Regulating Salt in New York City

I'm back after the holidays and an unusually busy first couple of weeks of January. The new year started with the New York Times reporting that the city’s Mayor, Michael Bloomberg, is going to press for the regulation of salt in New York’s restaurant food. As far as I know, this is a first anywhere in North America. There’s been a lot of talk about salt, as the recent Globe and Mail series on the issue attests. But there hasn’t been a lot of action on this side of the Atlantic. I blogged a few weeks ago about salt reduction efforts for processed food and noted that Canada’s proposed sodium reduction process will use a framework similar to that of the UK, using voluntary guidelines to push producers to lower salt in their food. According to the Times article, Bloomberg’s plan is similar in that it uses voluntary guidelines, but the goal is a whopping 25% drop in salt content over five years. The interesting thing about the New York plan is that companies would have to implement it at a national level as it would be difficult to do so only for New York. Both A&P and Subway have already said they will do this. As New York goes, so goes America and maybe Canada?