Anti-Salt Narrative Needs a Shakeup | Hacker News Reader

Anti-Salt Narrative Needs a Shakeup

bloomberg.com

88 pointspetethomas100 comments

As someone who loves salt, I will gladly add this to my collection in the game of Cherry Pick Evidence For Your Preferred Nutrition.

You'd think that science would make things here a little more conclusive by now...

One of the little talked-about but very prevalent problems in research is the endless number of lobbyists behind “scientific” findings and the products they promote.

Why isn’t research more decentralized?

Because most people can't understand research or how it's done, so there is not enough pressure to change anything. I found the books by Ben Goldacre to be enlightening. He has a ted talk as well I believe.

Who would do that decentralized research? Why would they do that?

The real question is why do governments watch private interests take over public research institutions and not only do nothing to preserve the lack of bias, but even go out of their way to help the process? (And yes, the answer is not secret.)

Do you really think government research absent private bias is free from bias?

How government money gets spent is a very political process, and naturally that puts a lot of pressure on research organizations to produce the politically correct result.

Those lobbyists and the scientists they fund are decentralized. Decentralization isn't guaranteed to improve anything, usually it only adds overhead.

Decentralized consensus works in Bitcoin (a minority can never fool the majority) because verifying work is much easier than doing the work. Decentralized consensus doesn't work very well in research, because verifying work is even harder. If you repeat someone's experiment and get different results, maybe you just didn't do it correctly? So you need multiple replication attempts before you can be sure to have falsified it, and in that time someone else has already published the next bogus study.

I have arguments with my girlfriend about this. She says she's concerned for my well-being because I am skeptical of most dietary recommendations. I have to convince her that detox shakes are a scam perpetrated by snake-oil salesmen trying to make a buck off people who don't know any better. I'm not sure how to defend the latter without conceding to the former.

>You'd think that science would make things here a little more conclusive by now...

One of the troubles is human bodies are quite complex and able to thrive on a wide variety of diets so any simple looking at the correlation of factor A and result B is likely to be shaky due to all the other stuff that happens. One example I found amusing is the correlation between alcohol intake and health. My recollection is the UK government did some study to do health recommendations on how much to drink but found the healthiest drank something like 4 pints a day so thought we can't say that and recommended max 2 pints or some such but the thing is cause and effect are basically the wrong way around - people drink till they feel ill and the healthy can drink more. There's a lot like that.

My rule of thumb is to ignore the 'science' stuff unless they can quantify how many years the bad habit takes off your life. Salt was never like that. The big ones are smoking - 10 years or so, obesity - of the order of 10, air pollution - of the order of 2 years.

There is just such a lack of good, well-done dietary research that it's almost impossible to know what advice is true, what advice is probably true and what advice is just made up. Obviously these studies are extremely difficult to do well, and hence why they haven't been done. But the cost to society is much, much greater than the cost of these studies.

I remember reading that it's because they're impossible to do: the only option would be to lock people up in a room and only feed them exactly the same food on a schedule for months.

There were some interesting observations about salt with people who did a 135-day simulation of life on the Mir space station. https://www.nytimes.com/2017/05/08/health/salt-health-effect...

There is also the confounding factor of gut microbiome (people who had more fiber continuously IIRC having a more diverse/probably better for health, microbiome) influencing results of diet or vice versa.

Haven't they done nutrition studies in the military and in prisons because of the level of control over food intake?

Maybe, but how biased is the population? People in the army do a lot more physical exercise than most, people in jail have a different way of living than the rest of the population because of their circumstances.

Isn't that what control groups are for? Then you could rule out exercise or jail conditions as a factor.

There are also a ton of "studies" funded by various industry groups. In a lot of cases you don't even have to prove that your product is healthy, you just have to cast doubt on any previous research that says it isn't. Sow a bit of confusion and people just throw up their hands and eat what they want.

It's a tactic the tobacco industry used to fend off attacks for decades.

There is a way to know: self-experimentation. I do realize you mean knowledge as a society. But I'm happy there's at least a way to resist the generalized brainwashing. And maybe if more people tried by themselves, it would be more difficult to get away with the current bs.

A few advantages are that you find out what's good for you in particular, not every body works the same, that you don't get confused with partial results that get canceled and, my fav, that you learn what works in practice: it's useless to know that you can lose fat with a diet you are unable to follow.

You've probably realized that my experience is about losing weight and general wellness, but that's just the problem with nutrition for most people.

Even this is hard to do conclusively, since your body is changing as you go through life (i.e. get older). You can certainly figure out what works for you at any given phase, but I think it's hard to generalize from that: certainly you couldn't start telling other people what is good based on your own experience (although some do try).

Acknowledging the problems with formal studies, one advantage they have is the ability to get lots of similar input and look at medians, distributions, etc.

This is probably the best way to go at the moment. There are some general health advice that works for all humans (your gums are bleeding during a 6 month sea voyage. Eat some vitamin C). And things we were told were true but now are likely not true (eating fat makes you fat). Each personal genome and life history will have its own quirks in how it interacts with diet, exercise, sleep, etc. Maybe with individual DNA sequencing we might get some more personal insight, but the best thing at the moment might be try out some food and health ideas your ancestors used before the modern era (1900?) industrial food and marketing complex got rolling.

Given the number of variables that can be adjusted, the extent to which they can be adjusted, and the time it takes to see results, self-experimentation is barely viable for even trivial short-term goals. How many chances does one have to try a different set of inputs for 3 months apiece?

Even for short-term goals anything non-measurable is highly prone to confirmation bias - e.g.: "I feel more energetic on this keto diet!" because I expected to feel more energetic on this keto diet and these Instagram accounts I follow keep reinforcing that this is what I should expect. Additionally there is the issue that the human body is a complex system where things that seem good in the short term can be quite bad in the long term - e.g.: "These 6 cigarettes a day are really helping with the over-eating I'd been struggling with!".

For many of us who care to research nutrition more than superficially the goals tend to be more long-term ones like not developing Alzheimer's, cancers, atherosclerosis, organ failures, etc., all in support of staying healthy & active for as long as possible. Those goals don't lend themselves to a hill-climbing optimization via self-experimentation.

How many chances does one have to try a different set of inputs for 3 months apiece?

No need to spend three months. The body raise all kind of signals in reaction to food, almost instantly.

Even for short-term goals anything non-measurable is highly prone to confirmation bias

Are bathroom scales also affected? Are keto test sticks too?

For many of us who care to research nutrition more than superficially the goals tend to be more long-term ones like not developing Alzheimer's, cancers, atherosclerosis, organ failures, etc.

Don't worry. Considering the level of aggressiveness industry has shown against low carbs diets, if any of those scares had any minimum basis, we would know by now.

Look, this post is no longer in front page, so it's doubtful anyone except us is reading it. I take for granted that you genuinely think what you say and hope you give me the same benefit of doubt. I haven't done keto in like twenty years? (not sure) but I can't tell you this: it works. Last time I did it, I spent two years in low carb with no adverse effects whatsoever. I ran every other day, was in a very good shape.

I can't help chuckling when I read hit pieces like what Wikipedia has to say:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atkins_diet

If you read carefully you'll see that they suggest that it doesn't work at all and that it's just placebo, "nutritional nonsense", water losing or simply caloric reduction due to unpalatable plan. That's idiotic, as you can see if you go to other more technical article:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ketosis

Surprise! It seems that there is actually a non-contentious, perfectly known mechanism to burn fatty acids induced by fasting or reducing carbs intake.

Try to reconcile that with: The Atkins diet is promoted with questionable claims that carbohydrate restriction is the "key" to weight loss. Questionable my ass. That's what the diet is and it works. If you don't like the kind or food you need to eat to follow the diet, it's OK and it's really the reason most people quit.

If you're worried about unknown long term risks, choose your poison: do you think it's safer to be fat? can you achieve the same results as easily with other diets? Power to you. But don't believe the army of liars that's been spreading FUD consistently over the years.

You seem quite defensive about keto and missed most of the point of my post. I wasn't writing about keto specifically, I just needed a few examples and that was one that came to mind at the time. You can sub in "eating nothing but sauerkraut and grapefruit" or anything else that springs to kind. My post was about self-experimentation in general. The "scares" you refer to, I did not claim were a result of a low carb diet - they were examples of the types of long-term issues that some of us would like to avoid. Unfortunately the impact of diet & lifestyle on those can be decades in the making - not to mention that some, like Alzheimer's, don't allow for do-overs - which makes it rather hard for an individual to employ self-experimentation to avoid them. The fact is that an individual won't be able to determine if consuming more or less of vitamin X or mineral Y will increase or decrease their probability of developing condition Z via self-experimentation for most of the scary conditions, let alone if vitamin X needs to be present in combination with compound Z, etc.

> choose your poison: do you think it's safer to be fat?

This is a false dichotomy. The choice is not keto or obesity. And losing/maintaining weight is one of the short-term & measurable goals I was alluding to. It's trivially achievable in a fairly short time with various approaches and keto is certainly one of them. Many of the others require less self-discipline than keto however, and a number of those have orders of magnitude more man-years of aggregated long-duration testing behind them.

> But don't believe the army of liars that's been spreading FUD consistently over the years.

That's good advice, but how do I identify which one is the army of liars and which one is the army of truth? :)

How body work is a complex subject indeed. But if you remember, this all began as a response to joshgel complaining that it's impossible to tell good advice from bad one.

I'm not proposing that every person invents own diet, just to use common sense if a diet works for you and another doesn't.

As to how to identify who's lying, how about people telling lies? When Atkins wrote the book in the seventies, his critics told that his diet didn't work and provoked a series of terrible side effects, none of what was true.

The fact was that thousands of people were trying the diet and it worked and it didn't make them sick. So where did the criticism come from? You can tell me that there are unknown risks and ask for caution. But if someone is saying in no uncertain terms what they said in the face of evidence, that's a strong indication that they have no interest in truth.

Of course, diet is not the only matter in what some powerful entities try to manipulate the public, it happens in a variety of matters where science, politics and private interests meet. The first principle here is follow the money.

You first make the claim that your chosen diet must be safe because if it weren't safe there would be evidence to the contrary. Then you dismiss those people who try to bring forward evidence to the contrary as liars. You can't have it both ways.

It's funny that you should bring up Atkins and then suggest "following the money"... Atkins Nutritionals sued some of the people that you are labelling as liars, and lost all of their lawsuits. If there's one thing I've learned from my two decades living in America it's that when a corporation loses a lawsuit to individuals here, the individuals are probably barking up the right tree.

Have you considered the possibility that what you are terming "liars" is just "people that disagree with my strongly-held belief"?

But isn't there, atleast for Americans, the FDA, who is a final authority on food product safety; So till the time that FDA is convinced to make an advice, there is no credible advice; irregardless of any other published study.

One important distinction is between research and the dietary guidelines issued. Most of the bad advice given in the 20th century was not well supported but there were strong ideological reasons which pushed it forward.

There was an interesting interview with one of the people on the Nixon-era group which was repurposed from focusing on hunger to the obesity crisis on the political aspects:

«Dr. Mark Hegsted, professor of nutrition at Harvard University and one of the three nutritionists who helped write the report, said:

"There will undoubtedly be many people who will say we have not proven our point; we have not demonstrated that the dietary modifications we recommend will yield the dividends expected.

"The question to be asked therefore, is not why should we change our diet, but why not. "What are the risks associated with eating less meat, less fat, less saturated fat, less cholesterol, less sugar, less salt and more fruits, vegetables, unsaturated fat - and cereal products - especially whole-grain cereals? There are none that can be identified and important benefits can be expected."»

https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/lifestyle/1977/01/20/...

I don’t think they set out intending to make the problem worse, or that they were getting paid off by industry, and they weren’t wrong about everything but the President wanted To Do Something and they went ahead even though the evidence for salt, fat, cholesterol, and meat was very sketchy at the time and generally debunked with a decade or so when people did bigger studies with good methodology, in particular having good control groups. The problem is that by then you had a bunch of senior people whose careers had been based on this who weren’t keen on substantially reversing the recommendations and so it’s taken much longer to reverse them than it did to create them.

Very interesting. I'm affected by high blood pressure so I monitor it pretty closely.

If I need to get my blood pressure down, there are three levers that consistently work:

° reducing sodium - note: I really like salty things, so it's very easy for me to push 6-7k mg or more, especially when I was in college eating cafeteria and frozen food constantly. Also, drowning things in hot sauce, to which I am mildly addicted.

° exercising.

° cutting out alcohol and certain other vices.

Everyone's different, so if you're worried about it, talk to your doctor and consider starting a monitoring program. I like home monitoring; IME knowing exactly the impact of my choices on my blood pressure helps me make good choices.

It's good to hear the guidance might become a little more sane - it is extremely difficult to eat a normal (by any American standard at least) diet and be less than a few thousand mg.

> 6-7k mg

Why not say grams? A thousand miligrams is a gram.

I've always "suffered" from low blood pressure. Never quite to the point of fainting when I stand up too quick, but it's been close a few times. Exercise for me means I have to go out of my way to supplement sodium or I start getting muscle cramps.

So I wonder, what does high pressure feel like? How do you know when it's too high? Or is it just something you notice on a device and know to fix because doctors say so?

Most people find out from having it measured at a doctor's checkup, but, if it gets high enough it feels like someone's squeezing your brain.

The lack of symptoms for most people is why the US has things like free blood pressure checkups, and automated machines in the waiting areas of pharmacies.

It feels like there's too much blood in my head/face.

Most food packaging measures sodium in mg, so I feel using those units is easier to reason about for most people.

There is a reason the SI system uses decades. It's exactly that it makes this trivial, but I guess if one is not that accustomed to thinking in decimals/metric, it might not be as obvious.

mg is also just composed of the SI prefix m = milli, and the SI unit g = gram, where the latter is a little weird due to naming problems early on leading to it being the only SI unit where the base unit, the kg = kilogram already has a prefix.

The milli means thousands, so you are just saying 6 thousand thousands gram. If you internalize SI units, and decompose them automatically, this seems at least confusing, possibly worse, depending on how picky the reader is about unnecessarily contorted grammar in general.

I myself advocate the use of prefixed gram for the cases where people use tons, but I accept that people in general don't like them being called megagrams = Mg from now on. This is by the way the reason why mb != MB when denoting storage space, but 8e9 mb = 1 MB, due to the former denoting millibits, and the latter megabytes. There is also MiB, mibibytes, denoting 2^30 B. Microsoft denotes MiB as MB, which is wrong, and lead to great confusion. Be careful, embrace SI units, they make your life easier.

Using SI doesn't mean you shouldn't maintain consistency between units you're actively comparing to avoid inadvertent conversion error. If your working units are mg, using mg across the board is completely sensible. It lowers the mental load involved and reduces the chance of the human factor introducing errors.

It has nothing to do with being uncomfortable with working with SI units and everything to do with having a consistent working environment for me.

For example, If I were drawing something up in CAD and needed a particular face to be 120mm, I'm completely aware that could be represented as 12cm, but I want the software to label that as 120mm so that it's consistent with e.g., a 23mm face next to it.

Your working units for sodium in food consumption are milligrams. Labeling the final sum the same way is a good thing.

Sure, but say 6000 mg, don't say 6k mg.

That'd be ideal, yes, but I'll take 6k mg over 6g when mg are the working units every time. The k makes it much more explicit that there was a shift in magnitude than just silently converting between units.

Yes, but if the face is 1200mm, you do see it as 1.2 m. I rarely like the intermediate units (1e1, 1e2, 1e-1, 1e-2), as they feel like bikeshedding.

It might look wrong in isolation, however the choice of unit do add context to a conversation. For example, there are instances where one would say "twenty hundred" instead of "two thousand". Sodium too is typically denoted in milligrams because most other micronutrients are measured in the same unit.

Terrible headaches.

In most cases, it feels like absolutely nothing.

Above roughly 150 systolic, it can start to manifest as headaches (as others have mentioned), but doesn't always.

In my case, after it had gone undiagnosed long enough (by an incompetent doctor), I had extremely severe headaches, constant nausea and vomiting, and vision problems that turned out to be capillary hemorrhages in my retinas. That was at around 240/120.

BUT: I am extremely lucky to have had all those horrendous symptoms. They alerted me to the severity of the problem, and caused me to escalate to a competent doctor. For many people who get up to that level of blood pressure, the first (and potentially last) symptom is a stroke or a heart attack.

I don't think there's any confusion that people who are sensitive to sodium & benefit from cutting back should cut back. If you know it works, great! The argument is about everyone else, especially all the folks who have no idea whether reducing sodium helps them or not.

> reducing sodium

What do you mean by that? If you're talking about salt, then that's sodium chloride, not sodium. Can't you just say reducing salt?

Is this a joke from the literal police?

Sodium is what has a RDV and a listing in products' nutrition facts, so it makes the most sense to discuss it in that fashion.

You can also get some of it from things like baking soda - salt isn't the sole dietary source.

What do you mean by that? If you’re talking about sodium chloride, then that’s sodium chloride, not salt. Can’t you just say reducing sodium chloride?

Do you also use caffeine? I have a low-moderate salt diet but had high-ish BP a couple years ago, turns out I was drinking too much coffee.

I haven't looked into it, but are there really no other cations besides sodium that can create the salty flavor sensation on human taste buds? I would find that surprising, given all of the work and industry around sugar substitutes.

Also, what is your personal experience - if any - with heavy potassium supplementation?

potassium chloride tastes salty but also has a strong metallic feel, it's what most salt substitutes are made out of

I see Aluminium Chloride salt sachets in fast food outlets from time to time.

The last time I tried it, I detected only bitterness, not saltiness.

I also wonder why potassium chloride is not being promoted heavily, in the face of low recommended intake of sodium, IIRC the recommended potassium intake is much higher than that of sodium.

The reason is that there is a lot of overlap of patients with hypertension and chronic kidney disease. When your kidneys don't filter as well, one of things that your body holds onto is potassium. High potassium levels (among other things) cause cardiac conduction issues and arrhythmias which can be fatal if not intervened on. I. The general population we have to be careful that we don't trade one problem for another.

On the other hand, _low_ potassium can also cause heart problems. You just can't win!

That's true as well, fortunately(?) it's much harder to get to cardiac issues with hypokalemia than hyperkalemia (most commonly I see it in anorexics).

Most causes of low potassium are side effects of medications, or short term losses from diarrhea or vomiting. There are some people with genetic causes of excess urinary potassium losses but it's pretty uncommon.

For cooking I use a mixture of sodium chloride, potassium chloride, magnesium sulphate (50:40:9, the remainder is iodine) tastes just like pure NaCl to me. It's a brand called Seltin here in Norway.

It's amazing to me that people still believe high blood pressure is some lifelong ailment you need to learn to cope with. Of all "diseases" it is pretty much the easiest to fix. It is well known that as short as a 8-10 day water fast is sufficient to drop any medication and restore a normal life, provided of course that you resume at least a somewhat normal diet and not McDonalds, high protein Keto crap, etc. It's really remarkable how such a "disease" can be sold to the public as a lifelong issue.

I am interested in your hypothesis and would like to see the research supporting it.

If reducing high blood pressure is important to you, don't trust a random dude on HN. Spend some time researching the concept of water fasting as well as dry fasting and you will find the literature that leads you to conclude it is a worthwhile effort for your best shot at curing many man made "diseases" such as high blood pressure, diabetes, Crohn's and all other IBS/Ds, among many many many others.

The information is readily accessible and available to be found if you do it with an open mind.

I don't have links or whatever to send you. This is not a new topic for me so I don't have a folder with bookmarks I keep around to include in my replies here or elsewhere. I have been around fasting (water, dry, and grape fasting) and herbal remedies for the last 20 years and have seen hundreds, probably thousands, of people cure diseases their top doctors once said were incurable. But again, don't believe me (and most don't, hence why I always get downvoted or flagged), believe yourself once you open up your mind to life changing information that's out there. When you realize your health is quite literally in your own hands, you free yourself to find the right information.

> hence why I always get downvoted or flagged),

Actually, I suspect this complaint itself that causes it. Especially combined with words and phrases that tend to inflame skepticism. It's a bit disingenuous to imply otherwise.

Today was the first time I ever complained about getting downvoted because I know it triggers HNers instantly.

> Today was the first time I ever complained about getting downvoted

Well that's (easily) verifiable as false, and the behavior is contrary to the guidelines regardless of any "trigger".

You are correct, I did mention it once more 22 days ago. Forgot about that one. Prior to that I've had thousands of comments here on HN in the last 10 years that I have not mentioned it in. And many have been downvoted within minutes or as I mentioned, more recently flagged.

Well, if you'd like to be upvoted, maybe find a couple of those study links.

I looked into water fasting several years ago because a friend's father went on a 40 day water fast to address cancer. Everything I found at that time was that it was dangerous.

He made it through the fast and the cancer didn't get any worse, but it didn't do any good. My friend was just relieved that he didn't badly hurt himself. He subsequently went on chemo, which worked.

> It is well known

A quick search suggests that is mainly known among alternative therapy sites and there isn't much science backing it up. Since high-blood pressure costs the NHS in excess of £2bn a year, I would expect a fair degree of research.

Does caffeine affect your blood pressure? I found mine went way down when I quit.

From what I've read, that's another everybody-is-different sort of thing. The median effect is marginal (like a few mmHg, if I recall correctly), but there's a wide distribution, and some people are affected much more than others.

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/its-time-to-end-t...

Scientific America (2011)

”This week a meta-analysis of seven studies involving a total of 6,250 subjects in the American Journal of Hypertension found no strong evidence that cutting salt intake reduces the risk for heart attacks, strokes or death in people with normal or high blood pressure. In May European researchers publishing in the Journal of the American Medical Association reported that the less sodium that study subjects excreted in their urine—an excellent measure of prior consumption—the greater their risk was of dying from heart disease. These findings call into question the common wisdom that excess salt is bad for you, but the evidence linking salt to heart disease has always been tenuous.”

>I found an advocate for rationality in Richard Sloan, a professor of behavioural medicine at Columbia University. He said that when it comes to hypertension and other health problems, Americans put too much faith in the power of personal agency.

Isn't that the truth. Another example came to mind immediately which is the treatment of alcoholism. AA is really big in the United States but has abysmal recovery rates, whereas preliminary studies with muscle relaxants have shown great promise.

Yet in public discourse diseases are treated like one's 'personal demons', a 'challenge that has to be overcome' and so on. It almost seems like a personal growth lifestyle change rather than an objective medical assessment with programs like AA suggesting opening oneself up to 'higher powers' in their official guidelines.

There really needs to be a big culture shift that moves health debate from a sort of Puritanism to objective medical evaluation that keeps the personal angle out. Especially when it comes to drug abuse and dietary related illnesses. Obesity is a big issue as well.

What are you talking about? There's plenty of stories out there of obese people who lost weight on their own and got their life back into shape (myself included). This ivory tower elitism is nonsense. They are worried that if enough people took actions into their own hands they'd be out of business.

The percentage of people who manage to successfully lose and keep off a significant amount of weight is tiny. No one disputes that some people manage it. The concern is that depending exclusively on willpower clearly doesn’t work for most people.

Who is "they" and what does Columbia have to gain from keeping people fat?

I think a lot of people could "will" to fix some of these problems in an ideal world, but other factors beyond their control prevent them.

I "beat" obesity in the last year. My BMI was low 30s and it's now low 20s. Knock on wood, after some time I don't seem to be regaining it like a lot of people do (as suggested by my sibling post). Without getting into too many personal details, the biggest thing to cause that was a radical re-shift of my work habits. A vast majority of people do not have the luxury of chosing when and how they work. I do not fault them for not replicating what I did. I struggled with it myself for a long time, before my recent success, until I was able to make these latest changes.

In general I think things which lead to judging other people for their circumstances is a bad idea. There are probably people who could will it away. Is it their fault that they don't? Honestly, probably not usually.

Out of curiosity, what did you change about your work habits?

Quit a job, replaced it with zero commute, making room for daytime exercise and better meals.

Agree with most of what you say, but the underlying reasoning around successfully using willpower to fight addiction is that it leaves one in a much stronger state to deal with other "demons" they might encounter.

Muscle relaxants may fix a addiction to alcohol at a higher rate, but likely do nothing to change an addictive personality.

>Muscle relaxants may fix a addiction to alcohol at a higher rate, but likely do nothing to change an addictive personality.

addictive personality traits are to a considerable degree genetic, and even the learned parts are usually solidified in adulthood. It is almost impossible to change one's personality, this isn't a good pathway.

Stopping people from engaging in addictive behaviour is really hard, that's why the most effective way of managing addiction should be chosen. It is not a battle to be won, it is a disease to be treated.

I'm on a ketogenic diet and I measure out a full tablespoon of salt for my daily consumption. I usually get somewhere between 7-8 grams of sodium a day. My mind was blown when I saw the McMaster study on sodium that found that for normal diets, 5 grams daily showed no increased mortality of all causes. I think it was too much below 3g or much above 7g is where things start to get dangerous. I had to do some trial and error to find the right amount of salt for me and I'm still tweaking it here and there.

But they're talking about all source sodium, not just added sodium. How much sodium is in the rest of your food?

EDIT: one tablespoon is 18 gm of salt. That's over 6 gm of sodium.

EDIT2: Also, the study you're talking about says this:

> We noted that most of the world’s population (about 95%) studied consumes more than 3 g/day of sodium, regardless of hypertension status and only 22% consume 6 g/day or more of sodium—the threshold above which we note an increase in mortality and cardiovascular disease risk.

I don't really eat any prepackaged foods besides macadamia/coconut milk. Mainly broccoli, spinach, celery, eggs, chicken, turkey, tuna and a ton of coconut/olive oil. A tablespoon of salt is 7080 mg of sodium. There haven't been any studies looking at ideal sodium intake for people on keto as far as I know, though it is generally accepted that there is a higher need since the liver gets efficient at excreting sodium.

I wouldn't necessarily recommend others take as much sodium as I do, only that personally I seem to feel better around that level. I have heard from some people that take as much as 11g a day on keto. I would definitely not exceed 5g much if I was on doing a standard diet though.

I was taught that salt (sodium) unmasks hypertension, but doesn't cause hypertension. In other words, sodium is the tool that the body's regulatory systems use when trying to raise blood pressure. So a healthy younger person can probably not worry about sodium intake. But for an older person with congestive heart failure, a bag of potato chips might end them up in the hospital.

High salt diets == Hypertension and High fat == heart disease are two "scientific truths" that have been propagated for decades and have turned up as bad science.

I've heard the argument of "all the scientists believe this, so you must be wrong" so many times with these and it turned out I was right. I believe the same will go for other incidents of bad science that most people believe these days.

Did anyone familir with the literature say "all the scientists believe this"?

We've all heard it in school and through major newspaper and TV shows since we entered school.

It doesn't matter what the best experts says as long as those picked up by mainstream media and textbook authors consistently agree on the wrong thing.

Makes sense. Just wanted to clarify in order to distinguish from a case like global warming, where there really is expert agreement.

There was expert agreement on both high salt and high fat diets for decades.

Recommend people read the book The Salt Fix, by Dr. James DiNicolantonio. Just like cholesterol and Ancel Keyes, opinions of just a handful of people, in particular Dr. Walter Kempner, changed public health policy against salt with very little evidence to back it all up. Now you are starting to see all this terrible advice unravel.

Stan Efferding, who not only holds world records in power lifting but who also trains Hafþór of Game of Thrones fame, is big into recommending at least 6g of sodium a day for people who are pretty active and exercise regularly: https://youtu.be/BeOc7TRo9Os?t=16m49s

Admittedly, some of the practices that work for genetic outliers of the caliber of Stan Efferding and Dan Green (or people who train as hard) don't apply to the rest of us regular mortals.

Dan Green and Stan Efferding both take steroids though (or at least Stan did at one time), and they weigh a ton. Not sure anything that applies to them would apply to most anyone else. It's probably best not to glean health tips from powerlifters in general...

It'd be pretty shocking to find someone performing at that level who doesn't increase their testosterone levels (and much, much more) artificially. I'm pretty sure Stan is still on HRT these days. It's sort of a loophole in the system these days for how to obtain it legally. It's not nearly as powerful as cycling it, but it's better than nothing.

I always find the whole "but they take steroids" argument strange.

It's actually funny you should mention taking health advice from powerlifters, bodybuilders and strongmen. Stan Efferding has an entire video on the subject, where he makes it clear that if you want to look or perform like him or some of his peers, you will most likely not be healthy: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yxHZrF4AFRg . The part that struck me the most was that some of these guys need CPAP to sleep once they get into the 300-400lbs weight category, just because a human body isn't supposed to weigh that much.

Eat freshly picked organic vegetables, a lot. Some fruit. No dairy. No grains. Meat once a week or so. Within a month or so you will positively glow with health.

Is this hypothetical diet, where does the protein come from? Soy? Nuts?

Meat. Once a week or so, two or three steaks. I forgot to mention eggs.

I should add that, in this very non-hypothetical diet, you eat a lot of veggies. Five or six giant salads a day. Eat a whole cucumber like a banana. Once your microbiome adjusts it will tear though that stuff surprisingly well. You'll be dropping the deuce five times a day. (And they won't stink. That's a side-effect.)

You have so much energy you can run up mountains and you're always giggling because you feel so good. As your cells start to clean out the molecular junk in your system you'll age in reverse for a while.

> meat, once a week or so, two or three stakes.

You say people should eat two or three steaks on one day or even in one meal??

> six giant salads a day

Seems a lot?

> drop the deuce five times a day

Five times a day???

> age in reverse for a while

Please back all this up with science, because it sounds like snake oil to me.

>> meat, once a week or so, two or three steaks.

> You say people should eat two or three steaks on one day or even in one meal??

No, although for some folks that wouldn't be a problem in the least. :-)

More like, fast Friday afternoon until Saturday morning. Have steak and eggs for breakfast, with potatoes if you like[1], Then a (bun-less) hamburger for lunch. Salads for dinner. Repeat Sunday.

But that's just an example.

Also, it doesn't have to be beef. Eat a whole chicken over the weekend.

I forgot to mention grubs and bugs, fantastic sources of protein if you can handle eating them. (I personally can't, but I just read about how cockroach farming is taking off in China. It's brilliant, apparently the company doing it is on track to consume all of China's kitchen scrap waste by 2020 or something crazy like that. The bugs grow in huge buildings surrounded by moats filled with carp to eat escapees. So wonderful and so gross!)

>> six giant salads a day

> Seems a lot?

Yes, it does. See below.

>> drop the deuce five times a day

> Five times a day???

Four or five, yep. Tidy human-size rabbit turds that barely stink. What's going on is you're biasing your microbiome to the organisms that feed on plants[2] rather than milk or bread.

The bulk of most plant matter that you're eating is water. The rest is largely fiber and "nutrients" which is a huge catch-all term in this context. In your gut the microbiome rapidly consumes the plant matter in a kind of internal "farm" and your cells actually eat the microbes. It's gross, but feces isn't "waste", it's a microbial culture, about 80% of it in fact. In a normal scenario feces is deposited on the ground and rapidly invaded by micro-rhizome which then begins to integrate the internal ecosystem of the "nuggets" with the ecosystem in the soil. Digestion isn't consumption. You take what you need, incubate the rest, and pass it along, having added your own contribution. From the microbes' POV none of us are at the apex.

With a large steady flow of nutrients and no milk or bread to gum up the works your system uses way less energy to pick and choose the molecules it needs. It's also much easier to dispose of waste molecules. Under a "normal" diet your cells literally get jammed up with too many of the wrong molecules. In severe cases there's nowhere to put them and you get e.g. cholesterol building up in the blood vessels. Take away the bad inputs and provide for the existing crap to leave easily, and that's what causes you to ...

>> age in reverse for a while

> Please back all this up with science, because it sounds like snake oil to me.

All of this stuff has science behind it. But I'm afraid you're gonna have to do your own homework. I'm busy. It's your health. It might sound cold, but uh, "evolution in action".

What I'm talking up here is a paradigm shift. The new paradigm is no less scientific and rigorous than the old one, it's just different.

Here's a decent introduction, with science: "The Soil Will Save Us" : "How Scientists, Farmers, and Foodies Are Healing the Soil to Save the Planet" http://www.kristinohlson.com/books/soil-will-save-us

Start with that and follow th references. The science is happening.

As for my specific claim about aging in reverse, yes, I admit that's anecdotal. However, I maintain that the best way to check the veracity of that claim is to try it yourself. Get your biological markers recorded, try the diet for N months, and keep track of your "biological age" throughout. This is a study I'd love to perform on a large scale.

Let me emphasize the importance of freshly picked food! This requirement almost demands that your kitchen is within walking distance of a garden. Food has a half-life. An organically grown vegetable in the supermarket is only marginally better than one plucked fresh from the garden and eaten immediately. You simply haven't tasted e.g. corn or carrots otherwise.

[1] If the tummy likes, not the tongue.

[2] vegetables, fruits, nuts, etc. But not grain. Grains are emergency food, eating them as a staple feeds the "wrong" gut microbes.

Organic, huh?

The other parts of your argument I doubt many would disapprove of. More vegetables, eat less meat. But any argument that start's with 'freshly picked organic vegetables' screams prejudice and ignorance.

https://www.health.harvard.edu/staying-healthy/should-you-go...

"While organic foods have fewer synthetic pesticides and fertilizers and are free of hormones and antibiotics, they don't appear to have a nutritional advantage over their conventional counterparts. "There've been a number of studies examining the macro- and micronutrient content, but whether organically or conventionally grown, the foods are really similar for vitamins, minerals, and carbohydrates," says McManus."

"PREJUDICE! IGNORANCE!"

Trolling with science is still trolling FuckOffNeemo

No trolling here. I'm pointing out scientific facts that are contrary to your opinion.

And my mention of 'screaming' was used metaphorically. That is to say, your bias was evident from your posturing. Not that you or I were _literally_ screaming about one opinion or the other.

> No trolling here.

Ok, cheers.

> I'm pointing out scientific facts that are contrary to your opinion.

I'm gonna have to go ahead and disagree with you there. What you're pointing out is one article that contradicts my own lived experience (on which my opinion is founded.)

I love Science. I've got a copy of Linus Pauling's "Chemistry" on my desk that's I'm reading for fun. But a scientific study that shows that "Organic" food is no better than (let's call it) "Conventional" food in terms of nutrition and health? Friend, I just laugh.

To even get my attention such a study would have to have at least three groups: one eating only organically grown food, one eating conventionally grown food (same diet), and a control group that eats what everybody else eats. Then you'd have to keep it up for several generations!

Which brings me to my main scientific objection to conventional agriculture: it's new. We know, thanks to science, that the living system we are a part of is approximately 3.5 to 4 billion years old. The primary constituents of the system (microbes and viruses) have a life-cycle measured in hours. This system evolves. Along comes the naked ape sprinkling fixed nitrogen on his crops and patting himself on the back. One of the apes puts on a lab coat and gives the rest a thumbs up, "It's just as good!", while another sprays nerve toxin on the crops to kill the "pests". Meanwhile Gary in the back is starting to ask, "Hey, where are the bees?"

The word I'm looking for is "Hubris".

Now then, the pragmatic argument against modern conventional agriculture is that it's unnecessary. We now know, again thanks to science, that soil is not a passive receptacle or matrix for chemical nutrients. It's a living dynamic system comprised of tens of thousands of species on all scales from the virus to the mole, and that has more in common with a vast city than a pile of minerals. We know that micro-rhizome interconnects plants in huge networks that shuttle water, nutrients, and chemical signals (often involving the same molecules that occur in humans as neurotransmitters and hormones) between them. We've also learned that we ourselves host a "microbiome" and it's obvious that, in a healthy relationship with your local gardens, your microbiome is effectively an extension of the soil into your system. (And back out again. Feces are ~80% microbes.)

(As an aside, given the above it should not be surprising that it's possible to taste the difference between home-grown organic food and store-bought conventional food.)

The way to grow healthy food is to garden the soil, the plants grow themselves. You can't really control plant growth too well. It's easy, however, to improve the soil, which then affects the growth of the plants.

One amazing example of this is a project that was done in Jordan. Agriculture had been practiced on the site until salt had gotten so bad that nothing would grow there. It was a patch of barren salty desert. Using applied ecology ("Permaculture") they were able to establish a nascent ecosystem. Within two years it was producing figs. The soil regenerated, mushrooms appeared.

There's a short video about it, "Greening the Desert" with Geoff Lawton. "You can solve all your problems in a garden." as he says.

Direct link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xgF9BU4uYMU

Main page: https://permaculturenews.org/2007/03/01/greening-the-desert-...

The bottom line is, if you practice applied ecology you can grow all the food you need in a garden without any artificial inputs at all. It's cost effective and it will make you and the world around you healthy. It's also soundly scientific.

I wish I could engage you further here, I'd love to dive more into your argument but time is not forgiving.

Thank you for your response however, it was very informative.

I only have one comment to make from the above:

I'm gonna have to go ahead and disagree with you there. What you're pointing out is one article that contradicts my own lived experience (on which my opinion is founded.)

For some one who's embedded and has a solid understanding of the scientific process, you're contradicting the scientific community here by saying your opinion and anecdotal evidence proves otherwise?

Well met!

Let me say that, while I have huge respect for science and the Scientific Method, my faith in science is weakened as one departs from physics.

To be specific, before I could credit (believe in) a scientific paper purporting to show no appreciable difference between "organic" and "conventional" produce there are a lot of boxes I'd have to check off. For example, how long after they were picked were the vegetables tested?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com