Keep your grasping paws away from my salt shaker

The latest from the food police: Regulating salt.

A consumer group prodded the Food and Drug Administration yesterday to regulate salt as a food additive, arguing that excessive salt consumption by Americans may be responsible for more than 100,000 deaths a year.

The government has long placed salt in a "generally recognized as safe" or GRAS category, which grandfathers in a huge list of familiar food ingredients. But in an FDA hearing yesterday, the Center for Science in the Public Interest (CSPI) urged the agency to enforce tougher regulations for sodium.

Doing so "lays the foundation for saving tens of thousands of lives per year," said CSPI Director Michael Jacobson in an interview after the hearing. It "just has tremendous potential to health and to cut health-care costs."