Hacker News Reader

Comment by blattimwind | Hacker News Reader

Nutrition "science" caught again perpetuating findings based in assumption and hitting the data until it fits, not solid research? Oh no, nobody could've expected that... also "scientists who are on a crusade to reduce our salt consumption to near zero". Like pope Urban II always said, no better place to do sound research than on a crusade.

View on HN

Salt increases intravascular osmolarity, which increases water retention to correct the osmolarity. This is freshman inorganic chemistry. There's plenty of biomedical science behind renal pathophysiology and the link between salt and blood pressure is as close to an if-then statement as there is in medicine. We use all sorts of drugs and methods to play with this central mechanism and can observe the effects in real time at the bedside.

It's not "science". It's science, as in, emperically demonstrated, over and over, billions of times, every time, science.

That said, healthy people manage their osmolarity and blood pressure through other renal mechanisms. The people who run up against this salt-blood pressure issue are generally medically fragile, older people who have outrun all their other compensation mechanisms. The question here is more about the cost-benefit of pushing this particular public health message. The vast majority of healthy people don't benefit, and the sick people get the word from their physicians anyway.

Yeah, a lot of people have no idea about this "homeostasis" thing, which is how you get to stupid things like "foods matched to your blood type" or "alkaline diet"

> The vast majority of healthy people don't benefit

If there's indeed no benefit, then the message is actively harmful, because it causes people who follow it to suffer (from bad-tasting food, in this case).

And of course, once they learn that they've essentially been lied to, they'll learn to ignore all "X is healthy/unhealthy for you" messages, which is probably a good thing given how many of them turn out to be wrong. (And if salt does not cause problems for most people, telling them that they need to eat less of it is wrong).

>If there's indeed no benefit, then the message is actively harmful, because it causes people who follow it to suffer (from bad-tasting food, in this case).

Well, the food doesn't end up tasting bad because they replace salt with sugar...

It's not just bad tasting food either, too little salt is bad for you in itself.

But doesn't this same principle apply to everything you eat? Too much vitamin A, too much sugar, too many preservatives, too much caffeine, etc... Some things are detrimental to the body, and are not food, some things are food, but are only detrimental at large quantities. (what isn't?)

But, your argument seems like a evasion of the truth, salt is actually food. (unless you want to argue that salt is not food, then your argument would not really apply in the same way)

If you are going to claim "too much salt" = "salt is bad", "because science", then don't you have to argue how bad water is as well (in the same manner), because the renal system also gets rid of excess water too...

http://www.nbcnews.com/id/16614865/ns/us_news-life/t/woman-d...

Doesn't potassium work similarly then?

Of course, but potassium is mainly intracellular (a much larger fraction of the body's water) so it would be quite difficult to cause the same problems. Hyperkalemia definitely has its own problems though.

"Salt has effect X" is not what's in the article, is not the recommendation widely circulated ("reduce our salt consumption to near zero", "salt is bad for health and should be avoided as much as possible" etc.) and thus not what I wrote about. You're building a straw-man. As straw-men go, you're technically correct in what you write, but miss that I didn't argue against the facts you laid out.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com