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Salt Linked To Autoimmune Diseases
ananyo writes "The incidence of autoimmune diseases, such as multiple sclerosis and type 1 diabetes, has spiked in developed countries in recent decades. In three studies published today, researchers describe the molecular pathways that can lead to autoimmune disease and identify one possible culprit that has been right under our noses — and on our tables — the entire time: salt. Some forms of autoimmunity have been linked to overproduction of TH17 cells, a type of helper T cell that produces an inflammatory protein called interleukin-17. Now scientists have found sodium chloride turns on the production of these cells (abstract). They also showed that in a mouse model of multiple sclerosis, a high-salt diet accelerated the disease's progression (abstract)."
Salt, sugar, ethanol, nicotine, any food that isn't raw and tasteless--in an ideal healthy world, we would all eat a diet of cardboard and water and walk around flagellating ourselves all day.
Enjoyable = sinful = unhealthy
Don't eat or you will die.... oh wait.
"Ye are the salt of the earth: but if the salt have lost its savor, wherewith shall it be salted? it is thenceforth good for nothing, but to be cast out and trodden under foot of men."
most of the salt is over processed crap with lots of chemicals
are these same conditions present in people who eat natural unprocessed salt?
These finding are contradicted by the epidemiological evidence. The hazards of low salt are immediate and deadly. The hazards of high salt are hard to detect. The chances that there are other variables at work are high. Just because you have a pathway, it doesn't mean you've identified all the regulatory mechanisms.
I should use this sig to advertise my book ISBN-13 : 978-1501515132.
90 years of whole wheat is indistinguishable from death.
Breathing is linked to lung cancer, just picture all the chemicals your putting into your lungs from that dirty air. TFA authors should immediately stop all salt and air consumption for a long and healthy life.
yes, people used to die from flu, tooth infections and because of exhaustion when they traveled from Paris to Vienna in autumn by coach, now people live to 80+ until the system shuts down from almost anything ... soon we'll hear oxygen is linked to autoimmune diseases, diabetes and lack of interest in MSM
it's called living, it is dangerous, and at the end, no matter what you do, you die
So "In recent decades.... rise of auto-immune linked to salt." means to me more intake of salt = more auto-immune. But haven't we been pushing low salt in "recent decades". I really can't imaged the average person ate less salt at the turn of the century then now. Salt helped preserve food and it enhanced flavor.
Nobody tell Bloomberg!
another thing I love that I can't eat? they're just throwing more salt in my wound!
I work for the Department of Redundancy Department.
...is somewhere between 0 and 100kg per day. Now we just need to zero in on the exact number and we'll be all set.
Koans and fables for the software engineer
As a Finn, I'm fucked.
The problem with these guesses about salt is our kidneys are specifically designed for actively and precisely maintaining homeostasis of certain key ions (Na, Cl, K, Ca) in the bloodstream. If it weren't we would simply die within days or sooner. Moderate salt with good hydration is probably not harmful at all -- it is probably good for you as it helps the kidneys filter other bad stuff out. Low salt could easily be bad for you.
High salt plus low hydration might be bad. But where exactly is the line where moderate salt becomes high? Guessing based on what we eat is for witch doctors.
So I would like to see an actual study showing how adding/subtracting a little salt changes anything measurable at all about the long term serum average, otherwise I am inclined to believe that this guess is baloney. We are not walking petri dishes.
(There are specific diseases where controlling salts are very important, but that is a separate issue.)
Of course, this latest FUD piece depends on ignoring the fact that the body precisely regulates the levels of all of the accused ions. If you have too much salt, your kidneys get rid of it.
This is why the alleged link between salt and high blood pressure never made any sense except from a 10th grade science perspective. It has certainly been thoroughly debunked, just like this conclusion will be thoroughly debunked.
Junk science at its best.
...God hates us.
Multiple Sclerosis is a horrible disease that leaves you incapable of doing anything but sitting around waiting to die. But it is just one of many horrible diseases. And diseases are just one of many things that are constantly trying to kill us, such as predators, parasites, famines, floods, flash fires, and on and on. And these things afflict everyone, including the young and innocent.
Anyone who thinks the Creator is a loving benevolent being is completely insane.
I love it how the conclusions from a mouse study automatically equals 'the man' trying to force use to eat a salt-free diet.
You should always take news like this with 64.79891 mg of NaCl.
Escher was the first MC and Giger invented the HR department.
It isn't salt, it's too much salt. No one needs the huge levels of sodium chloride that is now added to most processed foods. It is there because it "tastes good" while making you want to eat more and more.
I had to give up salt completely some years ago and it took months before I regained my ability to taste unsalted food. Now, food without salt actually tastes much better that the over-salted crap served to us everywhere.
Yes, the body requires some sodium chloride but the amount is very small. What most people ingest is far, far beyond that. As with just about anything, too much will harm you.
Well, experts have been advising it. Everyone actually been eating that way? If they were, the entire fast-food industry would have collapsed.
This reminds me of everyone who tried to put crohn's disease or H Pylori infection into the autoimmune bracket, which we now know isn't true.
Auroimmune means a reaction to a self-antigen, and whilte Th cells are part of the adaptive regulatory response, they are not an explanation of why the body would attack epithelial cells. In fact, that Th17 actually upregulates inflammation every time has been questioned, since for example in crohn's disease, something which I'm familiar with, they find increased Th17 in people with quiescent disease versus active disease, the Th17 response calms the inflammation in the mucosa.
The expression "worth their salt" is a very old expression, salt use is not new, I really don't think that the increase in salt is responsible for the sudden increase in autoimmune diseases in the West, the body has a lot of protective barriers in place to prevent a self-directed immune response, the adaptive immune system is tightly controller and I don't believe any diet has enough of an impact to make this go wrong. I think a lot of diseases related to the immune system are simply not understood and are all thrown under this autoimmune bracket without a good understanding of their mechanics.
So far:
Caffeine can kill you
Tobacco can kill you
Drugs can kill you
Salt can kill you
Sugar can kill you
Meat can kill you
Sex can kill you
The very air you breathe can kill you
Ya know what, from the time you're born - you are being killed by something or another (of course, until you're told it's not).
My philosophy? Don't sweat it and don't live in fear - enjoy your life and do what you will. Our time here is short - live it.
Salt is required for Osmosis. Without salt, you will dehydrate, regardless of how much water you drink. Is there the possibility that some people, who depend too much on junk food, might be getting too much salt in their diet?, yes. Just because they are, doesn't mean the rest of us need to stop eating it. It's like Oxygen. In high enough concentrations, Oxygen is toxic. This is one of the reasons divers use Helium, (the other is nitrogen narcosis).
The problem with salt is that it can be too low or too high. And, despite what doctors might say, it's not that hard to run low.
Bottom line, is that it's how much you have in your brain and blood stream that ultimately matters more than your consumption does. If you're eating 2x the recommended amount, but sweating 3x as much as a normal person would, you will get sick eventually.
Moderate salt intake is mandatory, if you're not consuming any you'll eventually run low and wind up dead or brain damaged. And, that's not as hard as people think, all it takes is a few days of unseasonable weather if you've been low balling your consumption to get seriously ill. As in wind up in the ICU of the local hospital with life threatening brain damage.
Yes, that's rather unlikely as most people consume so much salt that it would take weeks or more to run low, but it can and does happen.
Wasn't there an article referenced on /. that said the study of mice in experiments whose data is translated to humans is flawed.
Oddly enough, many people do. You can blame everything on fast food. You can blame things on twenty-year-old advice eventually turning out to be incorrect, as it's slowly appearing.
"The problem with these guesses about salt is our kidneys have specifically *EVOLVED TO* actively and precisely maintain homeostasis of certain key ions"
Fixed.
NZ Electronics Enthusiasts: Check out my Trade Me Listings
Taubes on Salt - http://www.nytimes.com/2012/06/03/opinion/sunday/we-only-think-we-know-the-truth-about-salt.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0
If only there were a homeostatic mechanism by which the body might increase salt consumption, like a craving...
I do agree. Electrolytes are vital to a healthy body, and all it takes to put you in the "too low" category is a 24-hour GI bug accompanied by a half-dozen bouts of screaming into the porcelain microphone.
And did you ever notice that sports drinks with electrolytes (like Gatorade) taste great when you're sweating and salt-deprived, and positively horrible when you're not?
Koans and fables for the software engineer
In other news..dying has been linked to living...
Oddly enough, many people do. You can blame everything on fast food. You can blame things on twenty-year-old advice eventually turning out to be incorrect, as it's slowly appearing.
Huh? If someone claims they are on a low fat and low sodium diet and also eats fast food regularly, they are full of shit.
But, if you wish to believe that trying to eat low fat and low sodium is what's making you fat; feel free to eat at McDonald's five times a week.
I'm a good cook. I'm a fantastic eater. - Steven Brust
Isn't all salt originally sea salt? Some of it is collected by evaporating sea water, some of it is mined from underground deposits left behind by ancient oceans.
None of them can see the clouds; The polished wings don't care.
Even more problematic for the legislature, human bodies use sodium and potassium salts for different purposes. Sodium salts are among the blood thickening agents, while potassium salts play a similar role within cells. So a proper salt intake is one within the general safety range that also maintains a proper balance of sodium in the blood and potassium within the cells.
I suspect that a bit more variety on both sides of the ions may be beneficial, but I don't know if anyone has done a study of health effects of different salt compositions.
Bananas. Apples. Fruits of every variety.
Potatos too. Grains of every variety, for that matter.
mmmmm.......
The rule of thumb is to simply avoid lack or excess of any thing! Maybe an ideal life is based on average...
lubricant they use on the machines that make aluminum soda cans can be conclusively, causally linked to obesity in lab rats...
BPA is not a lubricant.
It is a "key monomer in production of epoxy resins and in the most common form of polycarbonate plastic."
Also, he was asking for causation, not correlation.
Finding in your urine more of the chemical that you ingest while drinking sugary drinks, does not prove that it's the chemical and not the sugar that's making you obese.
All it proves is that the said chemical has apparently leached into your sugary drink - perhaps from its packaging and perhaps from the cups you use.
Mit der Dummheit kämpfen Götter selbst vergebens
Also, butter. They make tea from it.
They tend to eat or drink on average more than 20 grams of salt per day.
They also tend to live 4900 meters above sea level. On average.
Mit der Dummheit kämpfen Götter selbst vergebens
I've been doing a lot of reading on dietary topics, and it is quite amazing how many opinions about our dietary needs are based on nothing but opinion or the opinions of other people. Even the scientific results can be mis-interpreted or looked at in so many ways that you can seemingly show whatever you want from these studies.
There's a ton of stuff out there, like the book "Good Calories Bad Calories" that covers it in depth, but watch this video by Dr Peter Attia. I think it sums it up pretty well. The limits of scientific evidence and the ethics of dietary guidelines -- 60 years of ambiguity
I've been following the Primal Blueprint lifestyle for a few months, and the effects have been pretty amazing.
My beliefs do not require that you agree with them.
I guess Dr. Raymond Cocteau was right after all! (http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0106697/)
Drinking only water for a day can do it. I drank a gallon of water to try to detox, and nothing else.
When I did that one time, I started to feel REALLY wrong, I then ate a salt packet and felt 50% better in minutes, almost 100% better in an hour or so.
Just because it CAN be done, doesn't mean it should!
"screaming into the porcelain microphone"
*laughs* You just made my day with that one.
Not really, the kidneys can only hold onto sodium that's potentially going to pass through them, the do precisely zip for sodium that gets secreted by the sweat glands or if there's a sudden over hydration that occurs.
Craving itself is based upon different needs from a different time, your body doesn't know that getting the appropriate level of salt isn't as hard as it used to be.
No, Jesus was a leprechaun.
R.I.P., miss you at xmas Phil...
I wouldn't put too much on Taubes' analysis of the data, his main claim to fame that insulin responses cause obesity is BS. He might be right about excess salt not being a health issue (I honestly don't know what the long term issues are supposed to be) but be warned that Taubes is more interested in generating a novel result than a right one.
I stole this Sig
The biggest problem is that even in the face of absolute proof to the contrary, our medical, government, and insurance industries are absolutely convinced that the only people who have different dietary needs are Eskimos.
My own weak anecedotal evidence leads me to believe that it's not just the amount of salt but the type and balance between those types of salt.
Salt is the sea is:
Cl 55%, Na+ 30.6%, SO2
4 7.7%, Mg2+ 3.7%, Ca2+ 1.2%, K+ 1.1%, Other 0.7%.
We are decended from fish and the fat distribution in our bodies is still marine mammalian...
so to me it makes sense that we need to stop thinking in terms of "salt" and start thinking about different ions in the body; a thing I coin electrolytic (im)balance.
It would be nice to see a study looking at this to either give this some scientific acceptance or rule it out.
A blog I run for the wealth
I can quite confidently say that you never have had any real experience with science..... and probably never even taken any basic classes in statistics. I can agree with you that science journalism is a big joke, and unfortunately that is often the only contact normal laymen get with science. Luckily in this TFA there is a link to the paper showing a mechanistic link between sodium chloride and the up-regulation of a protein that promotes T-cells to differentiate into Th17 cells. There are several Th17-driven diseases that could be influenced by this. On the flip side, there are also diseases (mostly people with susceptibility to fungal infections) that have a too low Th17 response. It would be interesting to see if those people would be helped by a higher salt diet...
I don't want to support the AC's viewpoint about "processed crap" vs. "sea salt", but I would like to answer your question: Most industrially-produced salts are very pure: the processing done is a refinement which eliminates non-salty things. Salt harvested in "traditional" or "artisinal" methods will have more impurities present. Take sel gris, for example: it is pinkish or gray because some clay gets raked up along with the salt crystals. There are more minerals in there! My memory is hazy and I don't have a reference around, but some of the notable extra components are Iodine, Magnesium, and either Phosphorus or Potassium. Having more of these trace minerals around might be a good thing overall, but whenever I see the health benefits of "sea salt" I smell snake oil: the copy writers are just looking for a sale.
Is *not* real salt. As usual. Use marine salt and avoid it.
'Mouse model of multiple sclerosis'.
Mice don't get multiple sclerosis, this is just another example of fraudulent 'research', jobs for life for 'scientists' who get paid to FAIL at finding cures.
Refined salt is highly pure salt. Na-Cl up to better part than 99.9%. The rest being stuff which is inert in your body, sand mostly. Some firm might add a very small quantity of inert agent to enable an easier flow, but those are well known.
Natural sea salt on the other hand is motly left to dry and very few processing beside some very very absic purification process before drying to catch the bigest impurity, and then left to dry in the air and can be polluted by the nearby road, as long as it is not excessive and do not go above the regulatory percentage you can find all sort of shit in it.
So yeah, natural sea salt of whatever is actually much more impure than mined ground salt.
It sure is, but most table salt is brined (dissolved) by injecting water into a deep pocket well, where all the impurities settle or float out, then you take the clear brine up and boil it to recrystallize the salt. So we are actually reforming it a few days old, but it starts as ancient sea bed deposits. Along the Gulf where I work now we have salt domes, but they are really just mini salt volcano's, a deeper flat bed of salt gets hot, semi liquefies under pressure and blows up into a dome shape like magma would. They also make a long vertical break in the layers of sediment so a lot of oil can be accessed on the edges....... so salt and oil mix in a way :)
You're a retard.
Yup. It's called Hyponatremia: http://sportsmedicine.about.com/od/hydrationandfluid/a/Hyponatremia.htm
Koans and fables for the software engineer
GGP claimed "everyone". "Many" is very much not the same as "everyone".
Maybe I can (or maybe you mean "can't"), but I didn't, so its irrelevant either way.
I pointed to it's continued existence as a major industry as evidence of that the claim "everyone has been eating low fat and low sodium for twenty years now" is false. No blame involved.
You could, but if you want to do so credibly, you'll also produce evidence.
Your recommendations are fine for a white guy, of mostly western European descent, past puberty but not yet elderly, with no major genetic disabilities.
But they are extremely inappropriate for an African-Hispanic pregnant woman with a genetic predisposition to phenylketonuria. If she even survived your diet at all, her child could be born brain-damaged.
The best thing for people who want to live a long time to do is look at your own ancestors and try to figure out which ones lived longest, and why. Asians and Africans will favor different diets than Finns, women will get different results from men, environment and occupation will have effects.
But don't bother with paleo-schmaleo or whatever the latest fad is, work from actual data that's actually pertinent to your own genome and then validate your hypotheses using your own body. Otherwise you're just another sucker who gets medical advice from strangers with an agenda.
The salt that's added to processed foods and that you buy to put on your table isn't much like the "salt" found in nature, which isn't just NaCl; it's a complex of minerals.
The "salt" added to processed foods has been heated-up several hundred degrees, refined, and fucked with/denatured. Big surprise, it's not good for you and is the cause of disease.
Yeah, yeah, all sorts of assholes are going to say "it's not the "salt", it's "too much 'salt' "
And to that I say, bullshit. You put this fake "salt" IN almost EVERYTHING, and then say "ohhh, it's not the salt it's too much salt". Truly idiotic. That's like saying It's not the arsenic, it's TOO MUCH arsenic.
An adulterated food supply is an adulterated food supply. The sooner we lay the blame where it belongs the sooner we can get back to eating food that is primarily nourishing, as opposed to eating shit that's primarily designed to make a big profit for some bullshit corporation that's appealing to the lowest common denominator.
It's inevitable. Now pass me some more cheese twists, potato chips, ice cream and a triple martini!
IM an ATHEIST and I must MENTION THIS at every POSSIBLE opportunity NO MATTER HOW irrelevant.
BECAUSE IM AN atheist
Myself I would like to see physicians who are a little more cautious about making health recommendations.
There's a lot of evidence that salt has been getting a bad rap, e.g. a Scientific American article from 2010 suggests it's time to end the war on salt.
That's based on attempting to find evidence that reducing salt intake will help avoid heart disease, hypertension, etc. I expect it'll be awhile before we know if this new cellular-level research has any application on the level of human populations.
But myself I don't see why I should "already" be avoiding salt.