Salt intake and the perils of consuming too much sodium have been all over the news this year. Recent studies have found that lowering the sodium in your diet could prevent stroke, hypertension, and heart attacks.

And since then the food manufacturing industry has been struggling to find a way to lower sodium levels in their foods without sacrificing taste. This can be hard to do for a variety of reasons.

But mainly, this is difficult because Americans want to minimize their salt intake without sacrificing the flavor they enjoy.

And apparently we aren't the only ones trying to strike a balance between flavor and function. In the UK, the National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence (NICE) recently made suggestions for the progressive reduction of sodium for manufactured foods that could go on indefinitely.

According to NICE, salt intake could be minimized by reducing the sodium in foods "by 5-10% a year," going on indefinitely because "most consumers don't even notice any difference in taste."

This statement, according to FoodManufacture UK, is not true at all.

In fact, for those who work in food manufacturing this approach to reducing sodium levels really doesn't work no matter what continent you live on. Anyone involved in manufacturing and/or distributing food items knows that there is indeed a cut-off point where consumers will notice that there isn't as much salty flavor in their food.

But even if they didn't, there's an important factor in the manufacture and preservation of foods that has been lost in the concern over salt intake - salt minimizes water activity in food, which in turn prevents spoilage and many bacterial invasions that can be dangerous for human beings.

Salt is also crucial when it comes to food structure, texture, and the chemical processes required of baking.

So what should food manufacturers do to minimize sodium levels and still create products that are both delicious and safe for human consumption?

For now, until guidelines are clearer, it's best to use sodium where it is needed, and minimize it if possible.

But don't get too caught up in cutting salt intake; consumers want taste before function, and creating a product that tastes bad isn't going to make anyone happy--least of which you with your bottom line.

The rising popularity of products featuring "natural" sugar have led food manufacturing giants Coca Cola and PepsiCo to feature a new line of beverages that offer old fashioned sugar instead of sweeteners like high fructose corn syrup.

And consumers are loving it.

Now a report on food news from Mintel finds that all foods featuring a label that includes "natural" claims are doing well.

In fact, while the popularity of "plus" and "minus" labels have dropped - meaning labels that feature ingredients that have been added or removed from a product - natural labels have grown in popularity by one third.

Including the natural sugar craze; with the continuing unpopularity of corn syrup, sugar has become the healthier (though not lower in calorie) alternative. This goes double for unrefined sugars, and even brown sugar.

A perfect example of this trend is the new ice-cream line by Haagen-Dazs called "Five." It features only five ingredients, all of which are listed on the front of the package. Consumers seem to be more comfortable purchasing foods that they feel are less complicated, have fewer preservatives, and are closer to nature.

Other "buzzwords" connected to the natural labels craze include "wholesome,""naked," and "authentic."

The children's foods market is also one that has done very well with the drive towards less processing in foods, as parents search for things they can feed their kids that don't feature many preservatives or manufactured ingredients.

Food manufacturers and distributors who want to capitalize on the popularity of natural sugar products - and the natural line in general - can do so by featuring a simpler line of ingredients. The down side to this trend is that food lacking in preservatives doesn't last as well as traditionally packaged foods.

This might mean that such foods would require refrigeration, or at least, less time in transit and on the shelves.

It's Wonder Bread's 90th birthday, and the old-fashioned staple of America's diet is retaining its long standing popularity by competing in the whole wheat flour and bread market.

Wonder Bread's success is simple: they're flexible and they keep an eye on what the people want. In the 1930's Wonder Bread supplemented their bread line with vitamins and minerals designed to combat diseases of the era like pellagra and beriberi.

And along with its debut as one of the first sliced breads available in America, it was immensely popular...the people ate it up.

In the 1960s they sold their product as a means of building healthy, strong bodies.

And today they're focusing on the whole wheat flour market by offering a line of breads that feature a soft texture and the nutritional value of whole grains.

These lines include "Wonder Kids Bread," which is a vitamin enriched bread made of whole grain flour designed to appeal to kids, and "Wonder Smartwhite" another whole wheat bread that even looks like traditional white bread in order to please picky eaters.

This allows parents to feel good about what their child is eating, while children get to eat something they love.

Baking Management's recent article on bread flour suggests that the key to success is to know how to make formulaic adjustments to your recipe so that your bread still tastes great, but offers the nutritional value that consumers want.

Wonder Bread's ability to do just that with their whole wheat line explains why they've been going strong for 90 years, and likely to keep going for 90 more.

Finding an artificial sweetener that will adequately replicate the flavor of sugar has been a holy grail in food ingredients of sorts for the last 25 years.

The original sweetener of choice was Sweet n' Low, or saccharin, created in 1879 and featuring a sweetness that is from 300 to 500 times more powerful than that of sugar. Diabetics and those avoiding sugar for other reasons rejoiced that everything from ice cream to soda to cookies became available to them again thanks to saccharin.

The next big contender was aspartame, also known as Equal. It's 200 times as sweet as table sugar, and was discovered in 1965. It's never fared as well in baked goods, but many people prefer the flavor of aspartame for their beverages.

And fairly recently Splenda--formally known as Sucralose--hit the market. This artificial sweetener is heat stable, meaning that it makes many baked goods taste just as sweet as sugar. In most cases regular sugar is also added to the mix in order to facilitate the chemical reactions needed in baking, but for the most part Splenda has been the new darling of the artificial sweeteners craze.

But it appears that stevia may soon take its place--at least in some capacity. Stevia is actually a plant derivative cultivated in Paraguay, Brazil, Japan, and China. Previous criticisms of artificial sweeteners revolved around their "unnaturalness" as chemically created compounds. Being of a "natural" source, stevia is touted as a healthy alternative to artificial sweeteners that still supplies the sweetness of sugar.

And now recent sweetener taste tests find that stevia fares best when combined with another favorite - chocolate. Stevia flavored chocolate beverages were judged to be the best because it tasted well, was moderately sweet, and provided a well-balanced flavor.

Food manufacturers and distributors may soon find that their chocolate products will fare well with stevia. It's sweet, it's calorie free, and it maintains the best chocolate flavor. However, they'll have to get in line behind Coca Cola and PepsiCo, both of whom have already designed beverage lines featuring stevia and hitting the shelves already.

The saga of the sweeteners has been a complicated one in the last year.

With continuing negative press high fructose corn syrup has dropped in sales, even though all current data shows that the body processes it exactly like regular sugar.

At the same time companies advertising the substitution of "natural" sugar in the place of HFCS have seen an 11% growth in sales in the last year. So for now, good old fashioned sugar is enjoying a comeback after it was demonized by the low-carb craze.

At the same time artificial sweeteners continue to grow in popularity, even as a recent sweetener taste comparison test conducted by Consumer Reports finds that even artificial sweeteners have a hard time standing up to real sugar.

According to the test, drinks and candies are a good place to use artificial sweeteners, while baking items don't fare as well.

That's a problem, since baked goods are very popular, and rely on sugar for more than just sweetening. As it says in the article, "sugar does a lot more than add sweetness," it helps baked goods rise, and gives them an attractive color and texture.

However, some success was found in using a mixture of regular sugar and artificial sweeteners like sucralose or saccharin.

Food manufacturers looking to capitalize on both of these growing trends might find substantial success marketing popular baked goods as "reduced sugar," since this offers consumers a variety of popular benefits.

They could still enjoy those baked goods, while consuming fewer calories, "natural" sugar, and artificial sweeteners.