New Yorkers with Taste Fight Back

An organization called My Food. My Choice. has thrown a salvo at Mayor Mama Bloomberg for his latest buttinsky idea of lowering the salt content in the diet of New Yorkers. The organization sent me an email of a story that was published about their fighting back at the Yenta-in-Chief:

“It is a gross overreaction and a national disgrace that Mayor Michael Bloomberg and his health czar Thomas Farley are pushing for a 25 percent sodium reduction in manufactured foods sold in New York City,” says Orit Sklar, national spokesperson for the grassroots, city-based coalition My Food My Choice. “Since manufacturers would have to change their entire food product line for New York City, then the city is effectively setting policy for the entire country.”

Although the mayor for now claims this is a “voluntary” campaign, the city administration can pressure restaurants and food companies with its immense licensing and enforcement clout. It seems that Mayor Bloomberg has decided his “subjects” are not smart enough to enjoy the freedom of choice, yet he is known to be very fond of salt, even salting his toast and his pizza.

This campaign, if implemented as planned, will greatly affect the city’s ethnic cuisine. New York’s ethnic restaurants are world renown and this campaign will drastically affect the quality and taste of food.

“Imagine an Italian restaurant trying to serve low salt cheese and low salt anchovies. Who would want to eat it?” said Sklar.

“The city is being criticized for trying to make guinea pigs of the entire population. The U.S. Health and Human Services Department has been asked to run a large-scale trial to determine the impact of salt reduction in the diet as it relates to the health of the general population, but this has never occurred. So, because there has been no trial determination or any science to back up the mayor’s sodium reduction campaign, this campaign irresponsibly puts the city’s entire population into the largest clinical trial in history,” says Sklar.

In fact, a series of studies by a New York hypertension group led by Dr. Michael Alderman, MD, Professor of Public Health at Albert Einstein College of Medicine, Past President of the American Society of Hypertension and on the editorial boards of the American Journal of Hypertension and the Journal of Hypertension indicates that a population-wide reduction of salt consumption will result in no health benefits. On the contrary, such a reduction in salt consumption may have unintended consequences.