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Comment by dreamfactory2 | Hacker News Reader

I have read that only a percentage of the population are sensitive to salt and that has been extrapolated to the whole population because a) it's quite hard/expensive to test, and b) you can theoretically still achieve reductions in average disease and mortality by limiting everybody's intake.

If that's true it's somewhat like making everybody wear glasses, whilst understating the risks to the folks who are actually sensitive.

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But its simple to measure! Take your blood pressure; eat a lot of salty stuff; take your blood pressure.

This is how I learned that caffeine raises my blood pressure about 20 pts. One can of coke. Sigh. And every doctor I have says "oh that's not true, you'd have to drink like 35 cups of coffee". And I'd like to tell them "The more you talk, the less I respect your opinion". Off topic, but what is it about experts that make them spout off their book knowledge exactly when they're faced with contradicting evidence?

It's well known that caffeine causes a rise in blood pressure. That's one reason we have 300-400mg daily maximum level limit. I find this quite disturbing that your doctors didn't know this.

There's a lot of sugar in there too, which is also linked to high blood pressure.

The issue is that plenty of people come in spouting complete nonsense that they "know" about their health, and they're usually wrong. It creates a default reaction. Imagine someone coming in and saying they can't send emails more than 500 miles. If you'd never heard [that story][1] before, you'd probably think they were being ridiculous. They may be absolutely right, but it sounds so different from what you know that you default to saying "Email really doesn't work that way, generally." It doesn't help that you're used to people coming in and saying that a virus put porn in their browser history.

[1]: http://www.ibiblio.org/harris/500milemail.html

You have to realize that either 1) you've made a measuring error or 2) you are the exception to the hundreds of hypochondriac/self-diagnosing/internet expert patients they see on a regular basis that are sure that they have the marburg virus.

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