Eat Less Salt? Why?
Investigative science journalist Gary Taubes writes in The New York Times about the received "wisdom" that salt is bad for us:
This eat-less-salt argument has been surprisingly controversial -- and difficult to defend. Not because the food industry opposes it, but because the actual evidence to support it has always been so weak.When I spent the better part of a year researching the state of the salt science back in 1998 -- already a quarter century into the eat-less-salt recommendations -- journal editors and public health administrators were still remarkably candid in their assessment of how flimsy the evidence was implicating salt as the cause of hypertension.
...WHY have we been told that salt is so deadly? Well, the advice has always sounded reasonable. It has what nutritionists like to call "biological plausibility." Eat more salt and your body retains water to maintain a stable concentration of sodium in your blood. This is why eating salty food tends to make us thirsty: we drink more; we retain water. The result can be a temporary increase in blood pressure, which will persist until our kidneys eliminate both salt and water.
...With nearly everyone focused on the supposed benefits of salt restriction, little research was done to look at the potential dangers. But four years ago, Italian researchers began publishing the results from a series of clinical trials, all of which reported that, among patients with heart failure, reducing salt consumption increased the risk of death.
...When several agencies, including the Department of Agriculture and the Food and Drug Administration, held a hearing last November to discuss how to go about getting Americans to eat less salt (as opposed to whether or not we should eat less salt), these proponents argued that the latest reports suggesting damage from lower-salt diets should simply be ignored.
...This attitude that studies that go against prevailing beliefs should be ignored on the basis that, well, they go against prevailing beliefs, has been the norm for the anti-salt campaign for decades. Maybe now the prevailing beliefs should be changed.
Gary Taubes first caught my notice when he wrote about the junk science behind the war on salt. While objective science is willing to alter or discard existing beliefs according to evidence acquired by experiment and observation, junk science discards evidence that conflicts with existing dogma.
BarSinister at June 4, 2012 6:25 AM
MIL is supposed to eat a "heart healthy" (low fat, low salt) diet. What is weird about it is she has also been told to put on 30 pounds if she ever wants to drive again and she keeps ending up in the hospital because of low sodium.
nonegiven at June 4, 2012 7:43 AM
I've said it here before but it bears repeating: Nutrition today is a pseudo-science, right there with astrology and tea-leaf reading. Taubes is doing a pretty good job of connecting the dots, but right now there just aren't enough dots to make a coherent picture.
The entire field of nutrition needs to go back to about 1950 and start over from there.
Cousin Dave at June 4, 2012 7:47 AM
The only bad thing about sodium, so I'm told, is that it makes you retain water, supposedly a hazard to those with hypertension.
I do know that it makes you thirsty, which is why Coca-Cola inserted trace amounts of epsom salts in its Dasani drinking water. Makes you thirsty, so you'll drink more of their overpriced bottled water.
I won't go so far as to call nutrition a pseudoscience … however, I will say that we actually know very little about nutrition. Many of the chemicals we find naturally occurring in food we have absolutely no idea what they do for us.
Patrick at June 4, 2012 9:02 AM
The Right to Bear Salt
06/06/11 - The Covert Rationing Blog
A nice article about salt levels in human diets, and a great blog about our current problems with government run health care. [excerpt]
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Studies of sodium intake across a wide array of human populations, living under a wide variety of conditions and dietary constraints, also show that the range of salt consumption humans take in to achieve their set-point is remarkably universal, and is maintained within a fairly narrow range. That is, not only do humans consume the proper amount of sodium as determined by the body’s needs, but across the diversity of humanity that “automatic” sodium intake is maintained within a remarkably fixed range. (Sodium intake moves within that range to maintain the body’s proper sodium set-point.)
As it happens, the lower limit of that universal, naturally occurring, “optimal” range of sodium intake is roughly 2300 mg/day.
Astoundingly, this natural lower limit, determined by our physiology, is the same as the the upper limit our government would have many Americans consume, and far higher than the 1500 mg/day our government sets as the maximum for more than half of us.
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Andrew_M_Garland at June 4, 2012 9:36 AM
What does weight have to do with driving?
And there's nothing healthy about "low fat."
Sosij at June 4, 2012 3:33 PM
I genuinely don't like the taste of really salty stuff. I almost never add salt to anything. It's not a health thing, though.
My mom kills me with the salt level in her food. I guess her taste buds are fading.
momof4 at June 4, 2012 4:44 PM
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