In Raising the World’s I.Q., the Secret’s in the Salt (2006)
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
https://www.givewell.org/international/technical/programs/sa...
They don't consider it as good an investment as anti-malarial work but it's close enough to be worth mentioning which makes salt iodization charities a much, much more efficient use of your money than most charitable causes if you're just trying to minimize human suffering.
(Another good one last time I looked was deworming https://www.givewell.org/international/technical/programs/de... which scored quite highly, but again not as well as anti-malarial mosquito nets).
Malaria nets also score extremely well in their ranking system because those charities can accept a TON of money before diminishing returns start to kick in. Against Malaria has said "we could easily accept >$50 million in donations" where the two Iodization organizations GiveWell tracks have said they could probably only accept $2-5 million without major changes (even though both of them lost their primary funding sources in the past few years and are thus decreasing their programming).
This all doesn't mean GiveWell is wrong in their current recommendations. They are up front about disclosing the problems with their methodology, but you should keep it in mind when choosing which charities to donate to.
Where did Western people get iodine before it was necessary to add it to salt? Has our soil been so depleted that iodine is no longer present in the vegetables grown in it?
This is one of the many little invisible progresses that has steadily made our life expectancy increase all over the 20th century.
Iodine is so soluble that it's quite scarce other than in the ocean. And yep, people who lived inland (and thus didn't eat seafood) in premodern times were often iodine deficient.
Some lived near the sea and had high seafood diets, but most were just iodine deficient, which doesn't stop a population from surviving, though it leads to suboptimal outcomes in a number of dimensions.
There is this wierd pervasive mythology that before modern times people lived in an ideal state (at least in terms of nutrition), so any present deficiency from the ideal must reflect a difference between modern and premodern society. Past conditions were at least minimally adequate for survival and reproduction, or we wouldn't be here, but there's no real basis for assuming that they were in any way ideal.
Since the identification of the widespread deficiency and it's effects which motivated iodization of salt was first in the West among Western people, probably not meaningfully. Unlike sunlight which is highly latitude dependent, iodine availability is much more location dependent, and the high availability places (places with access to fish, approximately—both saltwater and many freshwater locations) are also where pre-civilization human populations tended to be most concentrated.
Let's repeat that because it's important and counterintuitive: Those conditions were ideal for us because our species changed to fit the conditions.
What's happened since is a crazy rollercoaster ride of life conditions changin much faster than evolution has any chance of keeping up with, and premodern society in the sense of preindustrial can in no way be presumed to be ideal.
Hundreds of thousands of years is not a really long time in evolutionary terms, and evolution doesn't necessarily, even given a long time, get out of a good-enough local optimum to “extremely well adapted”.
It's also debatable whether conditions in which humans evolved are really a steady state.
More to the point, humans being ideal for the conditions—what the argument from evolution suggests—is not the same as the conditions being ideal for humans.
I think violence, poverty and disease were the bigger factors.
All I'm claiming is that our digestive system is adapted to what we had to eat where our species evolved.
No, you wouldn't, as a European of any social class, except maybe in the very late middle ages at the boundary of the Renaissance; potatoes were a New World import in the 16th century, which might just still be considered the Middle Ages in some parts of Europe.
Potatoes are a New World crop. Medieval European peasants didn't have them.
It's possible this has some contribution, but it's not the main source.
> It's not inherent in the dairy itself
Yes, it is; in cows (and humans) mother's milk is where young who aren't eating anything else get their iodine.
> otherwise we could just eat the cow's grass to obtain iodine
Well, except for the fact that grass doesn't work well in the human digestive system, and you'd have to eat a lot of it, sure.
It was an important source of protein in centuries past, and was traded all over Europe. It would've also been an effective way for inland residents to get iodine.
In Australia the situation is a lot worse, she said, because our soils are so depleted. No just of Iodine but many other nutrients.
I love to find these tiny pieces of trivia :)
[1] http://www.significadode.org/tener%20poca%20sal%20en%20la%20...
https://cvc.cervantes.es/literatura/clasicos/quijote/edicion...
> Toxicologie : en 2012, l'Autorité européenne de sécurité des aliments (AESA)7 fait remarquer que alors que la plupart des aliments ont un taux de plomb qui a régulièrement diminué, parmi 734 catégories d'aliments consommés en Europe et analysés (145 000 analyses au total), 87 présentent encore des taux de plomb préoccupants. Le sel iodé est l'un de ces 87 aliments, il serait source - pour un consommateur moyen - de 2,4 % des apports alimentaires quotidiens en plomb. Le rapport de l'AESA ne pose pas d'hypothèse sur l'origine de ce contaminant toxique et indésirable, source de saturnisme.
So that is saying that there are some concerns, reported by 'AESA', with iodised salt containing lead.
Couldn't find any original source for that, though, so far (looking here: http://www.efsa.europa.eu/).
>Toxicology: In 2012, the European Food Safety Authority (EFSA) 7 notes that while most foods have lead levels that have steadily decreased, among 734 food categories consumed in Europe and analyzed (145 000 analyzes in total), 87 still have lead levels of concern. Iodized salt is one of these 87 foods, it would be source - for an average consumer - 2.4% of daily intake of lead. The EASA report does not make assumptions about the origin of this toxic and undesirable contaminant, a source of lead poisoning.
Surprised nobody has yet mentioned Mark Kurlansky's truly excellent book Salt. It's a fascinating read, and really clues you in to just how central salt was to human life for most of our history.
```Iodine is good. Therefore adding iodine to something makes something else that is also good.```
Is that right? Why not add iodine to anything other than salt? Iodized pepper, iodized milk, iodized iodine... Why salt?
• Burger King usually uses it
• Subway does not
• McDonald's usually does not
• Taco Bell, Kentucky Fried Chicken, and Panda Express are in the middle.
There's variability from restaurant to restaurant in a given chain because usually minor items like salt, ketchup, etc., are left up to the local franchise owner to buy from a supplier of their choice.
Unrefined sea salt contains small amounts of magnesium and calcium halides and sulfates, traces of algal products, salt-resistant bacteria and sediment particles. The calcium and magnesium salts confer a faintly bitter overtone... Algal products contribute a mildly "fishy" or "sea-air" odour, the latter from organobromine compounds. Sediments, the proportion of which varies with the source, give the salt a dull grey appearance. Since taste and aroma compounds are often detectable by humans in minute concentrations, sea salt may have a more complex flavor than pure sodium chloride when sprinkled on top of food.
It's the people who think thallium is an important nutrient in Himalayan salt that are of concern to me.
Whereas, according to [1], iodized salt has these "chemicals used to keep the salt from absorbing water and caking", which dilute the mineral content per gram: magnesium carbonate, calcium silicate, calcium phosphate, magnesium silicate, and calcium carbonate.
0: https://www.livestrong.com/article/534033-what-are-the-84-mi...
Total crap.
Farmed salt of today is contaminated with anything that is in the sea, including microplastics. If you don't want "chemicals" and want "natural" avoid farmed salt.
How do you propose to remove grains of plastic the size of salt crystals from the salt? And once done is it affordable or commercially viable?
http://pubs.rsc.org/en/content/articlelanding/2017/ay/c6ay02...
253 days ago
223 points
56 comments
However, the iodine is independent of the anti-caking additives. You can have iodized salt which still cakes up when it is humid, but why would you want to?
On top of that, not even your [0] claims that most of those elements are necessary nutrients for humans.
If Himalayan sea salt actually contains detectable quantities of basically all the elements naturally occurring in all creation, that's goddamn fascinating (although I'd probably say "bullshit" just on that point), but I'm not sure why it makes the salt good to eat.
Note: I previously worked on an iodated salt program in West Africa for the World Food Programme.
"How do you get people to ____" is a fundamental question in life with many approaches to answering it, ie marketing, public relations, missionary studies, theater, etc.
From what I pointed out below, this salt processing seems to have underappreciated trade offs. But most importantly, the overarching picture of nutrient availability, not just for iodine, seems to have a bigger challenge at hand worth solving than simply using salt as a vehicle for one - which spirulina would help with in terms of protein and mercury / biotoxin removal, for example.
The point is that you don't go looking for a new thing for people to consume to get them the nutrients they need, you fortify what they already eat.
And, yes, no shit. How to get other people to do something is a fundamental question in life and it just so happens that in life, public health is about getting people to do stuff that's good for their and society's health.
Nope, you could justify very specific pragmatic approaches, just like the parent did.
And, sure, there may have been some other equally good alternatives, but analysis paralysis helps no one. So, salt.
Depending on people deciding to eat healthy is a surefire way to fail to meet public health goals.
If you're running some sort of anti-malnutrition campaign that involves local cultivation of spiritual then sure, why not add iodine to it? (Assuming that this is technically feasible. Don't know whether it is or not.) But if you are trying to solve the specific problem of iodine deficiency, then I'm not sure why you would start with "first, grow a bunch of spirulina..."
Adding a small bag of sodium iodate to a big bag of sodium chloride and mixing requires no skill or special equipment and any idiot, or shall I say cretin, can do it. Whereas running a bioreactor and somehow convince people of eating the gunk that comes out of it is far more complicated and expensive.
Edit: and you'd still have to add iodine to said bioreactor, you might as well add it directly to the salt.
People get away with iodizing salt because the recommended dose is so small, so it can be almost undetectable. If you started adding iron and zinc to salt, it would start tasting like a multivitamin.
1. Kosher salt has larger granules which are easier to measure between your fingers.
2. Kosher salt is very different from table salt by volume so they're not directly interchangeable
3. Kosher salt has acquired a certain reputation like extra virgin olive oil so it's used even when not necessary
Unless you're fermenting or canning, iodine makes no difference to food.
It honestly hadn’t occurred to me that iodine could inhibit fermentation, and I had just recently purchased a box of iodized salt for the first time in years because of the reasons discussed in this thread. But lo, the fermentation blogs all seem to confirm this. I hope the salsa I have fermenting in my cupboard isn’t ruined.
It was also wildly successful because at the time, salt was turning from an expensive good of varying quality produced by thousands of companies to an extremely cheap good of uniform quality produced by a near monopoly in the United States. Public health advocates were able to get just a couple of companies on board and iodize basically all the salt, which then reached basically all the people, basically solving the problem completely overnight.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3509517/#__sec6...
(There are people that don't drink milk, there are people that don't like pepper, the dosing is so small that distributing it separately would be less successful, etc)
http://www.rff.org/blog/2014/should-we-all-take-bit-lithium
You can buy low-dose lithium orotate supplements very inexpensively in the US however, if you want to do an n=1 experiment.
Similarly, people going for trendy sea salt are likely to be missing the recommended iodine.
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/07/21/well/eat/should-we-be-buy...
User kosher salt.
Consider getting your vitamin D levels checked every once in awhile; that's the one you might be low on.
Iodine intake by Americans has dropped considerably over the past few decades. So much so that many pregnant women are borderline deficient or actually deficient. There have been several recent, high-quality studies in the U.S. and U.K. showing that pregnant women especially should be taking additional iodine supplements, and that supplementation beyond table salt could result in measurable increases in average IQ even in the U.S. and U.K.
When my wife was pregnant three years ago none of the nutritional supplements I examined (e.g. USP certified products like Nature Made) contained iodine. Partly because of the research and partly because she just doesn't like to cook with much salt, I searched high-and-low for a supplement. The research recommended 80-100 micrograms (mcg). The only supplement I found with such a small amount was a Whole Foods brand product, which I bought with some apprehension given the lack of certified quality control. Too much iodine can have similar deleterious effects as too little iodine, as it likewise screws with thyroid function.
When my wife was pregnant the second time around I bought another bottle of iodine supplements, as well as the exact same Nature Made prenatal vitamins. It wasn't until a few months later did I actually read the list of ingredients on the Nature Made bottle to discover that, sometime in the intervening two years, they began adding iodine! D'oh! So of course she stopped taking the separate iodine supplements.
Presuming the Whole Foods-brand pills were truly in the 100-microgram range, then all was good. The supposed safe upper limit of iodine intake (for pregnant and non-pregnant adults) as recommended by American doctors is actually far below the average intake for many Japanese populations, for whom no known bad effects are known. That said, most of the iodine supplements on the market I saw just had ridiculous and possibly dangerous amounts of iodine. It's a good development that Nature Made (and presumably other reputable prenatal supplements) have begun adding iodine.
For the record, my son turned out to be the smartest kid in the whole, wide world. ;)
Having a high-quality, upper middle-class diet isn't a simple answer. For example, cruciferous vegetables like broccoli inhibit the uptake and use dietary of iodine. Whatever the causes of the recent regression in wealthy societies, the fact of the matter is that the more modern studies 1) actually measured iodine levels, 2) measured outcomes, and 3) used large, randomized controlled studies. It's a good thing prenatal manufacturers are adding iodine, because even smart people (or perhaps _especially_ smart people) are stubborn and think they know better.
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14140086 (my previous comment about this passenger)
I looked into the matter a little bit. The Thai king had instituted an iodized salt program. Public relations campaigns helped the Thai people appreciate all the different roles of iodine. Iodine is a good antiseptic (it shreds most single-celled organisms by combining with a protein that's not on the cell membranes of multi-celled organisms, iirc), but my friend's strategy to 'disinfect' her vegetables with slightly-salted water was probably an exercise in futility, even if her salt had iodine...
> I just looked it up and found out that Morton Kosher salt is not iodized, which is what I've been using for a few years now.
I remember some research that found Thai women of reproductive age had much better iodine levels if they ate seafood, than if they got their iodine from salt.
Additionally, foods that are grown near the ocean [2] have much better iodine levels than foods grown in regions where almost all the iodine has washed out of the soil (Michigan, etc). Ocean spray 'mists' iodine back onto the land, which increases the iodine content of the food grown thereon.
[2] http://iodinehistory.blogspot.com/2015/02/an-iodine-road-tri...
There's another interesting post on this blog about old fear-mongering about "too much iodine", because patient's thyroids weren't taking up the radioactive iodine that doctors were giving them for 'diagnostic' purposes: http://iodinehistory.blogspot.com/2015/02/i-was-right.html Too much iodine seems to suppresses the thyroid activity, so it is a concern. But this is mostly a problem for people who use supplements. I think one should consume 'enough' iodine to fully saturate their thyroid... A little more than it takes to prevent goitre [3] (when the thyroid swells to try to increase the amount of iodine it pulls out of the blood), but not too much...
The condition is called "Hyponatremia": too low levels of sodium in blood (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyponatremia).
I make sure now to drink less water and add a bit more of salt to my food.
https://www.jti.co.jp/Culture/museum_e/collection/salt/index...
By the way I could never understand why do people add salt to everything, I personally don't like it much. Also, isn't it supposed cause cardiovascular health issues?
Because people tend to use salt. You can get iodine other ways, sure.
> Wy not just take iodine supplement
"Just"? For most people, adding a supplement is more of a change than changing which salt they buy (and in much of the world, iodized salt is already the most visible, anyhow.)
> Or iodize some other foods perhaps?
Iodizing salt is easy, and has nesr-universal reach. There aren't many alternatives that share those features.
Read about Iodine and apoptosis. Iodine and heart disease. Iodine and cancer. It seems to help with a lot of things. Why? Because it's good for the mitochondria among other things.
BTW I have started taking 1125 mg (300% RDA) of magnesium a day about a month ago (still taking) and it has changed my life instantly: almost cured chronic fatigue, sleep disorders and a heart condition I have had since childhood (but as soon as I stop taking this much and try lower doses it comes back).
[Salt: Are you getting Enough?] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=amJ-ev8Ial8
This means, provided salt is actually necessary for health, I am certainly not getting enough.
At the same time I find my heart (which has always been quirky, since my very childhood) working notably better if I supplement Potassium Chloride (which tastes almost exactly the same as Sodium Chloride to me, I can hardly tell any difference in taste even if I compare pharmaceutical grade samples).
So the question is: do I really need to start eating common salt (sodium chloride) or can I just supplement potassium chloride on regular basis? Does the body really need sodium or is potassium a reasonable replacement (provided I drink a good amount of water every day too)?
whether or not potassium supplement usually lowers the amount of sodium the body needs to function healthily
Simple as this.
You would understand the fact you have to rely on yourself, science and peers' experience and knowledge more than on doctors if you were an immigrant grown up in a "2.5th world" country living in a "2nd world" one very-very low on money rather than a middle-class citizen of the USA ;-) To make it easier to understand I can say I rarely meet the same doctor more than twice, they are rarely brilliant or motivated and they use to make mutually-opposite claims on life-critical matters.
Try glycine - 1 gram minimum per day. You may be able to find it as Magnesium Glycinate sold strictly as a Mg supplement. The thing is it contains 6-7 time more Glycine that Mg. so if you take 200mg of Magnesium in this form you'll get about 1.3 grams of glycine. It's a neurotransmitter and helps sleep among other things.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SAT#History
https://www.erikthered.com/tutor/historical-average-SAT-scor...
https://www.infoplease.com/us/higher-education/average-sat-s...
Flynn effect is a result of misunderstanding of IQ scale: "The basic misunderstanding is assuming that intelligence test scores are units of measurement like inches or liters or grams. They are not. Inches, liters and grams are ratio scales where zero means zero and 100 units are twice 50 units. Intelligence test scores estimate a construct using interval scales and have meaning only relative to other people of the same age and sex. People with high scores generally do better on a broad range of mental ability tests, but someone with an IQ score of 130 is not 30% smarter then someone with an IQ score of 100. A score of 130 puts the person in the highest 2% of the population whereas a score of 100 is at the 50th percentile. A change from an IQ score from 100 to 103 is not the same as a change from 133 to 136. This makes simple interpretation of intelligence test score changes impossible." Source: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3950413/
Also worth reading:
http://www.iapsych.com/iqmr/fe/LinkedDocuments/rodgers1999.p...
https://newrepublic.com/article/115787/rising-iq-scores-dont...
https://www.cato-unbound.org/2007/11/08/linda-s-gottfredson/...
How is it minorities of extremists keep holding back progress in health, education and transportation around the world?
I have a serious medical condition. If they wanted to make this mandatory, I would need to campaign against it in order to protect my health and life. It bothers me to see the desire for options tarred as if that desire is mere prejudice and cannot have legitimate concerns behind it.
> Even moderate deficiency, especially in pregnant women and infants, lowers intelligence by 10 to 15 I.Q. points, shaving incalculable potential off a nation’s development.
> All of them — Kazakhstan, Turkmenistan, Tajikistan, Uzbekistan, Kyrghzstan — saw their economies break down with the collapse of the Soviet Union.
Yes, Kazakhstan is a developing country according to the IMF and those who have seen Borat. Using it as an example of the public health success going on in Central Asia is disingenuous however because Kazakhstan is remarkably wealthy compared to its neighbors[0]. It's GDP PPP per capita at $25,263 is only a little behind the digital darling Estonia's at $29,364. Kazakhstan's neighbors like Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan have theirs at $3,551 and $2,980 respectively.
A lay western reader not knowing is particularities of Central Asia could easily make assumptions and walk away from this article with erroneous ideas. The article, in my reading and without the context, suggests a iodine->health->wealth causality. In Kazakhstan's case oil->wealth->health would be more apt.
[0] https://www.google.com/publicdata/explore?ds=d5bncppjof8f9_&...
If you go by PPP, you'll be falsely led to believe Iraq is on par with Iran and just a little behind Turkey. Iraq is a barely functioning, destroyed nation, in the midst of a full rebuild.
According to PPP, in 2016 Puerto Rico was just barely behind Japan. New Zealand is below Puerto Rico.
According to PPP, Equatorial Guinea is approximately on par with Finland, France, Canada, Japan, UK, Belgium.
Oman and Saudi Arabia are above Belgium. Saudi is above the Netherlands and Sweden. Is PPP aware of the actual living conditions in Saudi Arabia at the median? What the median income is in Saudi Arabia? Nope.
Like I said, it's laughable.
PPP purports to enable a better comparison stick. It fails entirely in all cases. Belgium & Denmark are below Saudi? The only proper response to that is: bullshit.
PPP is not only universally wildly inaccurate, it leaves out dozens of critical economic factors that are derived from objective economic capability rather than what the price of a hamburger is from one nation to the next.
PPP is a subjective measurement, and a particularly bad one. Who is on the ground doing the perfectly objective comparisons in every nation simultaneously, living there for a decade to really get a sense of things across the whole economic landscape? Nobody. PPP leads to mediocre guess-work, which gets you to New Zealand being below Puerto Rico.
What is your military capable of defense wise? Try basing that on subjective economic relativism, see how it works out for you in a war.
What kind of medical technology can your nation afford? What's the level of medical technology that your people have access to at the median? That collapses under PPP, because the best and latest medical equipment is expensive.
Can you buy a BMW or a $4,000 poorly made car that is guaranteed to fall apart and have far more problems than eg a Lexus? While simultaneously, who would confuse the standard of living impact of driving an extraordinarily mediocre $4,000 vehicle vs a Mercedes or BMW?
If your GDP per capita (non-PPP) is eg $35,000, then I can stack you right up against Japan or New Zealand and immediately have a good idea of what your national income potential is far more often than not, and I can tell a lot more about your nation's real capabilities at the median.
The medtech & car examples are representative concepts, they apply to pretty much everything else that defines standard of living. PPP is a dumb (its simplistic nature ignores almost everything that's actually important to the standard of living of actual humans) economic concept in the best of cases; in most cases, it's entirely worthless.
Is it a really great idea to have an accurate comparison of the standard of living and economic capabilities (both have a high correlation to non-PPP GDP), on a relative basis, between nations? Yes! Ten times over, yes. Do the annually published PPP numbers actually do anything like that? No, not even close. PPP is a nice idea, that's all it is unless you want to expend extraordinary sums of money and labor to be on the ground, with extremely objective and well trained experts doing the comparisons in an extremely scientific manner (rather than a clown at the IMF throwing darts based on hamburger prices).
What's a better measure? This is where the laziness of common PPP numbers comes into play. The better measure is to get into the mud and get really dirty, in volumes of accurate data, tracking, observation, experience. In reality we don't even have mediocre access to accurate, detailed economic data for the majority of the 195 nations. On that single fact, PPP collapses as it is.
How accurate is the economic data that we have for eg Brazil (207 million people), and how intricate can we get while maintaining that accuracy? In this case, Brazil is reasonably representative of the global median. We have low quality vague guesses at best. Below Brazil, it just gets that much worse.
It's extremeley difficult and expensive to do a nation to nation comparison which is then adjusted subjectively to measure relative condition. So many things would inherently come into play that can't be easily measured. It would require immense on the ground effort and measurement, on a constant basis, along with ideally at least semi-accurate wider economic figures from the national/regional/local government structures inside a given nation (only a few dozen nations have anything like that).
US: $57.6k Estonia: $17.6k China: $8.1k Khazakhstan: $7.5k Kyrgystan: $1.1k Tajikistan: $0.8k
GP's argument stands with the straight GDP/capita, except for the comparison to Estonia, which was a side remark anyway.
[1] https://www.google.com/publicdata/explore?ds=d5bncppjof8f9_&...
How much better off is your outlook if you're currently 40 years old and expected to live to 78 instead of 76. Not much. If you could time travel you'd arrange that the resources that you would have devoted to extending your life those last two years be instead devoted to more time with your children while they were young, more time at the beach, more time preparing food and hanging out with family or having sex.
And we can talk about $4000 poorly made cars and laugh, but the difference between a $12k Toyota and a $60k BMW is marginal or even negative if you prioritize things like reliability or maintenance. They are better only if you are richer and can afford the maintenance.
The life of someone in Costa Rica is, on average, worse than someone in Canada, but not by the 4x difference in PPP adjusted GDP, and certainly not by the 5x+ difference in raw GDP numbers.
But you're right, I wouldn't use PPP to build a military. Raw numbers work better there, so you get both an upvote and a generally dissenting comment.
The median income in Kazhakstan is a few hundred dollars per month. A median person in Kazakhstan couldn't pay for a $12,000 Toyota in a decade.
There is an extremely large list of standard of living concepts that come into play, that collapse under PPP and are entirely ignored, which is what I was alluding to in saying that my examples were represenative concepts.
Here's another one: can you afford to travel? A person making $300 per month in Kazakhstan, do they have the same global travel capabilities of someone making $1,100 per month in Estonia? No they do not.
Healthcare, though, is interesting in Switzerland for other reasons. Switzerland is a generally wealthy country that generally spends a lot on health care in a rather private manner, similar to the US in many ways. But the US system is a mess of corruption, bloated government and corporate programs, and inefficiencies. Switzerland is what a sensible free-market attempt to remake the US insurance markets might look like, instead of the "healthy people just shouldn't have to buy insurance" nonsense dogma of the current American right.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Healthcare_in_Switzerland
"The whole healthcare system is geared toward the general goals of keeping the system competitive across cantonal lines, promoting general public health and reducing costs while encouraging individual responsibility."
They seem to get the same best parts of the US system (short wait times (if you choose the right places here), up-to-date treatment options, flexibility of making your own financial priority choices around different procedures, without a bunch of our downsides.
I actually expect the answer to be a resounding "yes", especially for people away from coasts. Switzerland doesn't even have coasts and it's pleasant to all its citizens!
I also think it has much smaller occurrence of people on welfare selling and buying coke, drive-by shootings, rusty factories and young-earth theorists in schools. Much much smaller occurrence. Of all that kinds of stuff.
I mean, no. That fancy restaurant is really "almost twice" as good as your McDrive. The latter does have its uses, but it's laughable to compare. It's Swiss for god's sake.
smaller occurrence of people
on welfare selling and buying
coke, drive-by shootings, rusty
factories and young-earth
theorists in schools
https://www.consumerreports.org/car-reliability-owner-satisf...
It appears that Turkmenistan is growing at the same rate according to your Charts, does not have the GDP of Kazakhstan and yet had a higher Iodized Salt Intake. It started at 75% Iodized Salt Consumption where as Kazakhstan started at 29% circa 2000. This is the Health Success they are referring to. Even though Kazakhstan was wealthier and flush with money, their Ionized Salt intake was lower than their poorer neighbors.
https://knoema.com/WBWDIGDF2017Sep/world-development-indicat...
Median income (though income isn't exactly GDP) often differs heavily from mean income. There's purchasing power parity too, but I don't know how much it would impact this stuff with salt.
Suggest you google "average" and "median".
I'm pretty sure both claims are false.
[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Renaming_of_Turkmen_months_a...
Also, can you confirm that clocks must bear his likeness? I've seen a purported Turkmen deny this claim.
There is a common confusion between salt (sodium chloride) and sodium, many falsely believing salt is not used only for taste but it's essential for health.
Sodium is a vital element that is found in almost all plants and animals and there is no need for an extra sodium intake because our food has plenty.
Sodium and potassium balance in the body is essential for cell physiology and our health
No.
>there is no need for an extra sodium intake because our food has plenty
Depends on the food and other environmental factors. The reason why a preference for salt evolved in the first place was because we didn't get enough salt in our food, especially warm climates, which is incidentally where we started out. Same reason why herbivores frequent salt licks, their normal diets don't contain enough sodium or other minerals.
What you said would have been true if we were carnivores.