Thank you very much, Madam Chair.
And thanks very much to our panel who are with us this afternoon. Certainly we've heard some interesting comments, and they've generated some interesting questions around the table.
I have a couple of questions, for anybody who wants to venture an answer.
Why do we have so much sodium in our diet? Is it strictly for palatability? Is it a taste? Is that why it's there, or is there another reason we have the sodium in the prepared foods?
What about the substitutes? Dr. Liu referred very briefly to substitutes, but there have been substitutes on the market for years that people have used in place of free table salt. Are they not viable? Can they be used in the food production industry?
In terms of research, a lot of comments have been made this afternoon that we really need to have the research done to document the results of a lower-sodium diet. We need to make sure there aren't adverse results of that. Is there hard research out there that shows sodium causing all of these diseases that we've talked about; for example, the high blood pressure? Is there hard research that you're basing those decisions on when you talk about that?
We'll start with those.