It’s estimated that 30% of the Brazilian population has high blood pressure. To deal with this, the Brazilian Cardiology Society (Sociedade Brasileira de Cardiologia – SBC) has begun a campaign to reduce salt consumption in Brazil.
According to the SBC, too much salt is responsible for problems with high blood pressure and can lead to strokes.
That is the reason that the SBC is calling for changes in labels on packaged food, demanding that sodium chloride be called simply by its better known name: salt. And the reason for that is that a survey of high blood pressure patients in São Paulo found that 93% of them did not know the difference between salt and sodium chloride.
According to a director at SBC, Dikran Armaganijan, “The Brazilian food industry puts too much salt in food. And Brazilians are not accustomed to reading and understanding the labels on food packages.”
As an example of the problem, Armaganijan points out that when the label says sodium, the amount has to multiplied by 2.5 in order to get the real amount of salt that is present.
Meanwhile, the watchdog agency Agência Nacional de Vigilância Sanitaria – Anvisa (a kind of FDA), has set new norms for advertising of products with high levels of sugar, sodium and saturated or trans fats. However, producers have six months to comply.
Responding to accusations that they use too much salt and sugar in food, the Brazilian Association of Food Industries (Abia) says that excessive consumption of possibly harmful food “is much more the result of eating habits than the composition of industrialized products.”
