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Tuesday, August 02, 2011

Salt is good for you.

So is cholesterol.  So is fat.  Nobody listens, nobody cares...  just keep watching Dr. Oz, America.

Further info on how we arrived at all this bad nutritional advice [hint: politics] at the link.  Fat Head » Another A-Salt on Science:
"This week a meta-analysis of seven studies involving a total of 6,250 subjects in the American Journal of Hypertension found no strong evidence that cutting salt intake reduces the risk for heart attacks, strokes or death in people with normal or high blood pressure. In May European researchers publishing in the Journal of the American Medical Association reported that the less sodium that study subjects excreted in their urine—an excellent measure of prior consumption—the greater their risk was of dying from heart disease. These findings call into question the common wisdom that excess salt is bad for you, but the evidence linking salt to heart disease has always been tenuous.
I’d say labeling the evidence linking salt to heart disease as tenuous is being generous. Non-existent would be the more accurate term, unless you engage in some major cherry-picking. In real science, no consistency means no validity, and the associations between salt and heart disease or mortality aren’t even close to being consistent. If anything, the associations are all over the place...
For every study that suggests that salt is unhealthy, another does not.
Bingo. No consistency, no scientific validity. Given an honest analysis of the science, we’d have to conclude that restricting salt is pointless from a public-health standpoint, except as advice given to the few people who are hyper-sensitive to salt...

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