal scale (ranging from "strongly oppose" to "strongly support") the level to which they supported four randomly-ordered food and beverage policies shown to have significant associations with food and beverage overconsumption: (1) increase healthy food availability in work sites (Jensen, 2011), schools (Story, Kaphingst, Robinson-O'Brien andGlanz, 2008), and hospitals (Winston et al, 2013); (2) require food manufacturers to advertise food products in accordance with their actual nutritional value (Colby et al, 2010); (3) prohibit all high fat, high sugar food advertising on television programming watched primarily by children (Harris, Sarda, Schwartz and Brownell, 2013); and (4) require food manufacturers to disclose the amount of additives in food products on food packaging, additives such as salt, sugar, and caffeine (Gillespie et al, 2015;Guenther et al, 2013).…”

Sodium monitoring in commercially processed and restaurant foods

“…This effort complements another collaborative effort that the CDC is leading to develop a database of the ∼ 8000 packaged foods that contribute the most sodium to the US diet. In the CDC database, the sodium values are primarily based on proprietary databases, namely Gladson, and the choice of brands for these packaged foods is based on market share data from Nielsen (5, 38). …”

Do Lower Calorie or Lower Fat Foods Have More Sodium Than Their Regular Counterparts?

“…A detailed description of how this database was created is provided elsewhere [5]. The packaged food database consisted of the top 20 USDA food categories shown to contribute the most sodium to the U.S. diet, expanded from a published list of 10 categories [15].…”