WASHINGTON, Feb 8, (RTRS): Nine out of 10 American adults consume too much salt and the leading culprit is not potato chips or popcorn but slices of bread and dinner rolls, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said on Tuesday.
Forty-four percent of salt consumed can be linked to 10 types of foods, CDC said. Bread and rolls lead the list followed by cold cuts and cured meat, pizza, poultry, soups, sandwiches, cheese, pasta dishes, meat dishes and snacks such as pretzels and potato chips.
Bread may not have much salt in a single serving, but when eaten several times a day can raise daily salt intake. A single slice of white bread could contain as many as 230 milligrams of salt, according to the CDC.
High salt intake can raise blood pressure, which can lead to heart disease and stroke, the CDC said.
The average American consumes 3,266 milligrams of salt daily, not counting salt added at the table, which is far above the recommended 2,300 milligrams, the CDC said.
For six out of 10 Americans, including those who are over age 51 or have high blood pressure or diabetes, 1,500 milligrams is the recommended daily salt limit.
Even foods that seem healthy such as cottage cheese may be high in salt, the agency reported. Even raw chicken and pork is often injected with salt.
The CDC recommended eating more fruits and vegetables and carefully reading the labels on food products to find those with the lowest salt content.
“Heart disease and stroke are leading causes of death in the United States and are largely dependent on the high rate of high blood pressure,” CDC Director Dr Thomas R. Frieden told reporters in a telephone news conference Tuesday.
One in three American adults has high blood pressure, he added.
“One of the things that is driving blood pressure up is that most adults in this country eat or drink about twice the amount of sodium as is recommended,” Frieden said. “Most of that extra sodium comes from common grocery store and restaurant items and a very small proportion from the salt shaker at the table.”
Nearly two-thirds of the salt consumed by Americans is found in store products, 24.8 percent from restaurants and the remainder from other sources such as vending machines and the home salt shaker, the study found.
q         q         q
Spanking kids: Spanking children can cause long-term developmental damage and may even lower a child’s IQ, according to a new Canadian analysis that seeks to shift the ethical debate over corporal punishment into the medical sphere.
The study, published this week in the Canadian Medical Association Journal, reached its conclusion after examining 20 years of published research on the issue. The authors say the medical finding have been largely overlooked and overshadowed by concerns that parents should have the right to determine how their children are disciplined.
While spanking is certainly not as widespread as it was 20 years ago, many still cling to the practice and see prohibiting spanking as limiting the rights of parents.
That point of view highlights the difficulty in changing hearts and minds on the issue, despite a mountain of accumulated evidence showing the damage physical punishment can have on a child, says Joan Durant, a professor at University of Manitoba and one of the authors of the study.
“We’re really past the point of calling this a controversy. That’s a word that’s used and I don’t know why, because in the research there really is no controversy,” she said in an interview.
“If we had this level of consistency in findings in any other area of health, we would be acting on it. We’d be pulling out all the stops to work on the issue.”
q         q         q
Alcohol treatment: US college students seeking treatment for substance abuse are more likely to be having trouble with alcohol than with abuse of drugs like heroin, cocaine or methamphetamine, according to a new government study.
Researchers at the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (SAMHSA) analyzed data from 2009, when about 374,000 people between the ages of 18 and 24 were treated for substance abuse or dependence in the United States.
The overwhelming majority of those admitted for treatment — about 362,000 — were young adults who were not enrolled in college or post-secondary school, the researchers found.
About 12,000 of the admissions — or 3.2 percent of the total — involved young adults enrolled in higher education.
Nearly half of the college kids — 46.6 percent — admitted for treatment in 2009 were having problems with alcohol, compared with 30.6 percent of the non-students, researchers said.
Pamela Hyde, an official with SAMHSA, said the results underscored the “pervasive and potentially devastating role that alcohol plays on far too many college campuses.”
Marijuana remains a significant problem with both groups, the researchers found, accounting for 30.9 percent of the treatment admissions involving college students and 30 percent of the admissions involving non-students.
When it came to other drugs, however, college students had markedly lower rates of treatment admissions than non-students their age.
Only 7.2 percent of the college students seeking treatment in 2009 were abusing heroin, compared with 16.1 percent of the non-students.
Cocaine admission rates were more than twice as high for non-students than for students and methamphetamine admissions were more than four times higher for non-students, the researchers said.
SAMHSA is the unit within the US Department of Health and Human Services that focuses on substance abuse and mental illness.
The study was based on an analysis of SAMHSA’s 2009 Treatment Episode Data Set, which drew on reports from thousands of publicly supported substance abuse treatment facilities in the country.