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"In another welcome move   to making convenience foods a little less unhealthy, General Mills has announced they&amp;#039;re cutting back the sodium in about 40 percent of their products by 2015. That means the salt contents of some 600 name-brand foods will be reduced by 20 percent. That&amp;#039;s good news but from a health perspective, is it enough? &amp;quot;Since 2005, a cross-functional team of researchers has been working to silently trim sodium levels without compromising taste,&amp;quot; the food giant said in a press release. The company announced last year it would reduce sugar in children&amp;#039;s cereals. Both are positive steps in the right direction but reductions in sodium are relative figures, ultimately.  The truth is, most of the heavily processed foods that pass themselves off as being &amp;quot;good for you&amp;quot; often contain so few ingredients of real substance that the food processors such as General Mills and Nestle have to rely on sodium just to give their products some flavor. That&amp;#039;s why it&amp;#039;s going to take them until 2015 to reduce the salt content of, say, a can of soup or a frozen pizza. They need that much time to figure out what they&amp;#039;re going to replace all that sodium with.  Even the supposedly healthy convenience foods put out by other companies, like the box of Annie&amp;#039;s Organic Shells and White Cheddar sitting in my pantry (I&amp;#039;m a sucker for the stuff), with &amp;quot;no artificial anything&amp;quot; and &amp;quot;no pesticides or hormones&amp;quot; contains 24 percent of the recommended daily allowance of sodium. The best way to cut back the amount of sodium \u2013 or sugar \u2013 your family eats is to cook as much of your own food from scratch, as possible (luckily, there are plenty of recipes here at Delish to help you do just that). Eat fewer processed snacks and eat more natural snacks, instead. Apples and raisins are cheaper than fruit roll-ups, anyway. Of course, sometimes that box of macaroni and cheese is all that stands between an insane schedule or feeding the kids a Quarter Pounder for dinner but, remember, the more of your food you control, the more in control you are. "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
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