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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).
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
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.