Salt - What should we do?
There are 65 million Americans with hypertension, and in many instances, this can be controlled by a reduction in dietary salt intake. However, salt is ubuiquitous in our diets - it is present in the foods that we purchase at the store, as well as what we eat at restaurants (particularly fast food restaurants). Hypertension is one of the two most common causes of kidney failure - a 16 billion dollar/year government expense, and stroke, which costs approximately 128 billion dollars per year.
We pay for the care of salt victims through taxes or insurance. Lowering health care costs is not going to be possible once patients reach the end stages of either kidney or cardiovascular disease, and the only way that we will every make an impact on health care is through prevention.
Where do our personal rights to make unhealthy decisions end? When does the government, often the payor for the consequences of hypertension have the power to somehow intervene in our health decisions? How strong should the intervention be?
The range of intervention stretches from the extremes of controlling the salt content of food to the vast expenses of education. Education is expensive because a popular food chain spends around 1.5 billion dollars per year on marketing.