Comment by spidersouris | Hacker News Reader

Comment by spidersouris | Hacker News Reader

Eggs could easily be replaced with salt. Consuming too much salt (more than 2g a day) is heavily discouraged by some because it is said to increase the risks of cardiovascular diseases as well as increase blood pressure to a dangerous level, but others repudiate these claims and assert they are untrue, and that salt has positive health benefits above this limit.

Even if we take a group of people, put them in a closed place and strictly control what they eat, it is extremely difficult to say if a certain food has had a particular impact on X or not. There are some many elements which are unrelated to nutrition at play that X could decrease or increase for any reason other than what one ate: stress, tiredness, physical activity, mood...

Now, I reckon the wisest thing to do is to follow what the author concludes with: eat moderately and have a balanced nutrition. I doubt we'll ever get concrete and truthful research on nutrition soon enough. We first need to learn more about the extremely complex system that is the human body.

Relevant Scientific American article about the dubious scientific foundation the general vilification of salt is based on: https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/its-time-to-end-t...

> it is said to increase the risks of cardiovascular diseases

How? Salt is a convenient bogeyman, but nobody can demonstrate what it role it plays as an agent of disease. Every cell in your body regulates isotonic balance and excess sodium is rapidly excreted. Complex lifeforms wouldn't exist without this fundamental ability.

It was demonized because of the vast quantities contained in many processed foods but you're right and to add to that you'll die much quicker from a lack of salt than from excess salt.

The link between high sodium intake and elevated blood pressure is well documented. This is mostly because of the attempt of body systems to maintain isotonic balance.

There’s also a signficant portion of the population with a genetic predisposition to have above-average increases in blood pressure shortly after consuming large amounts of salt, to the point that it will even cause hypertension in some people that had otherwise normal blood pressure.

Salt -> elevated blood pressure -> complicating factor in pulmonary and cardiac disease.

It is very simple. If you suffer from high blood pressure (above 140/90mm Hg) and your sodium intake is considerable, your blood pressure rises even more. You can easily set up a study with a control group and test it repeatedly, the results will be the same.

However, the mitigating factor is potassium. If you consume an adequate amount of foods rich in potassium, the negative effect of sodium on your blood pressure is neutralized somehow. The exact behaviors depend on the amounts of each.

And here's the problem: in salt, sodium is very concentrated. You would have to eat a large amount of foods considered rich in potassium, such as tomatoes, in order to neutralize a teaspoon of salt.

You don’t even have to have high blood pressure for above ‘normal’ (~2000mg/day) salt intake to create the effect. It’s observable in people with normal blood pressure as well, and pronounced in a subset of the population with a gene that appears to worsen the effect.

The potassium factor is why many doctors often recommend sea/himalayan salt — these salts usually have a bunch of other minerals, including potassium.

For anyone wondering, no, it’s not a good idea to try to self medicate the combination of high blood pressure + a sodium heavy diet with potassium supplements. Do it wrong and you’ll end up with hyperkalemia, which is both very uncomfortable and potentially life-threatening.

> doctors often recommend sea/himalayan salt

Himalayan salt is 99% sodium chloride and doesn't contain significant potassium to make a difference. Someone recommending it as a healthier alternative should not be taken seriously.

The sodium content can be that high, but it's certainly not universal. The brand I use is only around 40%.

You can buy low sodium salt. The Himalayan part has nothing to do with it.

> If you suffer from high blood pressure

People who already have a disease that requires salt regulation doesn't prove any causative role.

> If you suffer from high blood pressure (above 140/90mm Hg) and your sodium intake is considerable, your blood pressure rises even more. You can easily set up a study with a control group and test it repeatedly, the results will be the same.

How do you square this with jonasmerlin's sibling post of a Scientific American article, pointing out that the foundations of this belief do not stand on rigorous science?

That article focuses not on the mechanics of action (increase of sodium intake -> higher blood pressure), and doesn't question the fact that reducing salt intake lowers blood pressure somewhat (albeit not by a significant amount), but that at a global level reducing salt intake in populations does not reduce overall mortality from heart-related conditions.

There might be many confounding factors at play. As the authors say, every study about negative effects of salt can be offset by an opposing one, so it is definitely something to be studied in more depth.

EXCESS salt raises BP, which raises the chances of a cardio event. Excess sodium is not rapidly excreted, in fact the body requires far more hydration to balance it out. https://www.heart.org/en/healthy-living/healthy-eating/eat-s...

> Every cell in your body regulates isotonic balance and excess sodium is rapidly excreted.

If I eat something salty for dinner, I wake up with swollen eyes, with others in my immediate family doing the same. My family uses very little to no salt. My wife can eat as much salt as she wants, without any visible effect at all. Her family uses, in my perspective, extreme amounts of salt. My naive assumption is that salt sensitivity is somewhat genetic, with research suggesting the same [1]. Maybe related, near hypotension runs in my family, while hypertension runs in hers.

1. https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2018/07/180705115632.h...

Higher salt levels raise blood pressure. High blood pressure leads the body to strengthen blood vessel walls, which make them less flexible. Less flexible blood vessels put more strain on the heart, which in cardiac patients (who are operating with a damaged heart) is obviously suboptimal.

There is a ton of studies about this and heart patient life expectancies have been going up for the last several decades because we have figured this (and a few other things) out.

Salt is something regulated well in all higher organisms. Probably dating from when we evolved in a salt-water ocean. That said, in a modern diet with lots of sodium, but also lots less of other important minerals like magnesium, potassium, etc., who knows?

Probably depends on the totality of the diet, for instance if you are getting a lot of salt "artificially", and eating an otherwise nutrient-poor diet, maybe lowering salt intake is a good thing. But if you are eating a varied and mostly natural diet, so that you're getting a wide variety of vitamins, minerals, sun-exposure etc., your absolute sodium intake may not matter much.

I think the issue with salt and eggs is that we talk of humans in the aggregate.

For eggs, there is some small percentage of the population that passes the cholesterol into actual high levels of serum LDL.

For salt, there is some small percentage of the population that reacts to high sodium levels with hypertension.

And these subsets of population studies skew the results to a degree that adversely affects the conclusions for the median case.

For most of us, dumping salt onto a plate filled with eggs is not only fine, but healthy.

Medicine deals in aggregates, averages, and statistical variation, which is to some degree useful. But it does precisely nothing to offer testing to tell you if you are in a reactive or nonreactive group to stimulus X, which would be extremely useful.

We do this with allergies - stick 50 different allergens on a grid pattern into your back to determine your precise reactivity. But with nutrition? Haha, go screw yourself, all humans are the same, eat your 14 servings of grains, regard bacon and eggs as poison, and we'll medicate you for your resultant metabolic syndrome.

Pretty much. Same with humans with a "leaky" blood-brain barrier. They can actually get GABA and other amino acids from the stomach to the brain, leading to vastly different effects than the majority of people get.

This is very true, a few years ago that I started eating around 4-6 eggs a day because it seemed a good source of nutrients and I had seen various articles saying the cholesterol thing was a myth etc. After about 3 weeks of that many eggs per day, I ended up at the doctor feeling lightheaded and not quite right and turned out my blood pressure was insanely high and after a blood test my cholesterol was through the roof.

I cut out the eggs but otherwise kept my diet fairly similar and about a month later my bloodwork showed I was back to normal cholesterol.

Definitely there are some people who when they eat eggs it will spike their blood cholesterol significantly, but I have also seen other people who can eat lots of eggs and it doesn't seem to change their cholesterol in bloodwork at all.

Agreed. The thing that irritates me so much in all these studies is how they conflate correlation and causation. Studies to truly isolate just one ingredient would be both time and cost prohibitive. We are better served by just eating as varied and unprocessed a diet as possible.

I constantly see people suffer through painful cramps after exercising because they refuse to replace the salt they lost through sweating due to salt being bad for you.

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