Free Republic

Plant-based diets are often seen as healthier alternatives to eating meat and dairy - with around one in five adopting the diet for health reasons. The way of eating, which has risen in popularity by at least a third since 2017, can involve anything from ditching meat, to going fully vegan, without eggs, milk or cheese. However, these foods could be loaded with sodium, which could raise blood pressure, packed with obesity-causing saturated fat, and stripped of bone-building calcium, a major analysis suggests. Researchers evaluated more than 700 plant-based foods sold in supermarkets, including burgers, sausages, milk, cheese, and yogurt,...

One in three Australian adults has high blood pressure (hypertension). Excess salt (sodium) increases the risk of high blood pressure so everyone with hypertension is advised to reduce salt in their diet. But despite decades of strong recommendations we have failed to get Australians to cut their intake. It's hard for people to change the way they cook, season their food differently, pick low-salt foods off the supermarket shelves and accept a less salty taste. Now there is a simple and effective solution: potassium-enriched salt. It can be used just like regular salt and most people don't notice any important...

This is the new BYD Seagull and with a price tag starting at just 78,000 yuan ($11,300), it is one of the most compelling new electric vehicles from China launched in quite some time. Presented at the ongoing Shanghai Auto Show, the BYD Seagull takes the form of a compact hatchback that will be positioned below the Dolphin in the brand’s range. It is just 3,780 mm (148.8 inches) long, 1,715 mm (67.5 inches) wide, and stands 1,540 mm (60.6 inches) tall and sports quite an edgy and aggressive design that should appeal to young consumers throughout China. The car’s...

What Is Salt? Salt is a seasoning that can flavor food and act as a preservative. It’s about 60% chloride and about 40% sodium. Nearly all unprocessed foods -- think veggies, fruits, nuts, meats, whole grains, and dairy foods -- are low in sodium. The salt that we do eat helps relax and contract muscles, lends a hand with nerve impulses, and balances the minerals and water we take in. How Much Salt Do You Need? Our body needs only a small amount of sodium. We should get about 1,500 milligrams of it every day. But the average American takes...

Physicists at RIKEN have created an exceptionally neutron-rich sodium isotope, 39Na, which was previously believed to be impossible. This breakthrough has major implications for understanding atomic nuclei structure and the creation of Earth’s heavier elements. In extremely neutron-rich form of the element sodium—which many models of atomic nuclei predict shouldn’t exist—has been created by nuclear physicists at RIKEN for the first time[1]. If you made table salt from this super-heavy version of sodium—and the most neutron-rich isotope of chlorine, salt’s other constituent—it would taste and behave like normal salt, except it would be roughly 1.6 times heavier, says nuclear physicist...

Urinary sodium excretion and salt intake are not independently associated with 24-hour blood pressure variability (BPV), according to a study. Tan Lai Zhou and colleagues used data from 2,652 participants in the Maastricht Study to evaluate whether urinary sodium excretion and salt intake are associated with 24-hour BPV. Participants adhered to a seven-day low- and high-salt diet (50 and 250 mmol NaCl/24 hour, respectively) with a washout period of 14 days. The researchers found that 24-hour urinary sodium excretion was not associated with 24-hour systolic or diastolic BPV (β, per 1 g/24-hour urinary sodium excretion: 0.05 mm Hg [95 percent...

Researchers found that patients who were assigned to the highest dose of the new medication saw the top blood pressure number drop by a full 20 points. Some patients with high blood pressure can't get it under control with standard medications, but a new study shows an experimental drug is up to the task of treating these tough-to-treat cases. Why do some folks struggle more with managing their high blood pressure than others? When the hypertension is caused by the hormone aldosterone, which is responsible for how much salt the body retains, it is much harder to control, researchers explained....

Increased consumption of dietary sodium may increase the risk for atopic dermatitis, according to a study presented at the annual meeting of the Society for Investigative Dermatology, held May 18 to 21 in Portland, Oregon. Morgan Ye, M.P.H., from the University of California San Francisco, and colleagues examined the association between sodium intake and atopic dermatitis in a U.S. population-based cohort of 13,183 children and adults identified from the 1999-2000, 2001-2002, and 2003-2004 cycles of the National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey. The researchers found that the average dietary sodium intake was 3.30 g and 6 percent of participants reported...

Explanation: That's no comet. Below the Pleiades star cluster is actually a planet: Mercury. Long exposures of our Solar System's innermost planet may reveal something unexpected: a tail. Mercury's thin atmosphere contains small amounts of sodium that glow when excited by light from the Sun. Sunlight also liberates these atoms from Mercury's surface and pushes them away. The yellow glow from sodium, in particular, is relatively bright. Pictured, Mercury and its sodium tail are visible in a deep image taken last week from La Palma, Spain through a filter that primarily transmits yellow light emitted by sodium. First predicted in...

In order to power all of these EVs, we will need batteries — lots of them. This vital mineral in rechargeable batteries has earned the name “white gold” and the rush is on. But until the 1990s, the U.S. was the leader in lithium production. But there is only one operating lithium mine in the U.S., Albemarle’s Silver Peak in Nevada.

California Governor Gavin Newsom announced Friday that Taco Bell will be giving away free tacos to residents who are vaccinated. In addition, he announced, Chipotle restaurants will be offering “FREE QUESO,” while various California sports teams will be offering discounts as an incentive to encourage more locals to take the coronavirus vaccine.

The residue of ancient urine can reveal the presence of early stationary herder-farmer communities. A 10,000-year-old archaeological site in central Turkey is helping scientists unlock the region's pee-historic past. That's right: the salty residue of ancient urine can reveal how and when humans went from hunter-gatherers to herder-farmers who kept and raised animals in their settlements... In the dry climate of central Turkey, the sodium, chloride and nitrates from all that animal excretion would be trapped in the layers of earth onto which they were originally peed. Excavating those salts, layer by layer, should provide a timeline of animal populations...

For the first time, researchers have performed a version of the famous double-slit experiment with antimatter particles.The double-slit experiment demonstrates one of the fundamental tenets of quantum physics: that pointlike particles are also waves. In the standard version of the experiment, particles travel through a pair of slits in a solid barrier. On a screen on the other side, an interference pattern typical of waves appears. Crests and troughs emerging from each slit reinforce each other or cancel each other out as they overlap, creating alternating bands of high and low particle density on the screen.This kind of experiment has...

Most of today's batteries are made up of rare lithium mined from the mountains of South America. If the world depletes this source, then battery production could stagnate. Sodium is a very cheap and earth-abundant alternative to using lithium-ion batteries that is also known to turn purple and combust if exposed to water—even just water in the air. Worldwide efforts to make sodium-ion batteries just as functional as lithium-ion batteries have long since controlled sodium's tendency to explode, but not yet resolved how to prevent sodium-ions from "getting lost" during the first few times a battery charges and discharges. Now,...

The Obama administration is pressuring the food industry to make foods from breads to sliced turkey less salty, proposing long-awaited sodium guidelines in an effort to prevent thousands of deaths each year from heart disease and stroke. The proposed guidelines released Wednesday are voluntary, so food companies won’t be required to comply. But the idea is to persuade companies and restaurants — many of which have already lowered sodium levels in their products — to take a more consistent approach. […] Some companies have worried that though the limits will be voluntary, the FDA is at heart a regulatory agency,...

Looks like the city is spoiling for a new fight with restaurateurs: A bill being introduced today by Brooklyn city council member Inez Barron would force them to warn customers that foods with too much sugar and carbs are dangerous to people with diabetes. If it’s passed, restaurants would be required to hang a poster created by the Department of Health that spells out the “risks of excessive sugar and other carbohydrate intake for diabetic and pre-diabetic individuals.” Barron says the city has “an obligation” to provide consumers with this information just like it has with calorie counts. …

More than 200 nuclear and biochemical experts from the Chinese military have been sent to the port city of Tianjin after two huge explosions killed at least 50 people. A team from the International Atomic Energy Agency's Beijing environmental emergency response centre has also gone to the area.

Strange but Rich Verses File: What Does Acts 1:4 Mean by Saying That Jesus Was “Eating Salt with Them”? By: Msgr. Charles PopeThere is an unusual verse that occurs in the first chapter of the Acts the Apostles, describing a gathering of Jesus and the Apostles after the resurrection but before the ascension. For the most part, modern translations do not reveal the full oddity of the verse. The verse in question, as rendered by the Revised Standard Version Catholic Edition, is,And while staying with them he charged them not to depart from Jerusalem, but to wait for the promise of the Father (Acts 1:4).However,...

Increased sodium intake was not associated with higher risk of mortality over the course of 10 years in Medicare patients, Andreas P. Kalogeropoulos, MD, MPH, PhD, of Emory University, and colleagues reported in JAMA Internal Medicine. "There's been a lot of controversy recently about the appropriate dietary sodium intake," Scott Hummel, MD, of the University of Michigan, said in an interview. "Low sodium content in the diet might increase the levels of aldosterone and catecholamines and other so-called neurohormones that might contribute to cardiovascular damage."

The new study, which tracked more than 100,000 people from 17 countries over an average of more than three years, found that those who consumed fewer than 3,000 milligrams of sodium a day had a 27% higher risk of death or a serious event such as a heart attack or stroke in that period than those whose intake was estimated at 3,000 to 6,000 milligrams. Risk of death or other major events increased with intake above 6,000 milligrams. Last year, a report from the Institute of Medicine, which advises Congress on health issues, didn't find evidence that cutting sodium intake...