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Comment by asdff | Hacker News Reader

Pretty much every culture around the world 100 years ago had some staple fermented food. Nowadays, a lot of people in western culture at least outright refuse yogurt or other fermented foods like saurkraut or pickled cabbage that used to be staples in these people's ancestor's diets a few generations ago. People are becoming even lactose intolerant. You have to fertilize your microbes so to speak and eat these sorts of foods. Plus once you are doing stuff like making your own yogurt, a jug of whole milk works out a lot cheaper than the chobani stuff.

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Lactase persistence is regulated by genetic mutations, not gut microbes. The negative symptoms of lactose intolerance is exactly due to lactose being able to reach the gut and making the microbes there flourish by digesting lactose, creating large quantities of gas and other metabolic byproducts that cause flatulence, diarrhea, etc. People don't spontaneously become lactose intolerant just because they stopped eating something. Koreans eat lots of fermented vegetables, yet why are 70%-100% of Koreans estimated to be lactose intolerant? Why are you suggesting lactose intolerance is some new condition that arose as a product of modern life? Lactose intolerance is simply the default setting for the majority of humans around the world for most of history.

Yogurt/kefir occupies very large segments in most developed countries' grocery store shelves and new brands/varieties pop up every year. How has this industry not collapsed if "a lot of people outright refuse yogurt" according to you?

The development and marketing of lactose free dairy products in recent years is simply the dairy industry exploring new market segments, because substantial portions of the population do not have lactase persistence. Even societies whose culinary traditions involved heavy consumption of dairy do not have 100% lactase persistence. It's not some weird conspiracy aimed at making modern humans "weak". The lack of lactose is not significant enough to change the nutritional content of dairy products.

Holy shit, that is the most over-the-top, aggressive response to a guy being factually incorrect about yoghurt that I've ever read.

Can you point exactly which part was "over-the-top" or "aggressive"? Or is calling out that factually incorrect things are, well, factually incorrect somehow unacceptable nowadays? The world needs less pseudoscience misinfo, not more.

I re-read your post and while it's not overly aggressive it's the difference in tone and approach that get you. The original poster was like the hippie encouraging home-made yogurt and you were like the school principal saying 'this is bull, store yogurt has scientifically the same benefits'.

PS: I also learned while writing this I can't spell yogurt. Thanks spellchecker!

Sadly the topic of lactose intolerance is rife with misinfo, biases, and dogwhistles, hence my rapid-fire questions in the previous comment. Most commercial yogurt products sold in grocery stores today are heavily laden with sugar and so mildly fermented that their probiotic quanlities are nearly nullified. Commercial unflavoured kefir is slightly better, but the overall probiotic effect is still questionable since we don't have affirmative answers on how much of the microbes can survive through our stomach acid, or how much of them can establish in our guts vs. heading straight for the exit like passengers on a roller coaster.

As for the spelling of yoghurt there's no correct version honestly, they are all transliterations of the same Turkish word https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yogurt#Etymology_and_spelling

The majority of nutritional science seems full of bullshit to be honest. I remember how we laughed at the Atkins diet when it first appeared as well all knew so well that the science told us fat was bad. Now Keto diet seems to be gaining a lot of acceptance, and refined sugar is the real enemy. Refined sugar being bad for you seems to be one of the few things that is agreed on. Will that change in another 20 years?

If you are worried about people's tone and approach, go over to 4chan for a bit then come back here. It should toughen you up.

I'm not worried at all. I was just commenting why others may see that comment (not mine) overly aggressive.

> The world needs less pseudoscience misinfo, not more.

Fully agreed. I appreciate the stern yet information-laden correction. It's certainly much better than hearing specious claims based on conjecture/misinformation that only seems plausible to the uninformed.

Also, IMO it did not sound "over-the-top" or "aggressive" at all. Some people are just so absurdly oversensitive that a simply direct method of speaking (or in this case, writing) is taken as hostile.

the "It's not some weird conspiracy aimed at making modern humans "weak"." bit seemed a bit much (and out of nowhere unless there was an edit in the original)

The insinuation in the very original comment that modern humans are abandoning fermented foods en masse and "even becoming" lactose intolerant (as if adulthood lactose intolerance is somehow a new condition rather than the default for pretty much all mammals in existence) was clearly in-line with the pseudoscientific conspiracist misinformation wave that modern lifestyle supported by technological advances is making humans regress somehow, rather than elevating overall levels of health and turning previous morbidity factors into manageable nuisances.

Yet they are all reasonable questions.

I'd be interested in knowing how asdff arrived at the idea that a sizable portion of lactose intolerance comes from people neglecting to fertilize their microbes with sauerkraut, pickled cabbage, or yogurt.

Honest question: I grew up on a farm in former USSR. We milked cows daily, when I was a kid. Back then, I never knew about lactose intolerance but to be fair, this wasn’t a topic discussed.

Considering I know nothing about this, and you seem like you do, are there any studies that looked at links between lactose intolerance and fresh milk produce?

Reason I say “fresh” is because we never refrigerated the milk. In the morning you get milk, cream is taken off top, by next morning you have a kefir like drink. All was consumed. There was no processing.

I know there is a study[0] that link exposure to farm animals being linked to less allergic reactions but never seen anything about milk.

[0]: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7744242/

Fermented milk is lower in lactose because some of the lactose have already been broken down by microbes in the fermentation process. https://www.webmd.com/allergies/news/20030530/kefir-helps-la...

Lactose intolerance in many cases also doesn't have a clear cut threshold nor is it common to be hypersensitive where a single drop of milk causes projectile vomitting. Many people who are technically lactose intolerant (as in they don't self product lactase in adulthood) can consume some amount of dairy without any symptoms. Otherwise dairy products such as milk, yogurt, and ice cream would not have existed in most of Asia.

https://www.journalofdairyscience.org/article/S0022-0302(87)...

>"However, when lactose loads of up to 12 g are fed, symptoms can be minimal or absent." >"Tolerance to yogurt, acidophilus milk, and other microbe-containing dairy foods has been suggested and is thought to be due to either a low lactose content or in vivo autodigestion by microbial β-galactosidase."

Fresh milk is linked with some viruses that can cause autoimmune diseases like type-1 diabetes and bunch of other stuff.

Always makes my eyes roll when I hear people driving hours just to get fresh farm milk.

Thanks!

I didn’t know that type-1 diabetes was an autoimmune disease.

> Lactase persistence is regulated by genetic mutations, not gut microbes.

> Koreans eat lots of fermented vegetables, yet why are 70%-100% of Koreans estimated to be lactose intolerant?

On the other hand, there is Mongolia:

> But a closer look at cultural practices around the world has challenged that picture. In modern Mongolia, for example, traditional herders get more than a third of their calories from dairy products. They milk seven kinds of mammals, yielding diverse cheeses, yogurts, and other fermented milk products, including alcohol made from mare's milk. “If you can milk it, they do in Mongolia,” Warinner says. And yet 95% of those people are lactose intolerant.

https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.362.6415.626

Even though most products are fermented for shelf life, unfermented milk is widely consumed by Mongolians to this day.

So how exactly does the diet of Mongolians prove lactase persistence is not fundamentally genetic? Lactose intolerance isn't something like celiacs where a dash of the substance causes adverse reactions. Most of Asia still sell non-lactose-free dairy in supermarkets. Look up any Youtube video of Korean street foods and you will see dairy products such as processed cheese, yogurt, mil, and ice cream are ubiquitous in Korea. That doesn't detract from the fact that the vast majority of the population are lactose intolerant in the definition that they no longer produce enzymes that can break down lactose once reaching adulthood.

Yeah and none of the foods on the list was raw unfermented milk.

> So how exactly does the diet of Mongolians prove lactase persistence is not fundamentally genetic?

It doesn't, but I think it indicates that genetic lactase persistence is not the only factor that affects lactose intolerance. Otherwise, how do you call a lactose-intolerant person that can tolerate significant amounts of lactose?

Koreans don't get a third of their calories from dairy products, though. Whereas if Mongolians get ~30% of their calories from dairy on average (which is credible), that would mean they are getting far more than that in summer, since dairy consumption is largely seasonal. We're talking prodigious amounts by the standards of any culture, not a dash. That consumption includes both significant unfermented dairy (milk, milk tea, clotted cream) and dairy products fermented in a wide variety of ways.

Are lactose intolerance symptoms widespread among Mongolians? If not, and if Mongolians are really genetically lactose intolerant, then it is worth asking whether the fermented dairy foods (as opposed to kimchi) they consume are mitigating that intolerance.

I developed lactose intolerance sometime during the 5 years I lived in Japan. I only noticed after returning to Canada when I resumed my old diet. I can still generally eat yogurt and kefir without symptoms, but I can't drink milk anymore without taking lactase tablets.

Would you be able to recommend a yogurt brand I could try out solely for the gut-related health benefits? Or if not yogurt specifically, anything that might even be better.

Highly dependent on what local brands are available. Look for unflavoured kefir or plain yogurt that isn't 0% fat.

> People are becoming even lactose intolerant.

This isn't new, and certainly isn't some crisis of the last 100 years. Historically only a minority of the planet has ever been lactase persistent into adulthood. It's a well-understood genetic trait, not some product of gut microbes.

You can think of this being evolutionary beneficial, if some milk is bad, the whole village don't all get sick.

Also a possible reason for why people have different taste preferences.

It's probably simpler than that: it's simply not energy-efficient to keep producing an enzyme throughout its life for a sugar that's rare-to-non-existent in an organism's diet for most of that life. Because mammals don't have any means of obtaining milk once they separate from their mother, lactose intolerance for their lifetime after weaning is almost universal among mammals. Over millions of years, the slight energy efficiency win of turning off that enzyme's production post-weaning probably won out.

Humans are odd in that we harvest milk for consumption at all beyond our own mother's, which is probably why we're the only species with a notable population with the genetic mutation that allows some of us to digest it – there's no competitive advantage to that mutation in most other mammals, because where would they even obtain milk?

The specific enzyme that breaks lactose is lactase. It's built from almost 2000 amino acids. In comparison, Alpha-Amylase, the enzyme that breaks starch, is much smaller. Couldn't find an exact count but it appears in the ballpark of 200.

I think it's just that mammals don't drink milk once they are weaned.

It seems that lactose tolerance is the new thing here.

Lactose intolerance is normal, but for a few people, presumably dairy animal farmers, something happened to their genes and they became tolerant, and it was an evolutionary avantage because they had access to all that milk. But because access to farmed milk is relatively recent from an evolutionary standpoint and people can live with lactose intolerance, the trait hasn't spread to all of humanity.

Or people who worked out they were tolerant to it, farmed it, and the high density nutrients allowed faster more reliable development of healthy children in adverse conditions. i.e. North Western Europe.

Also that smallpox resistance via cowpox exposure can’t have hurt survival rates in general

What does lactose tolerance have to do with "bad" milk?

You are correct. It's likely that the majority of humans have been lactose intolerant for human history. It's primarily people of Northern European descent that are not lactose intolerant, but lactose intolerance is very common outside of those groups

and west african; by two entirely separate mechanisms, which i’ve always found to be quite cool.

> and west african; by two entirely separate mechanisms, which i’ve always found to be quite cool.

What's the separate mechanism? I'm only aware of one set of genes coding for adult lactase production.

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/17159977/

I wonder if there's any advantage to inheriting both mechanisms.

Eating yogurt or sauerkraut will not render you (once again) lactose tolerant.

Lactase (the enzyme that breaks down lactose) production is regulated by a human gene; how would a probiotic like yogurt alter a gene?

https://biologydictionary.net/lactase/

You could always ingest other bacteria that can digest and break down lactose and rely on probiotics to digest the lactose for you instead of having a gene.

That's what ruminents do anyways, you need a steady colony of these helpful bacteria or you lose the tolerance. While that seems troublesome, for many animals that's how metabolism works for their entire life.

Epigenetic reversal of some inhibitory histone marks at the promoter region of the enzyme? Driven by some yet-to-be-discovered signaling cascade induced by reintroduction of lactose and proliferation of lactose loving microbes?

Just spitballing, this is pure speculation, but is plausible.

I have noticed pseudosciences are becoming fashionable again.

Well, as you probably know, genes are regulated more or less according to environmental cues all the time, including being very much subject to presence and behavior of commensals/parasites/symbionts.

I don't know any specific data whatsoever about inducing lactase, but it seems perfectly plausible that microorganisms such as lactic acid bacteria could interact with the system.

This has been studied, but the results tend to argue that it's purely genetic, eg)

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6669050/

> Studies that have measured changes in endogenous lactase activity after an intervention period consistently show a lack of enzyme induction, suggesting that lactose intake does not affect an individual's lactase activity. Although these studies are scarce and have relatively few subjects, data from cross-sectional studies support the theory of purely genetic regulation

That's interesting, and thank you for bringing it up.

What I was speculating about though, and what may be more relevant for the (Science) article, also includes things along the lines of a microbe manipulating the host gene expression to improve its living conditions. For instance a species that derives energy by fermenting glucose to lactate might under certain conditions have better benefit from that piece of metabolism if it can also make the host act as a sink for the product.

Again, not sure if that particular example is real or documented, but the idea has some consequences for the sort of adaptations and connections one might find.

I thought it would be that as well. But I went quite a while, probably almost two years, without ingesting milk at all. And I just had my 34th birthday two weeks ago. I figured there’s just no way I can still process milk and it turns out I absolutely can. No issues at all. Reading into it, it seems to be genetic.

https://medlineplus.gov/genetics/condition/lactose-intoleran...

You just either get the right genes or you don’t. I’m curious as to how long into my life I’ll be able to drink straight cow milk and be fine. Still got a bit of experimental time left. Hopefully, anyway.

Also both my parents can drink milk without issues.

You can't say something is "perfectly plausible" right after admitting you don't know any data supporting that hypothesis.

The negative symptoms of lactose intolerance is exactly due to microbes in the gut digesting lactose and producing metabolic byproducts such as gas. People who aren't lactose intolerant are free of such symptoms because lactose is digested with enzymes produced by the body before it reaches the gut thus depriving gut microbes of sufficient quantities of lactose to cause negative symptoms.

> You have to fertilize your microbes so to speak and eat these sorts of foods

[citation needed]. It seems unlikely that fermented foods are not consumed in urban areas at all. I’ve also no idea if other primates consume any fermented foods, but I’d guess probably not.

> People are becoming even lactose intolerant

Do any other primates drink milk after infancy? If not, that’s not really a valid concern in the context of the article.

No. In fact, almost all mammals stop producing lactase once they stop nursing from a mother. Humans are quite rare in that there's a significant population with the mutant "lactose tolerant adult" gene.

The study is of US cities.

I would be curious to see if you took, say, South Korean cities, what the results would be. (Seoul is one of the largest megacities in the world, and kimchi is an extremely common fermented food.)

Even the fermented food that you mention will not be probiotic if they are commercially bought. Sauerkraut in a jar will be pasteurized. Even probiotic yogurt is supposedly pasteurized then some live culture added after. I make my own kefir and saurkraut for that reason.

Zero added sweetener, straight Greek yoghurt. Absolutely sublime.

To the typical North American diet it tastes incredibly foreign because the US of A is drenched in sweeteners.

But unsweetened foods just taste beautiful once you get used to them.

I spent two months in Turkey and can confirm this. The national drink is called Ayran, and it’s not only fantastic tasting and cheap but full of nutrition.

Its amazing the incredible, over the top flavor that highly processed junk food has. Commercial Corn chips and the like are so over flavoured, but you don't notice until you give them up for a while.

Fermented foods are important. Milk-based foods, not so much. There's a reason most people are lactose intolerant - milk is to grow baby cows into large animals, and not suitable for consumption by adult humans.

> milk is to grow baby cows into large animals

Whence this transcendent purpose that limits suitability? Likewise, quinoa grains are to grow into full-sized plants, and not for consumption by humans, etc. etc.

Most people may be "lactose intolerant", but some of them find ways to survive and thrive on milk-based foods; meanwhile, some populations have developed tolerance to lactose, presumably because milk-based foods are important.

There is no need for transcendant purpose. Quinoa intolerance is pretty uncommon, whereas milk intolerance is the norm. Even without a lactose intolerance, there are several health issues with milk consumption, unlike quinoa consumption. That is because we've evolved for a orders of magnitude longer to eat plant material.

Yes, some northern European peoples have evolved to be more tolerant of milk. And some tibetans have evolved to live at very high altitudes. It's not a good argument to take a small exceptional population and apply that reasoning to the general case.

And this doesn't even get into all the problems with the dairy industry with regards to environmental damage and animal suffering.

But in this case with this country, that small exceptional worldwide population is overrepresented in our national population. It stands to reason that many people can infact consume lactose in the U.S. given this demographic history. The general case in the context of the U.S. population could very well refer to this population of people historically predisposed to tolerate lactase.

And on the other hand, I think there is this false logic at play with the meat/dairy industry as a whole. People assume these interconnected systems are in fact discrete. That we could do away with eating meat and suffer no consequences, in fact even see improvement in our ways of life. I am not so optimistic given how interconnected systems are. For instance, take the cow. Its not just used to derive meat. 99% of the cow is used. The pancreas is used to extract insulin and other factors. Same with the liver, and the pituitary gland. Serum is used for biomedical research applications. The hair is used for products, the hide is used. The fats are used for everything from toothpaste to flooring to crayons. Collagen and gelatin are extracted. I don't even need to go into the uses of the hide, I feel. The bones and blood are used for organic fertilizer, so I'd wager that many organic vegetarian products today actually rely on the cheap organic fertilizers produced by the meat industry versus synthetic sources. On top of that pasture land is often land that is not compatible for traditonal farming, owing to terrain mostly (e.g. Summit county in Colorado sports a lot of ranching versus farming, due to the rocky mountainous terrain being almost impossible to plow but trivial for a grazer to roam on).

Could you replace all of the parts of the cow with synthetic sources? Certainly. Would this lead to a net reduction in greenhouse gasses and other environmental externalities replacing each and every of these products with synthetic sources that hopefully aren't any more costly? That I doubt, and it worries me that headlines and other material in the media seem to ignore how all these externalizes will be resolved, assuming it will be an easy transition.

> several health issues with milk consumption, unlike quinoa consumption.

Are you claiming that most people who consume milk as a major part of their diet suffer health problems from it? Or that grain-based diets do not cause health issues?

> That is because we've evolved for a orders of magnitude longer to eat plant material.

Evolution has no telos. Evolutionary leaps into new niches are the norm, and hunting had formative impacts on the evolution of modern humans. We've also evolved for orders of magnitude longer walking on all fours (and walking erect causes health issues, such as stressing the back), but that has no bearing on what is healthy or suitable.

> It's not a good argument to take a small exceptional population and apply that reasoning to the general case.

I don't believe I did so. Northern European-origin populations are not small or insignificant, but I agree that for lactose-intolerant populations who have no tradition of using milk-based foods they are generally nutritionally unnecessary.

Dairy isn't nutritionally necessary for anyone. Perhaps it was in the past, but not now. You won't find evidence for that.

Not sure what you mean about telos. Evolution informs us about why we eat what we eat and how we might be affected by various foods, but it does not control us. We can choose what we want to eat.

> Dairy isn't nutritionally necessary for anyone. Perhaps it was in the past, but not now.

Assuming alternative sources of the same essential nutrients, I agree – no single food is nutritionally necessary or ever was. In the real world, meanwhile, dairy products are a key source of protein etc. for people in at least some regions where sufficient alternative sources are not widely affordable or available. Certainly, milk was crucial to the survival of many populations as recently as a century ago (not "aeons ago during some ancient famine").

> Evolution informs us about why we eat what we eat and how we might be affected by various foods

Evolution is an open-ended history of accidents, with much to say about what works for us (as opposed to what cannot).

> but it does not control us.

Indeed. Not only does it not control us, we cannot even conclude based on it that a novel environment or resource will not be advantageous. In the case of ungulate milk consumption, it turns out it was.

> Not sure what you mean about telos.

Evolutionary adaptations are in the nature of accidents, not guided by any purpose or implying any optimal "natural" state. Populations taking advantage of accidental fitness for new niches is a defining pattern in the evolution of life on earth, and consumption of milk by some human populations fits that pattern. Drawing conclusions about the suitability of drinking milk because "we didn't evolve to drink it" is fallacious (in contrast to, say, explaining most people's lack of lactase persistence by their ancestors' non-consumption of milk, which is sound, non-teleological reasoning).

There's also a reason why some people can digest milk: its a resource with nutrients and being able to intake a new source of nutrients offers a selective advantage to your offspring relative to offspring that cannot make use of these nutrients present in the environment. To say its not suitable for consumption by humans is a falsehood considering many adult humans can and do consume milk and make use of its nutrients.

You could posit this argument about anything we consume. Spinach leaves are to provide energy through photosynthesis for the spinach plant, and technically should not be suitable by consumption by adult humans so to speak if we took your logic to the limit. The fact that we have experienced gain of function mutations that allow us to digest spinach and recieve some nutrient benefit from it mean that we are able to take advantage of this resource. Milk in this sense is no different, even if not all of the human population has recieved this gain of function mutation of lactase persistance.

In biology there is no 'suitable' or not especially in the human sense of things being properly defined into discrete categories of expected outcomes, only what is physically posible through thermodynamics. If you physically can extract energy from plants, meat, milk, dirt, whatever, then its all suitable for consumption. having an enzyme to digest this sugar is no different than having teeth fit to grind down fibrous plant matter, or teeth strong and sharp enough to cut through cartilage and sinew.

You are speaking theoretically. That milk was necessary for survival by a small population of humans may have been true aeons ago during some ancient famine. This is not the case right now.

To say that humans can take nutrition from a substance is an argument that there is no criticism of the substance is a bad argument. Humans take energy from pure sugar, or taco bell. Yet to claim they are beyond criticism because they can keep people alive is absurd.

One tricky part with fermented foods is that the salty ones appear to increase rates of colon and stomach cancer as I recall.

I read something years ago about how as the Japanese population adapted a more western diet, heaps of ailments came upon them as you’d expect, but their salt intake declined so dramatically that they stopped experiencing stroke and GI tract cancers nearly as much.

I think you’d need to pin down just how much salt was causing those issues though and then ask if the benefits of the salty fermented foods outweigh the current problem of having depleted gut microbiomes and atrocious diets.

So, I’m certainly not suggesting everyone avoid salty fermented foods. I eat (and make) a fair amount myself and as I alluded above, I suspect it’s better for me than eating food that is, on balance, worse for me.

There’s no perfect diet, but there are clearly worse diets. I try to avoid the latter.

Seems unlikely. A lot of the traditional West African diet is fermented and they have the lowest rates of colon cancer on Earth. Smoked foods and foods containing nitrates/nitrates are correlated with stomach and colon cancer, but not salty or fermented foods. Studies that show a correlation of salt intake with cancer are very possibly confusing intake of smoked meat or processed meat (also high in salt) with colon cancer. For example, when adjusting for processed meat, one study finds that salt is not correlated at all with colon cancer. [1]

[1] https://www.clinicalnutritionjournal.com/article/S0261-5614(...

Interesting, thanks for that. I hadn’t seen it yet. Though the rest still stands, and as mentioned in the paper, reducing sodium intake is still recommended for other health benefits. There is a wealth of other research showing that most people in North America should dramatically reduce their sodium intake.

> Reduction of processed meat intake may be an effective strategy for CRC prevention, while sodium reduction should still be recommended to achieve other health benefits.

Apart from that, I’m still seeing evidence of correlation with stomach cancer, even if not in the lower GI tract:

https://www.wcrf.org/salt-shaking-up-the-link-with-stomach-c...

Given the connection to stomach cancer and cardiovascular disease, it does seem wise to be careful about salt intake.

Regarding west African diets, are they high in salted fermented foods or just fermented foods? It seems if the food is low in salt, it’s probably just fine

There is a wealth of other research showing that most people in North America should dramatically reduce their sodium intake.

The evidence for this seems much less conclusive than most people think: https://examine.com/nutrition/awful-nutrition-myths/#summary.... The tl;dr is that most of that salt comes from crappy food, and that’s what you want to fix - it’s not the salt as such.

It really is the salt though, and examine says as much:

> Some myths contain a grain of truth. Studies have associated excess salt with hypertension (high blood pressure),[54] kidney damage,[55] and an increased risk of cognitive decline.[56][5

The thing is, a lot of people have no idea that their salt intake is way too high. You’re right that the salt tends to come from processed foods, but the salt is still a problem.

I’m not trying to suggest the processed foods are not a problem, either. It’s a compounding problem, and it’s a massive one.

To be fair, that says "a grain of truth", and that's contained within a section entitled: "Myth 6: Salt is bad for you". The summary says:

But a drastic decrease in salt intake has not shown uniform benefit in clinical trials. Most people will benefit more from a diet of mostly unprocessed foods than from micromanaging their salt intake.

As an example, salt-sensitive hypertension is a condition which some people have, but most people don't. If you don't, then salt will generally not affect your blood pressure adversely (it will go up temporarily if you eat a whole Domino's pizza, but will quickly go down again).

There are some interesting points in this podcast and related resources/sources (not a fan of all of this site’s content, though Gregor is good at compiling research):

https://nutritionfacts.org/audio/the-sodium-debate/

My take away from this and other sources is that we don’t have proper long-term, randomized, human trials to determine exactly what to say about this. At the same time, there are cases where a reduction is clearly helpful but no typical cases where an increase is beneficial.

I’m certainly not out to debate or disprove you here — I’d really like to eat more salt, but the evidence I come across doesn’t justify it. I’d rather be wrong, though.

You may be thinking of this.

https://www.newser.com/story/119965/so-do-pickles-really-cau...

Not quite. I’d seen information about fermentation-related carcinogens, but like the article says, I haven’t come across anything suggesting this is problematic unless you eat a lot of this stuff every day (like the people in China who were a part of the study mentioned in the article).

I linked to an article pointing to heavily salted, preserved foods being correlated with stomach cancer in a response to another comment. Though salted fermented foods fall into this category, so would things like jerky or salted olives for example. It isn’t clear to me what should be avoided necessarily, though it seems like decreasing sodium intake is a net positive regardless.

In any case, I think eating these foods is likely okay or even healthful so long as it doesn’t make up a large part of your diet.

Salt tolerance varies a lot with blood pressure

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