Ready-to-Eat Foods for Toddlers Often Too Salty: Study

Parents urged to balance convenience with healthier meals, snacks

By Kathleen Doheny

HealthDay Reporter

THURSDAY, March 21 (HealthDay News) -- Those convenient, prepackaged meals and snacks for toddlers may contain worrisome levels of salt, U.S. researchers report.

More than three quarters of 90 toddler meals evaluated by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention were high in sodium, according to a new study.

Ready-to-eat foods for babies were less alarming, found the experts, who reported on the sodium content of 1,115 products for babies and toddlers using per-serving data from major and private-label brands.

"The products we assessed for babies and infants were relatively low in sodium," said Joyce Maalouf, a fellow at the CDC division for heart disease and stroke prevention.

"Unfortunately, the toddler food products -- meals and snacks -- have higher amounts of sodium," she said. Those products are aimed for kids 1 to 3 years old.

She is scheduled to present the findings Thursday at a American Heart Association meeting in New Orleans.

Eating too much sodium, the main component of salt, can lead to high blood pressure, which is a risk factor for heart disease and stroke.

Moreover, studies have suggested that children's taste for salt may be reduced if they consume less sodium at a young age, Maalouf said. "Children are not born with a taste for salt," she noted.

The researchers defined a product as high in sodium if it exceeded 210 milligrams (mg) per serving. The American Heart Association recommends limiting sodium intake to less than 1,500 mg a day, but some toddler meals contained as much as 630 mg per serving -- 40 percent of the recommended daily total.

"The toddler meals ranged from 100 milligrams per serving up to 630 milligrams per serving," Maalouf said. The average was 369 mg, with 71 percent of the meals high in sodium.

The researchers evaluated four toddler savory snacks, such as cheese and crackers, and found they ranged from 70 mg to 310 mg per serving.

Cereal bars for toddlers ranged from zero to 85 mg of sodium per serving. Fruit snacks for toddlers ranged from zero to 60 mg per serving.

Maalouf declined to name products by brand. "The main purpose of the study was to look at food categories, not compare brands," she said. "Even within the same brand, we had a wide variation of sodium."

Still, prepackaged macaroni and cheese, cheese and crackers, pasta and chicken, pepperoni pizza and chicken noodle soup typically have high sodium levels, Maalouf added.

The message for parents, Maalouf said, is to read nutrition labels and choose lower-sodium items.

The findings are no surprise to Julia Zumpano, a registered dietitian at the Cleveland Clinic's department of preventive cardiology. Foods prepackaged for infants tend to be lower in sodium, as they contain just one or two ingredients, often vegetable- or fruit-based, and servings are smaller than those for toddlers.

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Salty Diet Might Help Trigger MS, Rheumatoid Arthritis

By Barbara Bronson Gray

HealthDay Reporter

WEDNESDAY, March 6 (HealthDay News) -- Eating lots of foods loaded with salt may do more than raise your blood pressure: Researchers report that it could also contribute to the development of autoimmune diseases, where the body's immune system mistakenly mounts an attack upon some part of the body.

Three new studies suggest salt may be a prime suspect in a wide range of autoimmune diseases, including multiple sclerosis (MS), psoriasis, rheumatoid arthritis and ankylosing spondylitis (arthritis of the spine).

A significant increase in the incidence of autoimmune diseases, especially multiple sclerosis and type 1 diabetes, suggests that environmental factors, and not genetics, may explain the trend, the researchers noted.

"The diet does affect the autoimmune system in ways that have not been previously recognized," said senior study author Dr. David Hafler, a professor of neurology and immunobiology at the Yale School of Medicine, in New Haven, Conn.

It was an accidental discovery that triggered the researchers' interest in salt; they stumbled upon the fact that people who ate at fast food restaurants seemed to have higher levels of inflammatory cells than others, Hafler explained.

In the study, Hafler and his team found that giving mice a high-salt diet caused the rodents to produce a type of infection-fighting cell that is closely associated with autoimmune diseases. The mice on salt diets developed a severe form of multiple sclerosis, called autoimmune encephalomyelitis. Findings from animal studies are not always mirrored in human trials, however.

Inflammatory cells are normally used by the immune system to protect people from bacterial, viral, fungal and parasitic infections. But, in the case of autoimmune diseases, they attack healthy tissue.

Hafler's study is one of three papers, published in the March 6 issue of the journal Nature, that show how salt may overstimulate the immune system. In addition to Hafler's research, scientists from the Broad Institute in Boston explored how genes regulate the immune response, and researchers from Harvard Medical School and Brigham and Women's Hospital in Boston zeroed in on how autoimmunity is controlled by a network of genes.

All three studies help explain, each from a different angle, how "helper" T-cells can drive autoimmune diseases by creating inflammation. Salt seems to cause enzymes to stimulate the creation of the helper T-cells, escalating the immune response.

"We think of helper T-cells as sort of the orchestra leaders, helping the immune system know what the cells should be doing in response to different microbial pathogens," explained Dr. John O'Shea, director of intramural research at the U.S. National Institute of Arthritis and Musculoskeletal and Skin Diseases, in Bethesda, Md. "The strength of these papers is that they have found another factor that drives [helper T-cell] differentiation -- salt."

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