Posted on 12/03/2015 8:25:22 PM PST by Olog-hai
New York City's new warning label for salt-laden chain restaurant food is headed for a court fight, after restaurateurs sued Thursday to argue that health regulators overstepped legal bounds to enact the first-of-its-kind requirement.
The National Restaurant Association's suit came just two days after the rule took effect, compelling chain eateries to put a salt-shaker icon on menu items that top the recommended daily limit of 2,300 milligrams of sodium -- about a teaspoon. The group had vowed to challenge the city Board of Health-approved rule, which will sprinkle salt warnings on some dishes ranging from burgers to pizzas to salads. ...
(Excerpt) Read more at bigstory.ap.org ...
If you have heart disease, and don’t want to aggravate the problem, avoid low salt diets as though your life depends on it.
According to a 30 year study involving 300,000 people, it does.
The extensive, decades long study proved that low salt intake can kill you.
Trump is right, we are being lead by stupid people.
Don’t let their stupidity needlessly cause your death.
I deem their stupidity more dangerous than salt ever thought of being
AMEN to being lead by stupid people....Rainbow Hut, House, Senate, and on down the line...I’m surprise we are still here....
I hate to give everything up. I have this Tostidos salsa I love, it's probably got quite a bit of salt (a bit of hot can make you not miss the salt).
But the particular kind of chips I like. Round ones, store brand, thin crispy. I used to just eat them as is. But I "feel" the grainy on them. I tried brushing as much off as I could with my fingers, then got my toothbrush and brush them on both sides. It's a nuisance but edema from too much salt can be bad, too.
You deserve a more complete answer than what I gave you.
I will post the NYT article summarizing the study and ping you.
It may take a bit, but I will post it.
Thank you. You can just post a link if it would be easier.
I often include meat with my salt. Veggies go well with it, too.
Just grab De Blasio, shake him, and throw him over your left shoulder.
Canned vegetables, I buy the regular kind because they taste better but never or seldom add any salt. Fresh vegetables I don't cook too often but they need some salt. I can't eat raw and dips that look so good because I can't chew them.
So some days I just snack and right now it happens to be the bag of tortilla chips and Tostidos salsa. Some brie or brie-like cheese and saltines and so on. Often I just bake a big baked potato. Sour cream or butter and use too much of the latter but use liberal pepper and no salt. The salted butter is sufficient.
I'm on a hummus kick, doesn't need much salt. Now I'm torn because I found a recipe for two-olive hummus. Olives are very salty, and it calls for 3/4 cup Kalamata and 3/4 cup stuffed green. Yum. But too much. I will have to cut that down and rinse the olives.
I need to do something about my teeth and pain but it will be beaucoup expensive and many trips in winter where the weather is unpredictable to keep appointments. I had decided to face it all earlier this year when the weather was getting toward spring but the dr would only pull two because I guess my blood pressure and possible kidney problems, even though i have to use local anesthetic.
My blood pressure suddenly dropped a few months ago. I started skipping a day on my pills because I was feeling faint in the mornings. When I got in for my checkup, it was way lower than it had been for years. They liked it ok but when I told her what was happening, she took me off half my med for that. I'm overweight so I don't know why except when they had me scared about my kidneys, I quit the tea which has all this nasty sediment I'd drunk for years, so I hope I've cleansed my system of that.
And my ins watches my meds. I got a letter saying I should take my medicine and not skip any. It made me mad they would monitor me that closely. Now I only have until the 7th to get rid of AARP and am afraid anything else would have other expenses and problems.
Blah, blah. I know. No one to talk to.
that salt facism is happening in trump’s home town. jus’ sayin’
Salt, We Misjudged You
By GARY TAUBES
Published: June 2, 2012
Oakland, Calif.
THE first time I questioned the conventional wisdom on the nature of a healthy diet, I was in my salad days, almost 40 years ago, and the subject was salt. Researchers were claiming that salt supplementation was unnecessary after strenuous exercise, and this advice was being passed on by health reporters. All I knew was that I had played high school football in suburban Maryland, sweating profusely through double sessions in the swamp like 90-degree days of August. Without salt pills, I couldn’t make it through a two-hour practice; I couldn’t walk across the parking lot afterward without cramping.
While sports nutritionists have since come around to recommend that we should indeed replenish salt when we sweat it out in physical activity, the message that we should avoid salt at all other times remains strong. Salt consumption is said to raise blood pressure, cause hypertension and increase the risk of premature death. This is why the Department of Agriculture’s dietary guidelines still consider salt Public Enemy No. 1, coming before fats, sugars and alcohol. It’s why the director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has suggested that reducing salt consumption is as critical to long-term health as quitting cigarettes.
And yet, 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.
“You can say without any shadow of a doubt,†as I was told then by Drummond Rennie, an editor for The Journal of the American Medical Association, that the authorities pushing the eat-less-salt message had “made a commitment to salt education that goes way beyond the scientific facts.â€
While, back then, the evidence merely failed to demonstrate that salt was harmful, the evidence from studies published over the past two years actually suggests that restricting how much salt we eat can increase our likelihood of dying prematurely. Put simply, the possibility has been raised that if we were to eat as little salt as the U.S.D.A. and the C.D.C. recommend, we’d be harming rather than helping ourselves.
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.
The scientific question is whether this temporary phenomenon translates to chronic problems: if we eat too much salt for years, does it raise our blood pressure, cause hypertension, then strokes, and then kill us prematurely? It makes sense, but it’s only a hypothesis. The reason scientists do experiments is to find out if hypotheses are true.
In 1972, when the National Institutes of Health introduced the National High Blood Pressure Education Program to help prevent hypertension, no meaningful experiments had yet been done. The best evidence on the connection between salt and hypertension came from two pieces of research. One was the observation that populations that ate little salt had virtually no hypertension. But those populations didn’t eat a lot of things — sugar, for instance — and any one of those could have been the causal factor. The second was a strain of “salt-sensitive†rats that reliably developed hypertension on a high-salt diet. The catch was that “high salt†to these rats was 60 times more than what the average American consumes.
Still, the program was founded to help prevent hypertension, and prevention programs require preventive measures to recommend. Eating less salt seemed to be the only available option at the time, short of losing weight. Although researchers quietly acknowledged that the data were “inconclusive and contradictory†or “inconsistent and contradictory†— two quotes from the cardiologist Jeremiah Stamler, a leading proponent of the eat-less-salt campaign, in 1967 and 1981 — publicly, the link between salt and blood pressure was upgraded from hypothesis to fact.
In the years since, the N.I.H. has spent enormous sums of money on studies to test the hypothesis, and those studies have singularly failed to make the evidence any more conclusive. Instead, the organizations advocating salt restriction today — the U.S.D.A., the Institute of Medicine, the C.D.C. and the N.I.H. — all essentially rely on the results from a 30-day trial of salt, the 2001 DASH-Sodium study. It suggested that eating significantly less salt would modestly lower blood pressure; it said nothing about whether this would reduce hypertension, prevent heart disease or lengthen life.
While influential, that trial was just one of many. When researchers have looked at all the relevant trials and tried to make sense of them, they’ve continued to support Dr. Stamler’s “inconsistent and contradictory†assessment. Last year, two such “meta-analyses†were published by the Cochrane Collaboration, an international nonprofit organization founded to conduct unbiased reviews of medical evidence. The first of the two reviews concluded that cutting back “the amount of salt eaten reduces blood pressure, but there is insufficient evidence to confirm the predicted reductions in people dying prematurely or suffering cardiovascular disease.†The second concluded that “we do not know if low salt diets improve or worsen health outcomes.â€
The idea that eating less salt can worsen health outcomes may sound bizarre, but it also has biological plausibility and is celebrating its 40th anniversary this year, too. A 1972 paper in The New England Journal of Medicine reported that the less salt people ate, the higher their levels of a substance secreted by the kidneys, called renin, which set off a physiological cascade of events that seemed to end with an increased risk of heart disease. In this scenario: eat less salt, secrete more renin, get heart disease, die prematurely.
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.
Those trials have been followed by a slew of studies suggesting that reducing sodium to anything like what government policy refers to as a “safe upper limit†is likely to do more harm than good. These covered some 100,000 people in more than 30 countries and showed that salt consumption is remarkably stable among populations over time. In the United States, for instance, it has remained constant for the last 50 years, despite 40 years of the eat-less-salt message. The average salt intake in these populations — what could be called the normal salt intake — was one and a half teaspoons a day, almost 50 percent above what federal agencies consider a safe upper limit for healthy Americans under 50, and more than double what the policy advises for those who aren’t so young or healthy. This consistency, between populations and over time, suggests that how much salt we eat is determined by physiological demands, not diet choices.
One could still argue that all these people should reduce their salt intake to prevent hypertension, except for the fact that four of these studies — involving Type 1 diabetics, Type 2 diabetics, healthy Europeans and patients with chronic heart failure — reported that the people eating salt at the lower limit of normal were more likely to have heart disease than those eating smack in the middle of the normal range. Effectively what the 1972 paper would have predicted.
Proponents of the eat-less-salt campaign tend to deal with this contradictory evidence by implying that anyone raising it is a shill for the food industry and doesn’t care about saving lives. An N.I.H. administrator told me back in 1998 that to publicly question the science on salt was to play into the hands of the industry. “As long as there are things in the media that say the salt controversy continues,†he said, “they win.â€
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. Lawrence Appel, an epidemiologist and a co-author of the DASH-Sodium trial, said “there is nothing really new.†According to the cardiologist Graham MacGregor, who has been promoting low-salt diets since the 1980s, the studies were no more than “a minor irritation that causes us a bit of aggravation.â€
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. The British scientist and educator Thomas Huxley, known as Darwin’s bulldog for his advocacy of evolution, may have put it best back in 1860. “My business,†he wrote, “is to teach my aspirations to conform themselves to fact, not to try and make facts harmonize with my aspirations.â€
A Robert Wood Johnson Foundation Independent Investigator in Health Policy Research and the author of “Why We Get Fat.â€
A version of this op-ed appeared in print on June 3, 2012, on page SR8 of the New York edition with the headline: Salt, We Misjudged You.
Thank you, Balding Eagle. I’d like to read it without the strange characters. Other than the Tines, which I don’t have access to, where was this published?
Sometimes with the simplest thing, I'm not sure where someone is coming from.
Just a way of saying I am a huge saltaholic:)
There are some decent no salt added tortilla chips. You can find them in your supermarket’s health food/gourmet section, Whole Foods or on Amazon. I buy the Guiltless Gourmet brand, but there are others.
Moderation. Some days too much; other days not much at all. Drink plenty of water.
Something people should know, and I don't know if it is true across the board with diuretics. I was on one combined in a blood pressure pill. Luckily the dr knew to test for sodium and a couple other things which remained within tolerance limits.
So I took the pill and had a blood test. Electrolytes (sodium) too low. Reduce blood pressure med but don't go back to non-diuretic. Reducing the med also reduced the diuretic component.
Blood test, sodium lower. So what's the problem with that? They had to take me off that blood pressure med and onto another one (and try not to get the kind that depletes potassium so you have to religiously take supplements or have bananas on hand).
The dr said too little sodium can cause heart problems. Exactly the opposite of the thrust of the article (which I'll reread when I'm not so tired).
Probably both are true, not too much and not too little. And plenty of water.
Once these health bugaboos get started, no amount of current research can put them to rest.
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