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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.
My wife.
CDC: "A vast majority of scientific research confirms that as sodium is reduced, so is blood pressure."
Which does not mean that salt *causes* blood pressure to increase.
Eat shitty food, which happens to contain a lot of salt, and you will have high blood pressure.
Eat good food, and add a ton of salt to it, and you will have normal blood pressure.
Anyone who has taken the time to experiment with their diet can see the results themselves (like I have).
Now I can go back to ramen noodles for lunch!
Of course. I read about this quite a few years ago in a book called Global Warming and Other Bollocks. It has a chapter on salt. I'm still recovering from being told that egg yolks are as bad for me as smoking, though I don't eat 20 eggs a day (or smoke any more), it turns out that actually they're probably only bad for people with heart disease or diabetes.
Anyone losing the will to live yet? I could go on...
Clearly, this indicates that the science behind anthropogenic global warming is flawed.
Just about everything that is bad for you today is being negated a few years later. Can't find the link today, but at one point "research" showed that jeans were responsible for higher risk of cancer. So I will just continue to live my life and enjoy it to the fullest. If something kills me, at least I had a good time.
To Terminate, or not to Terminate, that's the question - SCSIROB
I can tell you from personal experience having been a physical fitness health nut and also having gone through prolong periods of enormous stress that the two are undeniably linked. When you're under stress, you have fight or flight response. Several chemicals such as cortisol and adrenaline are produced in your body. When you're under chronic stress, you have this type of constant sense of this. It depletes resources in your body differently than when you're relaxed. It also causes you to store more body fat because when we were in the wild the environment stress response could be associated with food scarcity.
The time in my life when I was in the best shape of my life was when I was under the least amount of stress. I had low blood pressure, cholesterol, LDL/HDL, triglycerides, everything. My GP was cheering me on.
Get your stress under control and focus on having a healthy lifestyle and everything else will sort itself out. The problem in America is that we are a culture that pushes inordinate amounts of stress on our citizens. Where UK citizens would take a month long holiday every year because of the generous vacation time afforded by most European countries, the United States doesn't guarantee any paid vacation or sick time. And then we wonder why compared to other countries our citizens are significantly more tired, burnt out and less healthy.
We'll make great pets
Way too many fad conclusions come and go in science, and especially with food. Eggs are bad, eggs are good, fat is bad, fat is good, carbs are good, carbs are bad, resveritol cures all, resveritol no better than placebo, Dr. Oz is a genius, Dr. Oz is a pocklining schill....
In the end it seems that if you wait about 10 years almost every headline on health gets contradicted, then thar contradiction gets at least qualified another 10 years after that.
Nothing so far has done better than simply trying to aim for eating plenty of real food with moderation on the highly processed stuff, and moderation on the calorie dense stuff.
The one thing about salt is that it does make stuff tasty, often the highly processed stuff, making it easy to overdo it. Avoiding salt sort of automatically helps one to cut out the heavily processed foods.
Yeah, I thought this was well documented. Societies with very low salt intake have low blood pressure, like tribes in the Amazon. Societies with high salt intake have high blood pressure (an area of Japan comes to mind). Lowering an individual's salt intake lowers blood pressure. Now, the salt you put on your food constitutes something like 10% of total salt intake. You need to avoid foods with high salt levels, and these days that's almost everything.
Tic-Tac-Toe, Global Thermonuclear War, and relationships all have the same winning move.
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
Being in the midst of trying to control mine, here is a basic explanation provided by my Endocrinologists with some help from Wikipedia.
It all comes down to the Renin–angiotensin system.
When the Kidneys think they don't have enough fluid volume to do their job, they send out signals that ultimately come back to themselves, causing them to retain salt and ditch potassium. Water, naturally, follows the salt and results in increased blood volume and subsequently, pressure. That's why many BP meds contains diuretics.
Too much salts mucks up all the complex feedback mechanisms.
Something that is apparently under diagnosed is a condition called Aldosteronism, where the adrenal glands make too much of a hormone called aldosterone, a primary messenger in this cycle. Aldosterone levels are not part of the standard blood workup done by your average family physician and diagnosing the condition requires a special, hours long process. It's is kind of a Zebra in diagnostic terms but is looking more and more like a horse.
So if you are afflicted with High BP and you're not having much luck controlling it, ask your doctor about aldosterone levels. High BP that is a result of this condition is more dangerous in the long term, but possibly curable by suppressing the aldosterone or removing one of the adrenal glands.
When Fascism comes to America, it will call itself Anti-Fascism, and tell you to give up your guns.
The problem is that "high blood pressure" refers to two different things: 1. your blood pressure is above the normal range (120/70) at a given time and 2. you have chronic hypertension - your blood pressure is *always* above the normal range. Eating a bunch of salt can temporarily raise your blood pressure due to water retention but there's never been any evidence that this temporary effect has any long-term effects. Chronic hypertension is normally caused by poor health habits, particularly in regards to having excess weight. Eating salt has nothing to do with it.
I deal with this all the time because my wife the RN was always taught in school that eating too much salt leads to "high blood pressure". Well, yes, by definition "1" above. But that's a temporary condition and there's no evidence that it's bad for you. It took me 10 years to "unteach" her this little factoid, and I still have to deal with her telling the kids to not eat too much salt "because it's bad for you."
The only way to solve this long term is to use only the term "chronic hypertension" to refer to the chronic condition.
Do you have ESP?
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.
Bring me more of these... Salted. I work better with salt.
Did you know that in the 20th century they actually thought that salt was bad for you?
Listen to the animals I say. The lion will sit down with the lamb to share the salt lick.
Good enough for them, good enough for me.
Max Eilerson, Crusade, 1999
How can I believe you when you tell me what I don't want to hear?
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.
People living in countries with a high salt consumption—such as Japan—also tend to have high blood pressure and more strokes. But as a paper pointed out several years later in the American Journal of Hypertension, scientists had little luck finding such associations when they compared sodium intakes within populations, which suggested that genetics or other cultural factors might be the culprit.
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The original study linking sodium to high blood pressure was to feed a rat an intake equivalent to 500g of salt in a human per day. Humans are safe up to 6g of sodium intake per day; salt is a lot more than 10% sodium by mass.
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The link between salt and blood pressure is pretty clearly not the one your Dr. tells you, and this has been known for a really long time. Even the first study to show the "link" turns out to be bunk science:
http://www.stat.berkeley.edu/~...
More recent meta studies have shown that about as many papers find a positive link as a negative link between blood pressure and salt - yes, eating more salt can lower your blood pressure (or, more likely, it's all just noise). Look it up on Pubmed if you want to read all the details. It's a good skill: you'll quickly learn more than your Dr. does about any topic of real concern to you, unless your Dr. is a specialist or obscenely good at his job.
What's sad is that simple to understand explanations that lead to simple to follow prescriptions (ie eat less salt) tend to stick around way longer than the scientific consensus behind them.
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.