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Comment by Cthulhu_ | Hacker News Reader

Cite your sources, because there's plenty of sources that indicate health risks with high salt intake, especially later in life.

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Japan has the developed world's highest life expectancies and yet the Japanese eat double the amount of recommended salt per day. To me that seems sort of inconsistent with salt being a great health risk

Showing examples that refute people hypotheses is so valuable.

Reminds me of the Israeli paradox, Israel has very low saturated fat intake but high heart disease rates. This information on it's own completely disproves any claim that high saturated fat could be the sole cause of heart disease. There must be either an underlying or parallel mechanism that explains Israel.

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

*It's all most like biology is complicated and is hard to understand.

Any "sole cause" claim about health/diet stuff seems highly suspect at best, I can scarcely imagine anything such a claim could be true for. You can't even say that cigarettes are the sole cause of lung cancer; the link between the two is incontrovertible but there are still many other ways to get lung cancer (asbestos, radon, bad luck, etc..)

Maybe a result of an higher than usual endogamy in the population.

In biology is called effect of the founder, and explain why Jews of german origin have a higher incidence of several recessive genetic diseases than other groups. Many of the survivors moved probably in mass to Israel after the war.

It's typically only an issue if coupled with high fructose. I'd argue the abnormally high levels of fructose are a much bigger health crisis, and salt is relatively minor in comparison.

Not a comment on the interplay, but Japan is well within WHO guidelines for sugars. In school, I heard that Japan reduced gastric cancer cases by 50% when salt intake reduced by 10%. Probably can’t repeat that same public health success again, but with nearly 5m individuals, the effect is strong. I’m not aware of as big a meta analysis for fructose.

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/34957192/

Like the great majority of health advice, especially from governments, limiting salt is based on what is essentially either a misunderstanding at best or pure pseudo-science at worst.

First two studies I found when you google for Salt intake and all cause mortality. All cause mortality is in my opinion the only real metric that matters for this discussion. You can find studies on it increasing blood pressure temporarily but if it doesn't translate to death who cares (See Japan and Korea)

https://www.karger.com/Article/Abstract/492034#:~:text=No%20.... (In dialysis patients)

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/33351135/

*Not really expecting this to convince anyone, so low effort, but maybe people can acknowledge biology is complex and we don't have any idea about what any food really does. Hence so many studies showing different results because the signal is so weak.

Plenty of pre-1970 sources, none post 1970, generally the opposite.

The most famous historical study was rigged from the start.

Check out The Salt Fix: Why the Experts Got It All Wrong--and How Eating More Might Save Your Life. I haven't read it yet but it's on my list.

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