A new report calls on Health Canada to set category-by-category sodium reduction targets for foods, similar to what has already been done in the United Kingdom.
The Centre for Science in the Public Interest released a report Thursday entitled Salty to a Fault, which says excess sodium in the Canadian diet likely kills more Canadians every year than any other chemical substance added to food.
"The World Health Organization has characterized elevated blood pressure as the leading cause of death in the world, and salty foods make a huge contribution to that," the health advocacy centre's national co-ordinator, Bill Jeffery, said from Ottawa.
"So we did this report because we wanted to survey the extent to which sodium levels vary in foods within the same category."
The range was "quite remarkable" in some categories, he noted.
For example, he said restaurant french fries that were tested ranged from a low of 40 milligrams to a high of 555 milligrams of sodium in a standardized serving.
On the low end, he explained that some restaurants simply don't salt their fries and leave it up to the consumer to do so.
The range in different brands of pasta sauce was also "quite significant," he said.
"So it demonstrated to us that it is possible to make a lot of these foods without using much salt, and it runs contrary to a lot of the information that we were given by food companies, which was that they need a lot of salt to make dough rise, to give the food a particular texture or to give it a flavour or preservative that's expected by the consumer," he said.
"That's plainly not the case."
Some estimates suggest as many as 15,000 Canadians may die prematurely each year from sodium-related heart attacks and strokes, he said.
The group also wants food manufacturers and restaurants to begin cutting sodium levels on their own, even as Health Canada and a Sodium Working Group organized by the government continue to develop a sodium reduction strategy.
In terms of consumers taking matters into their own hands and looking at nutrition information on labels, he noted that it can be confusing because sodium content is reported on the basis of different serving sizes.
"So it's not enough to look at two different foods and compare the per cent of daily value for sodium because they might have wildly different serving sizes, so you have to look at that too."
The report also recommends that grocery stores and chain restaurants ask suppliers to reduce sodium levels.
"They should care about the health of their customers ... I find it somewhat baffling that companies would be slow to respond to such a grave public health threat," Jeffery said.
In addition, the recommendations call for the end of exemptions from nutrition labelling rules that allow in-store bakeries, delis and butcher shops to conceal nutrition information.
