Killing us with personal responsibility

Most Canadians know the dangers of consuming too much salt. But how many hands shoot forward at your dinner table in search of the salt shaker?

I've never been a big salt guy. I trace it back to my childhood when a friend of mine used to always lick salt he'd picked up off the road in the wintertime. I wasn't yet 10 years old but even then I knew what he was doing couldn't be good for you.

So when I sat down to watch The Great Salt Shakedown last week on Marketplace I didn't think I'd be one of the regular Canadians overloading on salt. I was wrong.

Host Tom Harrington gave 80 Canadians containers to urinate into for one day. These people ranged in age from teenage hockey players, school kids, a senior's swimming club and other middle-aged Canadians. At the end of the day all the containers were collected to measure the amount of sodium each individual had consumed. The results were startling.

The daily maximum amount of salt you should have in your diet per day is 2,300 mg. Almost everyone tested was far higher than 2,300 mg. One of the teenage hockey players registered an astonishing 7,000 mg of sodium in a day. He attributed it to some Chicken McNuggets and pizza he'd consumed.

So how come the majority of these people tested registered high levels of sodium? It's in the food they eat. And it's not just the boxed processed foods that are high in sodium -- it's practically everything.

A number of years ago Health Canada went after food manufacturers to reduce the amount of trans fats they put into their products. Similar legislation was passed in the U.S.A. But no such rules were enacted concerning sodium which plays just as much a role, if not more in heart and stroke.

Mr. Harrington attempted to get an interview with our Health Minister Aglukkaq to pepper her with his sodium questions but she refused. Instead her Parliamentary Assistant Colin Carrie stood in her place. I took note because he's also my MP. When Mr. Carrie wasn't looking like a deer caught in the headlights he said his government believes it's a personal responsibility to limit your intake of salt.

The next morning I went grocery shopping to exercise my personal responsibility. I spent twice as much time shopping because I looked at every label and couldn't believe how much sodium is in everything outside the produce aisle. In order to consume under 2,300 mg of sodium per day you practically have to starve yourself! Don't believe me? Take the test using Marketplace's sodium calculator. It's not an exact science like the lab tests on the show were but it will give you a ballpark figure. Visit http://www.cbc.ca/news/interactives/sodium-calculator/index.html I took the test and my sodium count was 2,501 for a day. Scary.

Health Canada has raised a red flag over the amount of sodium in each and everyone of our diets but nobody on Parliament Hill is listening. If we keep this up you can count on the number of heart and stroke deaths to spike, especially among Boomers.

I understand that salt enhances the taste of food but I'd trade a bit of taste for a longer life any day. It's difficult to exercise personal responsibility when food manufacturers are allowed to pile sodium into everything (Even orange juice has sodium in it!). We wouldn't want to inconvenience big business would we? Put the blame on the consumer, how convenient.

I don't add salt to anything and as I found out from watching Marketplace I don't have to. Food manufacturers are doing that for us.