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Conservative Think Tank: Americans Do Not Want Less Salt

PHILADELPHIA (CBS) - Julie Gunlock, a Senior Fellow at the Independent Women's Forum, is accusing the Obama Administration of imposing tougher health restrictions on food manufacturers in their final year in the White House.

Gunlock, during an interview with Rich Zeoli on Talk Radio 1210 WPHT, claims the FDA is attempting to determine by themselves what people are allowed to consume.

"The Food and Drug Administration is completely out of control. They are going crazy and I think we're seeing the in last few months of the Obama Administration they're really working hard to control how Americans eat. We've seen bans on trans-fat. We've seen some efforts to ban e-cigarettes, which in Europe they consider a smoking cessation strategy. Here in the United States they're doing everything to make it harder for Americans to actually get access to these products."

She stated that the next target of the agency will be salt.

"The FDA is going to put a certain restrictions on how much salt food processors put in their food. Over the next couple of years, they have a two-year and a ten-year goal that the food manufacturers have to meet, we're going to see a change in how our food tastes. We've already seen that already because of some of the regulations that we've seen come out of Washington."

Gunlock worries that even some companies are going too far in changing what they make, citing her own consumer experience as an example.

"In 2009, Campbell's Soup went on this health kick and decided to reduce the sodium levels in every single one of their soups. I remember this. I was pregnant at the time and I was sick all the time and I used to eat a ton of Campbell's Soup and I remember the taste changed. I didn't understand what had happened. Well, they had reduced the salt in their soup by 32 percent. They still maintained a low salt line but they decided to reduce the salt in all of them. Sales just tanked. People like me noticed a difference in the taste. A couple years later, the new CEO of Campbell's came in, upped the salt back up to the old level, basically made the recipes the way they used to be and sales skyrocketed. That's a lesson."

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