Target Salt 2025: A Global Overview of National Programs to Encourage the Food Industry to Reduce Salt in Foods

Abstract

Reducing population salt intake has been identified as a priority intervention to reduce non-communicable diseases. Member States of the World Health Organization have agreed to a global target of a 30% reduction in salt intake by 2025. In countries where most salt consumed is from processed foods, programs to engage the food industry to reduce salt in products are being developed. This paper provides a comprehensive overview of national initiatives to encourage the food industry to reduce salt. A systematic review of the literature was supplemented by key informant questionnaires to inform categorization of the initiatives. Fifty nine food industry salt reduction programs were identified. Thirty eight countries had targets for salt levels in foods and nine countries had introduced legislation for some products. South Africa and Argentina have both introduced legislation limiting salt levels across a broad range of foods. Seventeen countries reported reductions in salt levels in foods—the majority in bread. While these trends represent progress, many countries have yet to initiate work in this area, others are at early stages of implementation and further monitoring is required to assess progress towards achieving the global target.

Perspectives of the public on reducing population salt intake in Ireland

“…A large amount of the salt consumed within the population comes from processed foods (5) . For this reason, rather than promoting individual behavioural interventions, many argue that the emphasis needs to be placed on government-led 'upstream measures', with much attention on garnering commitments from the food industry to reduce salt content in processed foods (6)(7)(8) . A national salt reduction programme initiated in Ireland in 2003 (9) has strived to achieve gradual and sustained reductions in the salt content of processed and prepared foods through voluntary product reformulation efforts by the food industry, along with the development of salt reduction targets for specific products, monitoring salt levels in key foods and publishing industry progress and commitments.…”

Analysis of a voluntary initiative to reduce sodium in processed and ultra-processed food products in Argentina: the views of public and private sector representatives

“…In other countries 44,45 , targets have been based on solid research evidence, and a sodium model was used to calculate how much salt would have to be removed from each food category in order to reduce the sodium content in the food supply by 40% 44 . Likewise, in order to have a substantive impact on salt intake it is necessary to combine weighted sales averages and upper limits in designing the targets 10 .…”

Innovative and Collaborative Strategies to Reduce Population-Wide Sodium Intake

“…While this approach has been well described [15,47], there is still debate regarding the most effective way to engage the co-operation of the food industry. Advocacy activities by lobby groups, such as WASH, have been demonstrated to be key in this regard [33,34] and the experiences of the UK provide the best example of an approach that has worked [4,33].…”

“…Thirteen national jurisdictions currently regulate salt in bread and a handful of other foods -e.g. Greece regulates the salt content of bread and processed tomato products [47]. In 2013, South Africa and Argentina became the first jurisdictions to introduce mandatory salt limits across a broad range of commonly consumed, high salt foods [54].…”