Low-Salt Diets May Pose Health Risks, Study Finds
online.wsj.com
online.wsj.com
I would argue that my risk factors are probably driven by factors associated with salty food that have nothing to do with sodium consumption per se. My blood pressure (and blood sugar) is essentially perfect after decades of absurd sodium consumption. However, as an example, a lot of salty food is deep fried and so there are other relevant consumption biases. Salt and sugar are not uniformly distributed throughout our food. My current (Pacific Northwest) diet of lean protein and fatty fish plus fresh vegetables has not exactly been detrimental as far as I can tell, even though it is loaded with salt.
What are the chances that there are many other confounding factors? The first one that comes to mind is that people with extremely low sodium intakes may also be the same ones who are malnourished because they can barely afford food.
It might also be interesting to see if there's a strong correlation between sodium intake and life expectancy; comparing http://cdn.chr-hansen.com/fileadmin/user_upload/Salt_Consump... and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Life_Expectancy_2005-2010_... roughly, it doesn't seem like there is much of one... and in fact the other sources I could find indicate a slight positive correlation.
[1] http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB1000142405270230367840...
It makes a bit of sense really. Fat and salt has always been part of the human diet, but large quantities of refined sugar are very recent.
That kind of reasoning is very much flawed. Why would the diet of x years ago be relevant versus having a better diet nowadays ? For all we know, our ancestors were eating berries and much less meat than we do, yet we seem to live longer those days and yet we ingest substances (such as medicines) that were not part of the human diet before.
Actually, that line of reasoning does not make sense at all. That's why we run clinical studies. To find out answers.
That's not very likely and there are plenty of studies that back me up here [1]. For a simple explanation as to why that's not likely look at the calorie counts for berries [2]. You'd have to eat about 10 pounds (~4.5 kg) of blackberries a day to get 2000 calories. There are other more calorie dense non-animal foods like nuts, but most likely around 65% of a hunter gatherer's calories came from meat [1]. This is much more than the amount of protein consumed by the average American today, who gets less than 20% of his or her calories from meat [3].
>yet we seem to live longer those days
Most of the improvement in average lifespan is a result of the drastic decline in infant mortality rate. Hunter gatherers regularly lived into their 70s [4] and when you account for the decline in infant mortality the difference isn't as great as most people imagine. The combination of reduced infant mortality, medical care, and relative safety of civilization are what accounts for our increased lifespan. It's very likely (almost certain given the obesity numbers) that our modern diet is driving the numbers down below what they should be given our other advances.
> That's why we run clinical studies. To find out answers.
Yes it is, and those studies are showing that too much sugar (and most of western civilization eats too much sugar) leads to metabolic syndrome which leads to heart attacks. The debate is on whether sugar does this because it directly causes insulin resistance, or if it is just very calorie dense and thus eating too much simply causes weight gain, or if it reduces satiety and actually causes you to eat more.
I'm not saying eating like a hunter gatherer is necessary for your health, and sure we need to do research--I'm not sure why you think I implied that we didn't. However, it seems logical (again the research we have done backs me up here) that our bodies may not be adapted to handle something we've never eaten in anywhere near the quantities we eat now--specifically the fructose in sugar.
[1] http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/11965522
[2] http://calorielab.com/foods/berries/66
[3] http://ajcn.nutrition.org/content/87/5/1554S.full
[4] http://www.anth.ucsb.edu/faculty/gurven/papers/GurvenKaplan2...
- big factor in longer life spans are the advances in medicine last 150 years - our increase in meat consumption and cooked meat goes ways back and likely tied to our (threefold) increase in brain size
That's not true at all. We're eating more meat than we did 100 years ago sure. But looking back significantly further than that, it's estimated that hunter gatherers got about 65% of their calories from animals, compared to much less than 20% we get today.
See my reply above for references.
EDIT: Besides, I can tell you from what I know on how people were living 50-70 years ago (grandfathers for example) that meat was expensive during their youth and that they only ate it once or twice a month, certainly not every single day like we do now. So I'm not sure where you got the impression people ate so much meat in the early 1900s while it defies all conversations I had with people who lived in that era.
I said this in the comment you're replying too "We're eating more meat than we did 100 years ago sure". I'm agreeing with your assertion that we eat more meat than we did 100 years ago. 100 years ago we ate significantly less meat than our hunter gatherer ancestors did.
>I'll check you references later, but I'm wondering where the hunter gatherers got so much meat before they had industrial meat factories that we have
They didn't need industrial farms because there were far fewer people. They hunted animals, which were relatively abundant. Meat is much more calorie dense than most plants.
Hunter gatherers didn't have agriculture, so many of the plants we eat today weren't yet domesticated. They lacked entire categories of food that we have today.
The largest percentage of daily caloric intake today comes from grains--hunter gathers didn't farm grains, so they had to get the largest share of their calories from something else--meat.
>Besides, percentages is one thing, absolute intakes are another, too.
An average adult male can't live long term with fewer than around 2000 calories per day (A very active hunter gatherer would require a far amount more than 2000 per day). The average American male eats about 2700 calories per day.
Let's take the lower end estimate for 2000 calories per day for a hunter gatherer. At 65%, meat accounts for 1300 calories per day.
At 20% of 2700 calories, an average American male gets 540 calories per day from meat.
So 1300 for the hunter gatherer vs 540 for the average American male. Almost 3 times as much. Even in absolute numbers, the hunter gatherer at much more meat.
It cost a lot of time/energy to hunt, for sure. But that's basically all they did. And reading descriptions of say, the Americas before European colonisation, meat was plenty despite industrial breeding, or any breeding at all.
The most recent change I think was to make it a strange looking thing:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Food_guide_pyramid#mediaviewer...
With "milk" being it own category. (Hello Milk Lobby) and then some humanoid shape running up the stairs.
Basically the message is "eat whatever is marketed to you, but if you get fat is because you didn't run up the stairs enough".
And I believe they found that sugar does not cause hyperactivity, but somehow discovered that it helped either remember events better or learn new things.
Now looking back I think I had experienced that myself -- I remember my mom made some strawberry jam and I was eating it with a spoon for whatever reason, and it was while studying for a final oral exam in history (this is a different country, were we had to memorize and answer all 50 or so questions and then we'd be questioned on it orally by student). Anyway that one instance, out of many instances in years before before and after, I was remembering and at much higher rate. At least high enough to be noticeable to me.
Seeing the study years later kind of confirmed it.
They did NOT find high salt wasn't actually bad for you.
Soylent ran into issues by including around a gram of salt in their 1.0 version with people getting dizzy from too little sodium in the diet. They're now suggesting adding some extra.
Edit: actually, my opinion on "everything in moderation" is even stronger: I consider it a useless advice. Because, where do you even begin? Should you use some salt in your cooking? But how much? Or should you use none, because there is already some present in foods you buy? Or should you actively avoid foods that have already some salt added?
And it ends up like this: everyone thinks that he eats X in moderation, while anyone who eats less X is just unnecessary resticting himself, and anyone who eats more X is a glutton.
Or consider, would you say "smoking in moderation is okay and healthful"? And if not, how do we know that there are no substances consumed as foods that act in a similar way - hurt us even taken in moderation?
This sort of study makes me feel better about my intuition of what to do when my doctor told me to cut back on the salt, though: stop letting myself use it as a seasoning, think a few times before grabbing a snack whose entire purpose is to shovel salt into my mouth, but still eat things that had salt involved in their preparation. My blood pressure has gone from "why are you not keeling over right now" to "slightly elevated" thanks to this.
do people still believe salt raises blood pressure too?
keto recommends between 3 and 5 grams of salt per day
your blood is salty, only way to replenish salt is through the diet, especially important if you're sweating
While I'm on keto myself and I love it, that sentence isn't exactly a proof for anything.
Until I know who funded the research, I'm taking the results with a grain of salt.
Do populations with high sodium intake also have other lifestyle factors that influence mortality and morbidity? Is it really the sodium that's causing the differences found in the study or are there other factors?
How many times have we seen corporations fund research designed to support their interests and then selectively publish the results that are favorable to them?
Would you view the research in a different light if you knew it was funded by PepsiCo, McDonalds, Sara Lee and Campbell Soup Company?
Why aren't the funders disclosed along with the results?
"Sodium is an essential nutrient that regulates blood volume, blood pressure, osmotic equilibrium and pH;..."
doesn't it sound like it better be not too low and not too much ? :)
That statement is pretty much impossible to logically disagree with so yes
not impossible. At least for proponents of low sodium it is possible.
This isn't even new knowledge... Our bodies need various proteins, sugars and minerals in certain quantities - call the fucking press...
As an aside, there's also a reason that iodine is required to be added to salt and various stable products in some countries.
Animals seek salt because they need it, as did ancient humans to the present day, saying humans need salt is like saying humans need water, or protein, or vitamin B.
It's not like salt is some new chemical we know nothing about - we've known about it for at least 10,000 years (probably longer). It's nice and all that now we know you should have between 3000 and 6000 mg per day (which is higher than what agencies recommend, but apparently around the average consumption in many places anyway), but come on...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyponatremia
Also, there's a reason athletes drink liquids with electrolytes in them (salt is one) - because the effects of a deficiency of salt and other electrolytes is known...
Independent body who runs a well-controlled double blinded study? A+
Biased organization who runs an analysis of questionable observational data with barely passible statistical significance? F
They already do this for cancer therapies. NCCN gives rating that describe how much evidence exists for a given therapy.
But that sells a lot less clicks than "SCIENCE SAYS LOW SALT IS BAD FOR YOU OMG"
The confidence rating you mention has little value to the general public, and even among scientists, the value of 'p-value' is questionable and the matter of occasional debate.
http://annals.org/article.aspx?articleid=712762#ThePValueFal...