John Tierney: Salt Good or Bad? Nobody Knows (Yet) | Hacker News Reader

John Tierney: Salt Good or Bad? Nobody Knows (Yet)

nytimes.com

24 pointscwan26 comments

> The harder the experts try to save Americans, the fatter we get. We followed their admirable advice to quit smoking, and by some estimates we gained 15 pounds apiece afterward. The extra weight was certainly a worthwhile trade-off for longer life and better health, but with success came a new challenge.

Huh? I think that that's a rather poor example of "oh noes! public health officials have no idea what they are doing!"

Tierney can be counted on to reflexively rubbish any topic. He's sometimes thought-provoking when I know something about the subject matter, and think it good, because he will attempt to convince me that I'm wrong and it's terrible (most notable example: recycling). But with background knowledge he's rarely convincing, and without background knowledge, it's entirely possible to come away knowing less. On balance, I avoid him.

Please tell me I'm not the only one that thought this would be about password salting and not table salt.

Well, I was hopeful before opening the thread.

Full disclosure, I was a chemist at a famous salt company many years back. The obsession with salt came following a study that showed a reduction in blood pressure in hypertensive patients who went on a incredibly strict reduced salt diet.

You can't infer from the study that non-hypertensive people have anything to gain from restricting their salt intake, or that hypertensive people would benefit from anything but a draconian salt reduction diet.

If you want to pay attention to salt in your diet, I would recommend getting more potassium, preferably from fresh vegetables.

My father had major health issues after following a reduced salt diet as suggested by doctors due to his hypertension problem as his sodium fell below the usual levels.

Living in the UK what I appreciate most of all is the amount of information now available on food packaging. You can give me all the advice in the world, but without that information on the pack it means very little.

The recommended daily limit for salt is 6 grams as far as I know. It's quite difficult to stay within that limit if you eat what is seen as a healthy diet. Breakfast cereals can have a surprisingly high salt content. Two slices of bread instantly take a gram of salt out of your allowance. Like soup? Most cans contain 2-3 grams of salt. Packaged meals can be packed full of salt, especially curry.

The only way to be healthy is a balanced and varied diet in my opinion. Keep your saturated fat levels down (> 20g a day), eat fruit and veg regularly, and at least keep an eye on your salt. And of course, combine it with some regular exercise.

Immediately after reading an article that points out that we don't know what salt intake does, in a fully scientific sense of "don't know", you feel empowered to make a recommendation about what salt intake I should have? "Don't know" does not mean "Well, play it safe and cut it down", it means don't know. Cutting down salt can have an adverse effect too; it is an essential nutrient you are recommending we "keep an eye on" after all!

I find myself wondering how many more times we're going to read things like "Before changing public policy, Dr. Alderman and Dr. McCarron suggest trying something new: a rigorous test of the low-salt diet in a randomized clinical trial. That proposal is rejected by the salt reformers as too time-consuming and expensive. But when you contemplate the potential costs of another public health debacle like the anti-fat campaign, a clinical trial can start to look cheap." (Emphasis mine.) No, your judgment is not so awesome we can just bypass the scientific process, for any value of "your judgment".

Might I also add that you still seem to be stuck on the "public health debacle like the anti-fat campaign"; I find the scientific evidence against saturated fat to be wanting. As that paragraph implies, ultimately they did the same thing you're advocating here for salt: They skipped over science because we had to act now!!! and it was OK to substitute their judgment for science. We'll be another decade or two minimum flushing out the wrong idea that fat is bad for you, decades in which those wrong ideas will cost hundreds of millions more their lives and health. (Excluding transfats, which I think the evidence is clear that they are.) The stakes on this stuff are high, you'd better be damned sure you're right before you make public health pronouncements.

Amen to that.

The stakes on this stuff are high, you'd better be damned sure you're right before you make public health pronouncements.

Unfortunately, this seems to be the standard process when government steps in. Whether the topic is an economic bailout or taking action on AGW, it seems to be driven more by the desired means than a well-understood model of how to get to the ends.

It was opinion. They don't know with concrete scietific evidence how much salt is good or bad for you. I'd suggest that too much of most things is bad for you therefore I choose to have everything in moderation and follow guidelines given out by the Food Standards Agency (http://www.eatwell.gov.uk/healthydiet/fss/salt/). Whether you follow that advice or not is up to the individual. Am I overweight? No, Is my blood pressure high? No. Is this due to controlling my salt and fat intake? I have no idea. But it works for me.

If it's not due to controlling your salt and fat intake, then it doesn't work for you, it's just correlated with some behaviour which does.

The way to eat healthy is to eat food, which is to say, don't eat a lot of processed stuff that resembles food. There's no salt, high fructose corn syrup, refined carbs, etc. in pretty much all whole foods.

I really think that sort of misses the point. There are lots of "whole foods" that eaten in the wrong quantities are unhealthy. Like the article suggests I think the human body is pretty good at regulating what it needs. The key is moderation and diversity. Pay attention when your body tells you it's craving something. And don't keep eating when your full. This works whether your eating "whole" foods or "processed" foods.

No salt in whole foods? That's hardly true. Perhaps if you consider plants to be the only whole foods, I suppose. Meat of all kinds has plenty of natural salt content.

Breakfast cereals, bread, tinned soup, package meals, these are hardly "what is seen as a good diet".

And what makes you recommend a varied diet for health anyway? How many creatures on Earth eat anything other than a limited and pretty monotonous diet?

I know of at least one: Homo Sapiens Sapiens. But really, any one of the thousands of omnivorous and scavenging species fits the bill nicely.

Keep your saturated fat levels down (> 20g a day)

You used the bracket wrong. Correct: "fat levels down (< 20g a day)"

Anyone who still has any shred of respect for these "public health experts", who by all appearances are little more than irrational single-interest zealots intent on pushing through their pet theory regardless of evidence, should seek out and read The Diet Delusion by Gary Taubes. It is an (IMO) authoritative excoriation of the kinds of processes and personalities behind these "recommendations" and will really open your eyes.

The same (excellent) book has a different title in the US: "Good Calories, Bad Calories: Fats, Carbs, and the Controversial Science of Diet and Health", by Gary Taubes (Paperback - Sept. 23, 2008).

And it explains this quite well:

The harder the experts try to save Americans, the fatter we get.

Obviously, since the dogma is "low fat", and "low fat" means more carbs, and carbs generally make us fatter, the explanation for this becomes blindingly obvious.

Rule of thumb: Fat = 9calories/gram Carb = 4calories/gram

The difference might be that you feel full quicker with fat - but in that case carbs don't make you fat, eating more makes you fat.

I just remember those numbers from a class, but here's reference. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fat http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carbohydrate

Is "low fat" the dogma?

I always thought that was just the general public getting confused about "fat" (the essential part of your diet), "fat" (the vital organ of your body) and "fat" (what you are if you are heavier, larger or just a different shape than current fashion dictates). Do other languages use the same word for these three concepts?

Yes I see hundreds of things advertised, mainly to women, as "low fat" which are just filled full of sugar to make them appetising, but any medical expert, even ones on TV, seem to emphasise good fats vs bad fats and calorie consumption. They are more likely to warn against those "low fat" foods than encourage them.

I have less respect for anyone who demonizes, based on nothing more than some rhetoric, an entire informal and nebulous group of people.

1. I am not demonising, I am criticising. There is a fundamental difference.

2. It is based on much more than "rhetoric".

3. The group being criticised is not "informal and nebulous". I was, of course, speaking of the small, well-defined group of people who, against all evidence to the contrary and placing haste and ideology firmly above caution and even-handedness, championed and rammed through the current establishment consensus.

So that's 0 for 3.

1. Calling people "irrational single-interest zealots" hardly constitutes critical thought.

2. If not rhetoric, then what do you base your "criticism" upon? What evidence demonstrates to the rest of us that "they" are irrational single-interest zealots? (I'm particularly curious to see what kind of evidence proves any particular human irrational or zealous)

3. Who, exactly, are "they"?

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