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Link Between Salt and High Blood Pressure 'Overstated'
An anonymous reader writes: Diagnosed with high blood pressure? If so, you were probably told to moderate or avoid the use salt in your food. Well, a new study (abstract found that salt is not associated with systolic blood pressure after controlling for other factors. The study found that BMI, age, and alcohol consumption all strongly influenced blood pressure, and concluded that maintaining a healthy body weight was the best way to counteract it. The publication of this research follows a CDC report from Tuesday decrying the amount of salt in children's diets — a report that lists high blood pressure as one of its main concerns. The debate on this issue is far from over, and it'll take years to sort out all the contradictory evidence.
This is not actually news though it's one more study on the pile. My wife is a physician and her instructors in med school pointed out that the relationship between salt and high blood pressure was based on correlations, not a causal chain. Basically it was a logical hypothesis that people started acting upon before it was ever established as fact. A lot of patients with high blood pressure problems (apparently - I'm not a doctor) have issues relating to osmotic gradients and other biological functions where salt is involved. So the theory went that by controlling sodium you could help control these problems. A good theory. But a good theory isn't a necessarily fact and it sounds like a lot of medical effort went into controlling sodium before anyone actually could test to see if it really mattered. Apparently the answer is turning out to be that it doesn't matter nearly as much as we thought.
Oblig XKCD
not true. Just avoid crap that comes in a box, can, or plastic bag and you are golden.
Fresh meat, veggies, fruits, and grains have zero added salt. It's the lazy people's pre packaged crap that has salt dumped in by the truckload.
Oh and good Whiskey... That has very little salt in it.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
What bugs me is when I can taste the sugar in a hamburger bun. And you can't shake that off.
(Well, sure, you could "shake" the whole bun off, but you know what I mean. Someone was sure to point that out, so now you've been denied of your attempt at pedantry.)
This is one of the many examples of why I don't care about consensus opinion. Show us evidence, or go away.
Fair enough. Do you have sufficient expertise that you are able to interpret the evidence? Is the evidence clear? Is the evidence properly gathered and analyzed? Do we have enough evidence to draw firm conclusions or merely enough to nudge the direction of inquiry? Will the patient die before you can get conclusive evidence?
Fact is that the human body is complicated and sometimes a good sounding theory is the best we have to go on. A lot of diagnosis are basically well informed probabilistic guesses because we don't completely understand the underlying disease process. Sometimes you have to act before you can be certain of your case. For instance if you have a bacterial infection it can take days to culture the infectious organism and the patient can die before you get a definitive answer. So the doctor has to take an educated guess before he has the evidence. Sometimes a consensus opinion is the best we can do.
What people miss about consensus opinions is why they matter. What a consensus is NOT useful for is as evidence proving or disproving a theory about physical phenomena. A consensus IS useful for as evidence against the (political) argument that there are substantially conflicting opinions when there in fact are not. A consensus is useful for establishing standard of care. A consensus is (sometimes) useful for protection against legal liability.
Yeah, much of what we know is being overturned. Some of the disinformation was probably created by the food companies that wanted to make cheaper food. Back in the 70's we were told that fat was bad, and so all these processed foods got lots of extra sugar instead. Now we find out that sugar is bad and you need to consume more of the right fats. We're also starting to see that this "food pyramid" they taught us about should be basically inverted. The reason for the food pyramid is more to do with cost (grains are cheap) than nutrition.
Today, we know a hell of a lot about the impact of genetics, microbiotic flora, and many other things that affect individuals differently. For instance, many people have some mild sensitivities to various food proteins, although no always enough to notice more than some unexplained lethargy unpredictable times after eating certain foods. Of course, for some people, it's bad, like those with celiac disease.
Here's an interesting one: Apparently, about 10% of the population (US or world, I'm not sure) has a homozygous MTHFR C677T mutation. These people cannot convert folic acid (which is artificial anyway) or folinic acid (found in lots of vegetables) into methylfolate. As a result, these people suffer from massive B9 deficiencies (which indirectly causes others, like trouble absorbing B12). Moreover, it's not just that folic acid and folinic acid are not useful to them; they're functionally poison, interfering with the normal function of the methylation cycle. So these people need to take large quantities of methylfolate and cut out certain "healthy" vegetables. They also have to cut out "enriched" foods. We're starting to see a correlation between health problems increasing in these people and the mid-90's FDA mandate to enrich certain foods with Folic Acid. Lovely.
[mercola.com]
According to recent information and studies there seems to something to the Low Carb High Fat diet, not just for weight loss, but for much better serum cholesterol numbers and lower inflammation markers. But citing Joe Mercola probably isn't convincing anybody of the credibility of what you're saying.
'The Economy' is a giant Ponzi scheme whose most pitiable suckers are the youngest among us and the yet-unborn.