Guideline: Sodium Intake for Adults and Children

Overview

This guideline provides updated global, evidence-informed recommendations on the consumption of sodium to reduce NCDs in most adults and children. The recommendations in this guideline can be used by policy-makers, technical and programme planners in the government and various organizations involved in the design, implementation and scaling-up of nutrition actions for public health and prevention of NCDs, to assess current sodium intake levels relative to a benchmark and develop measures to decrease sodium intake, where necessary, through public health interventions including, reducing content in manufactured food, food and product labelling, consumer education, and the establishment of food-based dietary guidelines (FBDG).

The guideline should be should be used in conjunction with potassium and other nutrient guidelines to develop and guide national policies and public health nutrition programmes.

The reduction of sodium intake in the population is a cost-effective public health intervention for preventing NCDs and is one of the nine global targets selected by Member States for the prevention and control of NCDs.

Contents

• Acknowledgements
• Abbreviations and acronyms
• Executive summary
• Introduction
  • Scope and purpose
  • Background
  • Justification
• Guideline development process
  • Advisory groups
  • Scoping of the guideline, evidence appraisal and decision-making
  • Management of conflicts of interest
• Summary of evidence
  • Evidence base
  • Adults
  • Children
  • Final considerations of the evidence
• Recommendations and remarks
  • Recommendations
  • Remarks
• Translation and implementation
• Research gaps and future initiatives
  • Implications for future research
  • Dissemination
  • Updating the guideline
• Annex 1. GRADE “Summary of findings” tables
• Annex 2. Examples of sodium content in various foods and food groups
• Annex 3. WHO Secretariat
• Annex 4. Members of the WHO Steering Committee for Nutrition Guideline Development 2010 - 2011
• Annex 5. Members of the NUGAG Subgroup on Diet and Health and external resource persons 2010 - 2011
• Annex 6. External Expert and Stakeholder Panel
• Annex 7. Priority questions in the format of population, intervention, control and outcomes (PICO)
• Annex 8. Summary of considerations for determining the strength of the recommendations
• Annex 9. Management of conflict of interest
  • NUGAG members
  • External experts and resource persons
• References

This publication is a WHO guideline. A WHO guideline is any document, whatever its title, containing WHO recommendations about health interventions, whether they be clinical, public health or policy interventions. A recommendation provides information about what policy-makers, health-care providers or patients should do. It implies a choice between different interventions that have an impact on health and that have ramifications for the use of resources. All publications containing WHO recommendations are approved by the WHO Guidelines Review Committee.

Suggested citation:

WHO. Guideline: Sodium intake for adults and children. Geneva, World Health Organization, 2012.

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