Health: Horrifying salt!

Salt: Why Top Experts Give Wildly Conflicting Advice And What To Do Until They Figure It Out
9/17/2014
By F.D. Flam
Doctors and scientists sometimes complain that the public doesn’t trust them, but occasionally they can make trust impossible. Last month, for example, medical researchers gave health-conscious consumers information whiplash on the dangers of too much – or too little – dietary salt. One the one side were the experts from the American Heart Association warning us that 99 percent of American adults consume more than the recommended safe maximum of 1.5 grams of sodium a day. The average is more than twice that, at 3.5 grams.
The message about the dangers of salt got a boost from a study in the New England Journal of Medicine concluding that salt kills 1.65 million people a year worldwide.
And then other scientists come along and say the heart association’s maximum intake is so low it might pose a danger. In an extensive study, they found that subjects who consumed less than 3 grams a day were more likely to die from heart attacks and strokes than those who consumed between 3 and 6 grams a day. That study was also published in the New England Journal of Medicine.
The media were split. NPR, reported that salt is a “global killer”, while the Wall Street Journal warns that low sodium diets may “pose health risks.”
It is possible to sort through the mess and decide whether you can safely salt your popcorn. Scientists on both sides come armed with data, so figuring out who is right requires a look at the way they are interpreting data and which assumptions they put behind it.
The first step is to look at the new studies in the wider context of existing evidence. Doctors in the anti-salt camp were quick to point out that people shouldn’t jump to the conclusion that moderate salt intake is safe based on any single study. New data should be considered in context.
If anyone knows the context on salt consumption, it’s Brian Strom, chancellor of health and biomedical research at Rutgers. Several years ago, he was asked to head a panel, convened by the Institute of Medicine, to examine the evidence to date on salt and health. Results came out last year.
Strom said the panel found no evidence that anyone can benefit from cutting sodium below about 2.3 grams a day. And they saw some hints that going lower might cause harm.
The limits set by the American Heart Association are not based on a direct cause-and-effect link between salt and heart disease, he said. The limit was derived through a process that he called “not entirely rational”. The recommendation for maximum salt intake of 1.5 grams, he said, is really the minimum amount of sodium that it’s possible to ingest while eating enough food to maintain proper nutrition. All food contains some sodium, so the guideline represents a zero-tolerance policy with regard to added salt.
Why such a draconian limits? That depend on which scientist you talk to. Strom says it’s based on assumption and extrapolation. Clinical studies showed that people who consume a lot of sodium can lower their blood pressure by cutting back. And other research shows that chronic high blood pressure is correlated with heart disease and strokes. From that, he said, the medical community inferred that salt causes heart disease. It wasn’t an unreasonable assumption, he said, but evidence is mounting that the relationships between salt, blood pressure and heart disease are a lot more complicated, and that moderate salt may do people some good.
Strom says he takes seriously the recent study, out of McMaster University in Canada, showing moderate salt eaters were healthier than those on the extremes. The important thing to consider, he said, is that it’s the first large study to directly compare salt intake and cardiovascular death. Most previous studies looked at the effect of salt on blood pressure and inferred the connection to disease, he said.
The McMaster researchers followed 100,000 subjects of diverse ethnic backgrounds. Those who were least likely to die from heart disease or stroke were those who consumed between 3 and 6 grams of sodium per day – far above recommendations of the heart association, the CDC or the World Health Organization.
There seems to be wide agreement that the experiment had its limitations, and that there’s still a dearth of research that directly connects death to salt consumption. Such research his a lot more difficult than it sounds, said Rutgers’ Strom. Since sodium is infused in food, you can’t just ask people to record their intake. The biggest source of salt in the American diet is bread, he said, not because it’s unusually salty but because we eat a lot of it. So sodium input has to be estimated from output in urine, and there are complications in getting lots of people to collect all their urine for an extended period of time.
The McMaster study used single urine samples and extrapolated, which some consider a serious flaw and others less so.
But long before this study was done, the medical community had become tangled in discord over the way they inferred the safest course of action from the limited data at hand.
Cardiologist Elliott Antman, president of the American Heart Association, says the safest course is to keep the present guidelines, since he finds the evidence linking salt and blood pressure to be compelling, and this new McMaster study less so.
Michael Alderman of the Albert Einstein College of Medicine, on the other hand, says the safest course of action is to leave the American diet alone until we have strong evidence that a low salt diet is beneficial and will cause no harm. He sees evidence mounting to the contrary. “The American Heart Association has been telling us for 40 years we should eat less salt, and that does apply at the high end, but the fallacy is that they take it and apply it through any sodium intake,” he said. Previous studies had shown that the relationship between sodium and blood pressure is not linear, he said. Cutting back on salt has a diminishing effect, and below 2.3 grams a day it has no effect on blood pressure.
Another assumption, said Alderman, was the notion that no harm could come from very low sodium diets. And yet, he said, sodium has many effects other than influencing blood pressure. Lowering sodium intake can increase triglycerides, for example and contribute to insulin resistance.
The other new study to make headlines last month connects salt to millions of global deaths, but that depended on the assumption that even moderate salt intake is dangerous, said Alderman. It uses data on blood pressure and salt, and other data sets on cardiovascular-related deaths and blood pressure, and then creates a model to reach the conclusion that salt kills more than a million people a year.
The studies aren’t completely contradictory. High salt consumption could still be a global killer, while moderate salt intake is deemed safe.
Another clue might come from an even broader look at the relationship of salt to all living things. For life to take hold on a planet, salt, like sunlight, needs to be in a certain range – a Goldilocks zone – said Arizona State University astrobiology professor Paul Knauth.
Life has not only adapted to our salty planet, he said, but incorporated salt into its most essential machinery. In your bloodstream, salt separates into electrically charged sodium and chloride ions, and these allow cells to store and transfer energy, like batteries. “Advanced organism like us are full of electronic circuitry- you brain is essentially an electronic device,” he said. “Sodium and chloride are essential for electronics in cells and controlling the mechanisms that allow cells to operate.”
When those electrically charged sodium ions pass through cell membranes, he said, it generates an electric charge that sends signals through your nervous system.
With such an important and delicate function, it makes sense that our bodies work best when the salt in our bloodstreams stays in a Goldilocks zone. But where is it for us?
The new McMaster urine test results could raise concern that some of people are eating too little salt. Does that mean we now need to worry about an epidemic of sodium deficiency?
Not necessarily, said Strom. The McMaster study doesn’t prove that low sodium is causing people to die. These people at the low end of the spectrum may be undernourished in some way. They may also lack potassium or other nutrients.
In his view, moderation is the safest course of action, and then more research to better determine what defines moderate. It seems counterintuitive that many Americans are already being moderate. Could that be possible?
Yes, said Albert Einstein’s Alderman. Despite the rise in salty processed food, the average American intake is about the same now as it was in the 1950s, he said. And it’s relatively consistent across countries, though in some places, such as China, it’s somewhat higher.
In the end, the confusion is not over the way people are doing science, but in the ways doctors are interpreting the science and making subjective judgments about safety in light of limited knowledge. There may never be a one-size-fits-all answer. In the meantime, moderation is the advice of the doctor who reviewed all the research to date. Worrying too much can’t help either. Doctors say stress can raise your blood pressure.

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When Salt IS Good for You: The Thyroid Health Connection
June 25, 2014
In recent years, medical journals and consumer publications alike have been hashing out the controversy about salt consumption and its effects on an array of medical conditions, primarily high blood pressure and heart disease, but also osteoporosis, kidney stones and kidney disease, and obesity.
There is one fundamental fact that has gotten lost in the great salt debate: the substance is one of the primary vehicles for delivering iodine to the body’s thyroid gland, which is essential to production of thyroid hormone. Thyroid hormone is used in every cell of our bodies to regulate metabolism and weight by controlling the burning of fat for energy and heat and managing the regulation of other vital body functions. Without iodine, thyroid hormone production simply does not happen, thus throwing the body into a tailspin.
Although iodine is present naturally in seawater and soil, a stable source of the element does not exist in many parts of the world, and the body does not make iodine. Consequently, management of iodine deficiency disorders is a fundamental part of most national nutrition strategies.
In the U.S., salt producers have been working with public health authorities since the 1920s to add iodine to table salt; it was used then to correct what was a national epidemic of goiter, an abnormal enlargement of the thyroid gland that occurs when the thyroid enlarges in response to an insufficient supply of thyroid hormone. Salt was used because it is an easy, spoil-free method of getting iodine into the food chain.
Pregnant women are at particular risk of iodine deficiency, because of increased thyroid hormone production during pregnancy, which a fetus needs inside the womb to reach optimal development. Iodine deficiency during pregnancy can result in damage to the developing brain and can lead to profound mental retardation and problems with growth, hearing and speech.
Women who are breastfeeding also need higher iodine intake, since iodine is transported into breast milk, where it is important for infant nutrition.
The American Association of Endocrinologists (AACE) and the American College of Endocrinology (ACE) recommend that all U.S. women who are pregnant, breastfeeding or planning a pregnancy should take a daily multivitamin containing 150 micrograms of iodine to avoid iodine deficiency.
Iodine deficiency also can lead to hypothyroidism (low thyroid hormone levels). In hypothyroidism, because the body’s cells aren’t receiving enough thyroid hormone, the bodily processes start slowing down, causing intolerance to cold, fatigue, dry skin, constipation, depression, forgetfulness and more. Hypothyroidism disproportionately affects women more than men, because the female hormone estrogen inhibits the absorption of iodine.

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Salt Is Worse Than Tobacco
11/18/2013
By Georg Mathisen
Sodium chloride is – well – the salt of life. We would die without it. But too much salt is really harmful. Senior Researcher Ulla Toft at the Research Centre for Prevention and Health in Copenhagen thinks we err on the side of salinity.
Toft was a speaker at the recent MeetEat conference in Oslo and lectured the meatpacking industry on salt from a health perspective.
“Our ancestors ate less than one gram of salt per day,” says Toft.
She says that one-and-a-half grams of salt daily is sufficient. We now consume around ten grams. Health authorities in Norway advise women to reduce that to six grams by 2018 – men are urged to limit themselves to seven grams. Once that is achieved, the next Norwegian goal will be to decrease intake to five grams a day.
High blood pressure
Hypertension and the corresponding risk of cardiovascular diseases are the most dangerous consequences of too much salt. High blood pressure is responsible for 50 percent of all cases of angina and heart attacks, and 60 percent of all strokes.
“We have a convincing cause-and-effect relationship between high salt intake and cardiovascular diseases,” says Toft.
She points to stomach cancer, osteoporosis and kidney stones – and perhaps also obesity and diabetes – as other consequences of our overconsumption of salt.
Saving 900 lives
Toft has calculated what Denmark can save if the average daily salt consumption were lowered by three grams – which is also the reduction that nutritionists want to see in Norway.
“Every year we can expect 400,000 fewer incidences of elevated blood pressure, 1,100 to 1,800 fewer cases of cardiovascular diseases, 600 to 1,000 fewer strokes and at least 1,000 fewer deaths,” she says.
Denmark has a population of 5.6 million – Norway has 5 million. Danes tend to consume about the same amount of salt as Norwegians. Transferring these estimates, Norway could expect around 900 fewer deaths a year if salt intake dropped by three grams a day. It would also save the country hundreds of millions of dollars in health costs.
In fact, reducting salt intake can be a better and cheaper form of life insurance than cutting down on smoking.?? Toft points to figures which show that a 15 percent cut in salt intake prevents three times as many deaths from cardiovascular disease as does a 20 percent cut in smoking.
These numbers were crunched in a study of 23 countries with medium and low incomes per capita, and possibly other levels of tobacco and salt consumption than in Scandinavia. So they cannot be directly transferred to prospective health gains in Norway. But the trend is clear.
Consumers wish to cut down
Norwegian consumers do want to reduce their salt consumption, according to Lars Johansson of the Norwegian Directorate of Health. International initiatives are underway – WHO, the EU and the Nordic Council of Ministers are working to lower our salt intakes.
Slightly over half of the salt in Norwegian foods is found in meat and grain products. That can be reduced. For instance, the salt content of bread has been cut 50 percent from 1984 to today.
In Great Britain, where media focus and consumer awareness regarding salt started several years before it did in Norway, studies have shown that consumers have noticed no change in the taste of foods as salt content has been gradually reduced. Low-salt foods sell just as well as other products.
Alternatives to sodium chloride
Alternatives to the salt we now have in foods are available. But that requires producers to understand their products, asserts doctoral student Kirsti Greiff at the independent Norwegian research organisation Sintef.
“There are all kinds of possibilities. But it comes down to what role salt plays in a product. If it’s just a matter of taste, for instance, yeast extracts can be added. But if the functional properties of salt are involved, if it is used as a water binding agent, for example, another type of salt has to be added, such as potassium chloride.”
“If microbiological issues are at stake – if the salt is preventing bacteria from multiplying –? lactates or other ingredients would have to be used as substitutes. If we take away something that hampers bacteria we need to ensure that something else does the job,” she says.
Greiff wants the food industry to start reducing salt content whenever possible, without adding anything at all.
“Certain products have a relatively high concentration. Producers can try reducing the salt in different products and see how people react. But we need to do more than just reduce the salt if we want to achieve the goals set by health authorities. We have to add substitutes.”
The salt you have in a shaker on your table is not the big problem. Table salt sprinkled on your plate is only a small share of your total consumption. And it is effective – it provides a rapid change in taste, because it is on the surface and hits your tongue immediately, unlike much of the salt that is blended into the product.
“The sodium reduction we really need to see is in industrially produced foods,” says Greiff.

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No Benefit Seen in Sharp Limits on Salt in Diet
May 14, 2013
By GINA KOLATA
In a report that undercuts years of public health warnings, a prestigious group convened by the government says there is no good reason based on health outcomes for many Americans to drive their sodium consumption down to the very low levels recommended in national dietary guidelines.
Those levels, 1,500 milligrams of sodium a day, or a little more than half a teaspoon of salt, were supposed to prevent heart attacks and strokes in people at risk, including anyone older than 50, blacks and people with high blood pressure, diabetes or chronic kidney disease — groups that make up more than half of the American population.
Some influential organizations, including the American Heart Association, have said that everyone, not just those at risk, should aim for that very low sodium level. The heart association reaffirmed that position in an interview with its spokesman on Monday, even in light of the new report.
But the new expert committee, commissioned by the Institute of Medicine at the behest of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, said there was no rationale for anyone to aim for sodium levels below 2,300 milligrams a day. The group examined new evidence that had emerged since the last such report was issued, in 2005.
“As you go below the 2,300 mark, there is an absence of data in terms of benefit and there begin to be suggestions in subgroup populations about potential harms,” said Dr. Brian L. Strom, chairman of the committee and a professor of public health at the University of Pennsylvania. He explained that the possible harms included increased rates of heart attacks and an increased risk of death.
The committee was not asked to specify an optimal amount of sodium and did not make any recommendations about how much people should consume. Dr. Strom said people should not eat too much salt, but he also said that the data on the health effects of sodium were too inconsistent for the committee to say what the upper limit of sodium consumption should be.
Until about 2006, almost all studies on salt and health outcomes relied on the well-known fact that blood pressure can drop slightly when people eat less salt. From that, and from other studies linking blood pressure to risks of heart attacks and strokes, researchers created models showing how many lives could be saved if people ate less salt.
The United States dietary guidelines, based on the 2005 Institute of Medicine report, recommend that the general population aim for sodium levels of 1,500 to 2,300 milligrams a day because those levels will not raise blood pressure. The average sodium consumption in the United States, and around the world, is about 3,400 milligrams a day, according to the Institute of Medicine — an amount that has not changed in decades.
But more recently, researchers began looking at the actual consequences of various levels of salt consumption, as found in rates of heart attacks, strokes and death, not just blood pressure readings. Some of what they found was troubling.
One 2008 study the committee examined, for example, randomly assigned 232 Italian patients with aggressively treated moderate to severe congestive heart failure to consume either 2,760 or 1,840 milligrams of sodium a day, but otherwise to consume the same diet. Those consuming the lower level of sodium had more than three times the number of hospital readmissions — 30 as compared with 9 in the higher-salt group — and more than twice as many deaths — 15 as compared with 6 in the higher-salt group.
Another study, published in 2011, followed 28,800 subjects with high blood pressure ages 55 and older for 4.7 years and analyzed their sodium consumption by urinalysis. The researchers reported that the risks of heart attacks, strokes, congestive heart failure and death from heart disease increased significantly for those consuming more than 7,000 milligrams of sodium a day and for those consuming fewer than 3,000 milligrams of sodium a day.
There are physiological consequences of consuming little sodium, said Dr. Michael H. Alderman, a dietary sodium expert at Albert Einstein College of Medicine who was not a member of the committee. As sodium levels plunge, triglyceride levels increase, insulin resistance increases, and the activity of the sympathetic nervous system increases. Each of these factors can increase the risk of heart disease.
“Those are all bad things,” Dr. Alderman said. “A health effect can’t be predicted by looking at one physiological consequence. There has to be a net effect.”
Medical and public health experts responded to the new assessment of the evidence with elation or concern, depending on where they stand in the salt debates.
“What they have done is earth-shattering,” Dr. Alderman said. “They have changed the paradigm of this issue. Until now it was all about blood pressure. Now they say it is more complicated.” The report, he predicted, “will have a big impact.”
But Bonnie Liebman, director of nutrition at the Center for Science in the Public Interest, an advocacy group that has taken a strong position against excessive salt consumption, worried that the public would get the wrong message.
“It would be a shame if this report convinced people that salt doesn’t matter,” Ms. Liebman said.
The American Heart Association agrees with her. Dr. Elliott Antman, a spokesman for the association and a professor of medicine at Brigham and Women’s Hospital n Boston, said the association remained concerned about the large amount of sodium in processed foods, which makes it almost impossible for most Americans to cut back. People should aim for 1,500 milligrams of sodium a day, he said.
“The American Heart Association is not changing its position,” Dr. Antman said. The association rejects the Institute of Medicine’s conclusions because the studies on which they were based had methodological flaws, he said. The heart association’s advice to consume 1,500 milligrams of sodium a day, he added, is based on epidemiological data and studies that assessed the effects of sodium consumption on blood pressure.
The Institute of Medicine committee said it was well aware of flaws in many of the studies of sodium, especially ones that the previous Institute of Medicine committee relied on for its 2005 recommendations. Much of that earlier research, committee members said, looked for correlations between what people ate and their health. But people with different diets can differ in many ways that are hard to account for — for example, the amount of exercise they get. And relying on people’s recall of how much salt they consumed can be unreliable.
Even the ways previous studies defined high and low sodium consumption varied widely.
“In one study, it was high if it hit 2,700 milligrams a day. In another study, it was high if it hit 10,000 milligrams a day,” said Cheryl A. M. Anderson, a committee member who is an associate professor of family and preventive medicine at the University of California, San Diego.
The committee said it found more recent studies, published since 2005, that were more careful and rigorous. Much of the new research found adverse effects on the lower end of the sodium scale and none showed a benefit from consuming very little salt.
Although the advice to restrict sodium to 1,500 milligrams a day has been enshrined in dietary guidelines, it never came from research on health outcomes, Dr. Strom said. Instead, it is the lowest sodium consumption can go if a person eats enough food to get sufficient calories and nutrients to live on. As for the 2,300-milligram level, that was the highest sodium levels could go before blood pressure began inching up.
In its 2005 report, the Institute of Medicine’s committee said that sodium consumption between 1,500 and 2,300 milligrams a day would not raise blood pressure.
That range, Dr. Strom said, “was taken by other groups and set in stone.” Those other groups included the Department of Agriculture and the Department of Health and Human Services, which formulated dietary guidelines in 2005.
But those dietary guidelines will soon be revised, with new recommendations to be issued in 2015.

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CDC Nannies
The Salt War reaches the cancer stage.

February, 2012
Written by: Leg-iron

I can’t wait to see the reaction when the Daily Howl-at-the-moon and its frothy-lipped commenters get hold of this one.

Salt gives you cancer.

Yes, following the tobacco control template to the letter, salt now gives you lumpy tum. There are so many people falling for the same trick every time that I have to wonder how they manage to find their way out of bed in the mornings. GPS perhaps?

Just as the drink argument now bypasses the most likely effect of excessiveness (pulverised liver) and goes to the iDeath of the Day, the pancreas, then on to cancer, the salt loons make no mention of the kidney damage which is likely to be the first effect of excessive salt intake. No, that’s yesterday’s disease. It has to be cancer.

Everything gives you cancer now. I remember reading, many years ago, about a study that used these same statistical games to prove that hot showers give you lung cancer. I have one of those every day but there’s no need to worry. I clean out my lungs with a smoke afterwards.Shower cancer? Oooh, no, I don’t want that.

I don’t count units of booze per day because the limits are made-up numbers. I eat fruit and veg as and when I feel like it because the recommended intake is a made-up number.

I have never measured the amount of salt I use and am not interested in doing so. They talk about five grams a day but who’s that for? Me? Someone twice my size? Someone half my size? Someone who drinks less than I do and who therefore flushes their system less often? Someone who drinks more? Someone whose kidneys are genetically more efficient than mine or someone whose kidneys are less efficient, someone whose gut absorbs salt more efficiently than mine or… you get the idea. The five grams is for the BMA’s British Standard Human because they cannot understand that people are individuals.

Is it another made-up number? Well, why on Earth would I even consider for a moment that there was any research behind it? There has been none at all behind anything else. As Frank says, the medical profession is determined to be seen as a haven of quackery and about as reliable as a man in a grass skirt and wooden mask shaking bits of animal at you. They’ll be prescribing it soon, you know. “Cancer? Take these stoat’s entrails and wave them over the affected part twice daily.” At least the only side effect will be stoat’s blood on your shirt and possibly an increased level of interest from your cat.

The article comes from the food industry and smacks of the same appeasement tried by the tobacco and drinks industry. They do attempt to point out that with no salt at all, we’ll all die but you just know ‘no safe level’ is on the way. They also point out that they don’t put lots of salt in some foods just to be nasty. It’s a preservative.

Roast pork was a staple of the old sailing ships.? They kept in in barrels full of salt. Not just a sprinkling. A barrel filled to the brim with salt. That stopped it going off. Possibly something of an overkill there but there is one important thing about salt that CASH don’t know.

It stops the growth of Clostridium, a genus of bacterium which includes the species responsible for gas gangrene and for botulism. The genus includes other nasties too. The bacterium grows without oxygen and forms spores that can withstand boiling for at least ten minutes. They don’t even notice pasteurisation. The spores can be dried out for years and still germinate. So tinned food is often in brine because even if one of these gets inside the can, they can’t grow in salty solutions.

The extra salt you get when you eat these things is simply flushed out by your kidneys. Salt only becomes a problem if you eat vast amounts of it or if you don’t take in enough fluids to keep the kidneys in flush mode.

Botulism is a far bigger problem. We’ve already seen the rise of rickets because of lunatic control freakery that only lets kids out in the sun if they are painted all over with enough sunblock to make them reflective. Those C. botulinum bacteria are rubbing their little flagella together in anticipation of their soon-to-be-announced comeback tour. Oh, and C. difficile will be on its way to a tin of carrots in your local shop too.

I still have plenty of salt. Hardly used any on the paths this year and I’ll be increasing my supply.

There will be one benefit of the CASH lunacy. All the dopes who fall for it will be comatose so we won’t have to listen to them. It won’t take long. They’ll be exercising regularly, not drinking and not eating anything with salt or fat in it so they should only take a couple of weeks to get to this stage.

Maintenance of a low salt diet for many months or excessive sweat loss during a race on a hot day can present a challenge to the body to conserve adequate sodium levels.

It won’t take months on a no-salt diet.

Keep it up, Righteous. Soon you will have killed all of your idiot drones.

I think I’ll have a bag of pork scratchings to go with my whisky and tobacco this evening.

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CDC: 9 out of 10 Americans eat too much salt
The Centers for Disease Control said Tuesday on average Americans consume 3,300 mgs of sodium every day, putting people at risk for high blood pressure, heart disease, and diabetes. NBC’s Tom Costello reports.

2/7/12

Despite public health messages telling Americans to lower the amount of salt in their diets, most of us still eat too much of the stuff, according to a new report from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Nine out of 10 people ages 2 and older in the United States consume more than the recommended amount of sodium each day, the report says, and the leading culprit is not potato chips or popcorn but slices of bread and dinner rolls.

Bread may not have much salt in a single serving, but when eaten several times a day can raise daily salt intake. A single slice of white bread could contain as many as 230 milligrams of salt, according to the CDC.

The average American takes in about 3,300 milligrams of sodium per day — and that’s not counting the salt you might shake onto your food before you eat it. The 2010 U.S. Dietary Guidelines recommend people limit the salt in their diet to 2,300 milligrams per day. And for 6 out of every 10 adults, the recommended limit is substantially lower: those who are 51 years or older, African-American, have high blood pressure, diabetes or chronic kidney diseases are advised to limit their sodium intake to 1,500 milligrams per day. About 99 percent of people in this latter group eat too much salt, the report says.

“Too much sodium raises blood pressure, which is a major risk factor for heart disease and stroke,” Dr. Thomas Frieden, director of the CDC, said in a statement. “These diseases kill more than 800,000 Americans each year, and contribute an estimated $273 billion in health care costs,” he said.

A 2010 report from the CDC, based on surveys from 2005 to 2006, also found that 9 in 10 Americans consume too much salt. However, the average daily sodium intake reported back then was slighly higher, about 3,500 milligrams.

Top sources of sodium
The report identified the top 10 sources of sodium in our diets, which include a lot of food we find tasty. These are, in order: breads and rolls, luncheon meats, pizza, poultry, soups, cheeseburgers and other sandwiches, cheese, pasta dishes, meat dishes such as meat loaf, and snack foods like potato chips and pretzels. These foods account for 44 percent of all the sodium we eat in a day.

About 65 percent of our total daily sodium comes from foods we buy at the store. But within some of the food categories, such as pizza, about 50 percent comes from foods we buy at restaurants and fast food outlets.

For children ages 2 to 19, only about 8 percent of sodium comes from foods obtained from school cafeterias and day care centers, the report says.

The findings are based on surveys of 7,227 Americans conducted between 2007 and 2008.

Cutting back on salt
Cutting back on salt isn’t easy, the report acknowledged. Some foods that may seem healthy, such as turkey lunchmeat that is low in calories and fat, may have high levels of sodium, the report said. In addition, a lot of the salt we eat comes from processed foods.

The CDC recommended Americans check food labels to purchase foods with lower sodium content. People should also try to consume a diet rich in fruits and vegetables, and limit the amount of processed foods with high sodium content, the CDC says.

Frieden said that some food manufacturers and restaurants are making efforts to lower the amount of salt added to their foods.

“We’re encouraged that some food manufacturers are already taking steps to reduce sodium,” Frieden said. “Kraft Foods has committed to an average 10 percent reduction of sodium in their products over a two-year period, and dozens of companies have joined a national initiative to reduce sodium. The leading supplier of cheese for pizza, Leprino Foods, is actively working on providing customers and consumers with healthier options,” Frieden said.

Lowering the average American’s salt intake by 400 milligrams could prevent up to 28,000 deaths, and save $7 billion in health-care costs, each year, according to projections in the report.

However, not all studies have been able to find benefits of a reduced salt diet. A review study published last year that included information from 6,500 people found that moderate reductions in salt in the diet lowered blood pressure, but did not reduce participants’ risk of having heart disease or dying. Still, those researchers said that perhaps even greater reductions in salt were needed to see a benefit.

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Big Benefits Are Seen From Eating Less Salt

January 21, 2010
By PAM BELLUCK

In a report that may bolster public policy efforts to get Americans to reduce the amount of salt in their diets, scientists writing in The New England Journal of Medicine conclude that lowering the amount of salt people eat by even a small amount could reduce cases of heart disease, stroke and heart attacks as much as reductions in smoking, obesity and cholesterol levels.

If everyone consumed half a teaspoon less salt per day, there would be between 54,000 and 99,000 fewer heart attacks each year and between 44,000 and 92,000 fewer deaths, according to the study, which was conducted by scientists at University of California San Francisco, Stanford University Medical Center and Columbia University Medical Center.

The report comes as health authorities at federal, state and municipal levels are considering policies that would have the effect of pressuring food companies to reduce salt in processed foods, which are considered to be the source of much of the salt Americans eat.

Last week, New York City announced an initiative to urge food manufacturers and restaurant chains to reduce salt in their products nationwide by 25 percent over the next five years. California, according to an author of the study, Kirsten Bibbins-Domingo, an associate professor of medicine and epidemiology at University of California, San Francisco, is considering setting salt limits on food the state purchase for schools, prisons and other public institutions.

A panel appointed by the Institute of Medicine, the widely respected independent research arm of the National Academies of Science, is close to issuing a report that will make recommendations about reducing salt intake, including actions government and manufacturers can take.

Dr. Bibbins-Domingo also said the Food and Drug Administration was considering whether to change the designation of salt from a food additive that is generally considered safe to a category that would require companies to give consumers more information alerting them to high levels of salt in food. An F.D.A. spokesman was unable to say Wednesday whether such discussions were taking place. “We are actively looking at how to improve the nutrition content of the American content,” he said.

“For 40 years in this country we’ve been trying to get individuals to reduce the amount of sodium we consume and it hasn’t worked,” said Cheryl A. M. Anderson, an assistant professor of epidemiology and international health at Johns Hopkins University and a member of the Institute of Medicine panel.

“We need to collectively come together and approach the problem with a combination of efforts, including changing the food supply,” said Dr. Anderson, who also is a co-author of an editorial about the study in The New England Journal of Medicine. “This type of evidence really helps us support that movement toward not just relying on the individual to do something that is really difficult, limit salt.”

The study involved a computerized model that analyzed previous studies to estimate the benefits of salt reduction on lowering blood pressure and the lowered blood pressure’s effect on decreasing heart disease, stroke and heart attacks.

The researchers found that everyone would benefit from less salt, but people at higher risk for heart problems – blacks, people with hypertension and people over 65 – would benefit most.

Not every expert in the field of salt science was persuaded.

Michael Alderman, a professor of medicine and epidemiology at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine, said the research was “based on the assumption that there would be no other effects of reduced sodium, but that’s not so.” He said that salt reduction could lead to insulin resistance and imbalances of hormones in the adrenal and kidney systems, and that clinical trials comparing these effects with the benefits of lowering blood pressure needed to be conducted.

Dr. Norman K. Hollenberg, a professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School, questioned the assertion that the benefit of salt-reduction policies would be as great as antismoking policies.

“If we’re going to change something, smoking would be No. 1,” Dr. Hollenberg said. “Salt intake would come somewhere well below it.”

Dr. Bibbins-Domingo said that for many people the decrease in blood pressure would be modest, which is why, she said, “many physicians have thrown up their hands and said, ‘I’m not going to advise my patients to reduce salt because it’s too hard for patients and the benefits for any individual are small.’

“But small incremental changes in salt, such as lowering salt in tomato sauce or breads and cereals by a small amount, would achieve small changes in blood pressure that would have a measurable effect across the whole population,” she said. “That’s the reason why this intervention works better than just targeting smokers.”

Projected Effect of Dietary Salt Reductions on Future Cardiovascular Disease
http://content.nejm.org/cgi/content/full/NEJMoa0907355?query=TOC

Compelling Evidence for Public Health Action to Reduce Salt Intake
http://content.nejm.org/cgi/content/full/NEJMe0910352?query=TOC

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Straightening Up Eaters?

March 31 – Big Salt – There’s a menace abroad in the land, a lethal white powder that is being consumed by sensation-seekers all across America. And like meth and other fashionable horrors, this scourge is not confined to the mean streets of the big city, but can be found in the small towns, big malls and red states of the heartland. Worse still, there’s disturbing evidence that many otherwise responsible people are being tricked into taking this substance; horrifying report after horrifying report of innocent and unsuspecting individuals swallowing food cynically spiked with this silent and seductive killer, a killer which is, some say, responsible for the loss of 150,000 Americans – that’s nearly forty times the battlefield death toll at Antietam – each year.

And over one quarter as much as are killed by tobacco, we must add since the pattern so amusingly recounted here derives completely from the war on smokers.? Andrew Suttaford aims his barbs and facts at the Center for Science in the Public Interest, the most repulsive of the outfits springing up to share the spoils when the food industry is shaken down as was the tobacco industry.? Junk science, hysteria-peddling, media compliance and naked financial maneuverings, all are part of the battle against salt, one battle in the war on food providers and their customers.

Powder Keg
Horrifying salt!

March 24, 2005
By Andrew Stuttaford

There’s a menace abroad in the land, a lethal white powder that is being consumed by sensation-seekers all across America. And like meth and other fashionable horrors, this scourge is not confined to the mean streets of the big city, but can be found in the small towns, big malls and red states of the heartland. Worse still, there’s disturbing evidence that many otherwise responsible people are being tricked into taking this substance; horrifying report after horrifying report of innocent and unsuspecting individuals swallowing food cynically spiked with this silent and seductive killer, a killer which is, some say, responsible for the loss of 150,000 Americans – that’s nearly forty times the battlefield death toll at Antietam – each year.
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The name of this killer? Salt. That’s right. SALT. As in shakers. As on plates. As on fries. Good old, familiar, deceitful sodium chloride, unmasked at last as a Dahmer at dinner and a Bundy at breakfast, a smooth-flowing serial killer found lurking even in our morning cereal. And who has done the unmasking? Somehow I think that you can already know the answer. Yup, once again that bizarre collection of neurotics, nannies, killjoys, hysterics, and scolds better, if misleadingly, known as the Center for Science in the Public Interest, has dreamt up yet another way to poison the pleasure that Americans take in their food.

At the end of February, CSPI published a new report, “Salt: The Forgotten Killer,” and announced legal action against the FDA. Its lawsuit is designed to compel the agency to declare salt a “food additive”, something that could be the prelude to mandating lower sodium levels in processed and restaurant foods. There is “no way”, claimed CSPI executive director Michael Jacobson, that the “FDA can look at the science and say with a straight face that salt is ‘generally recognized as safe'”.

To be fair, there is slightly more justification for the assault on salt than many earlier campaigns against just about anything that might cheer up a meal (caffeine, frozen desserts, fried mozzarella sticks, garlic bread, General Tso’s chicken, alcohol, fettuccine alfredo, meatloaf, cookie dough, the Cold Stone Creamery’s Mud Pie Mojo, and so, so much more). Most medical professionals do indeed believe that too much salt in the diet can lead to high blood pressure (high blood pressure is a major contributory factor in cardiovascular disease), but there are dissenters. To Jacobson, those who disagree with his views are nothing more than noisy “contrarians” basing their conclusions on “flawed, misinterpreted” or “fragmentary” research, harsh words that, coming from CSPI, conjure up thoughts of stones and glass houses.

In fact, the science is somewhat less clear-cut than the Center’s researchers would like you to know. Their report has nothing to say about a 2002 study published in The British Medical Journal that showed no decrease in either the death rate or the incidence of cardiovascular disease among the subjects of the study who reduced their salt intake. Jacobson is also silent about the fact that, despite years of research, links between lower sodium intake and improved health in the general population remain awkwardly elusive. As for those noisy “contrarians,” their ranks include former presidents of the American Heart Association and the American Society of Hypertension, and, just last year, a number of Canadian medical groups including the Canadian Hypertension Society, the Canadian Coalition for High Blood Pressure Prevention and Control, and the College of Family Physicians of Canada.

Jacobson does, however, find time to bring his readers the good news about the Yanomami, rainforest Indians, who consume only 20 mg of sodium a day (less than one percent of the average American’s intake) and “are healthy, do not gain weight as they age, and are totally free of high blood pressure.” Curiously, he does not bother to explain that the Yanomami live in miserable Stone Age squalor, eat the powdered bones of their dead (mixed in with a banana soup, since you ask), and on average only just make it past the age of 40. Call me fussy, Dr. Jacobson, but I’ll look elsewhere for nutritional inspiration.

Perhaps it’s best to sidestep this controversy for now and just take time to savor Jacobson’s jeremiad as yet another sample of how the CSPI’s chow-time Comstocks manipulate the media, the science and the public in the interest of taking aim, yet again, at their real foe: fun.

As is its usual practice, CSPI begins this latest onslaught with tales of a spectacular death toll (those 150,000 hardy, but unfortunate, Americans who manage to escape the carnage brought by passive smoking, obesity and the Second Amendment only to succumb to a condiment) and then piles on from there. “This innocent-looking white substance” may, says Jacobson, a man clearly unaware of what anchovy can do to pizza, “be the single deadliest ingredient in our food supply.”

And as usual, the language of these latter-day puritans resembles nothing so much as the darker, more lurid sermons of their stern black-hat/black-suit predecessors of three centuries before. The report is morbid and overblown; its author appears fixated on the horrible fate that awaits those who have sinned: “[T]he salt in our diets has turned our hearts and arteries into ticking time bombs, time bombs that explode in tens of thousands of Americans every year.”

That’s not to say that reading this grim, grating report is entirely without its rewards. The CSPI is justly celebrated for its obsessive exploration of the wilder regions of American food rococo, and, in this respect at least, Salt: The Forgotten Killer does not disappoint. While the appearance of that notorious repeat offender, General Tso’s chicken (with rice, 3,150 mg of sodium), on CSPI’s salty rap sheet won’t come as much of a surprise, fans of extreme cuisine will be delighted to learn of the existence of two salt-mountainous treats from Denny’s – the robust Lumberjack Slam (two eggs, three hotcakes with margarine and syrup, ham, two strips of bacon, two sausage links and 4,460 mg of Lot’s wife), and the disturbingly-named Moons Over My Hammy (ham and egg sandwich with Swiss and American cheese on sourdough and a mere 2,700 mg of the deadliest single ingredient in our food supply).

Jacobson argues that those who feast on such delicacies are unaware quite how much salt they are consuming, an argument that dovetails neatly with CSPI’s longstanding campaign to compel chain restaurants to list nutritional data on their menus. Eating out is, writes Jacobson, “basically a nutritional crap shoot”, a statement that implies that most people are too dumb to understand that Moons Over My Hammy may not exactly pass muster as health food. But Jacobson’s claims should come as no surprise. Without the assumption that Americans are incapable of deciding for themselves what to eat, there would be no room for the big government paternalism so relentlessly advocated by CSPI.

But, ironically, if consumers are unclear as to what they ought to be munching, it is organizations such as CSPI that must take their share of the blame. Jacobson half-acknowledges this when, in the course of bemoaning the fact that Americans seem less worried about sodium than they were some years ago, he notes that “the public’s concern about salt’s harmfulness has steadily diminished, as controversies over low-carb diets, trans fats, genetically engineered foods, and other topics have dominated the headlines,” controversies (which Jacobson might have said, but didn’t) in which his own center has played no small part. The constant food scares generated by the health mullahs at a time when average life expectancy in the U.S. has just reached a new high have done nothing other than increase consumers’ confusion, cynicism, and the chance that genuinely good advice gets junked as junk science.

The best counsel remains, as it always has been, a balanced diet, moderate exercise and, good news, maybe a drink or two, but then that’s the sort of common sense that would leave no room for a CSPI, let alone the overbearing measures that Jacobson would like to see imposed on the rest of us. It’s revealing that the center is trying to bully the FDA through litigation rather than by more democratic measures, but its lawsuit against the government agency is doubtless only the beginning. If salt were to be no longer “generally recognized as safe” by the FDA, it would only be a matter of time before the usual cabal of “public interest” lawyers and the tort bar turn their attention to the food companies and restaurant chains and dig up a salt-scarred plaintiff or two.

And that would not be the end of it. Jacobson’s report concludes with “an agenda for action” that includes mandatory sodium limits in processed food, and consideration of a “salt tax” (in addition, presumably, to the proposed Twinkie tax we have all read so much about). In short, therefore, the policy recommendations from an organization often misdescribed as a consumer group would, if implemented, mean less choice, not more.

They need to be taken with a pinch of you know what.
http://www.nationalreview.com/

Salt Addiction
Excerpt from FOUNDATION TO ALL FREEDOM
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It is in everything. Chicken soup, pickles, pork and beans, peanut butter, bread, macaroni and cheese, ketchup, mustard and relish, canned vegetables, pizza, hot dogs, salad dressings, not to mention the endless list of junk foods, jam packed and stuffed to capacity with salt.

Organic salt or sodium is an essential mineral and is naturally present in fruits, vegetables, nuts and seeds. We need only a small amount of sodium, easily supplied by these natural sources. The sodium in fruits and vegetables is complexed with other organic molecules, causing them to be absorbed slowly. In contrast, table salt is unbuffered and enters quickly through the stomach lining.

When a surplus of salt enters the bloodstream, the body is forced to store the salt between the cells until the kidneys can filter it. Salt then causes a caustic, burning effect on the surrounding tissue. For protection, the cells release water into the intercellular fluid to dilute the excess salt. As the cells give up their water, they lose elasticity and shrink. This, in turn, causes an imbalance of the cell’s chemistry through a loss of potassium.

Low potassium levels cause more sodium to penetrate the cell walls. When the sodium level of the cell rises, water then enters to dilute it, causing the cell to become swollen. The continuous disruption of the cell’s fluid balance can, in time, calcify, scar and destroy the muscles, valves and arteries of the entire coronary route. It may culminate in congestive heart failure. In this way, salt becomes an accomplice to North America’s most voracious killer, cardiovascular disease!

In China, a traditional method of suicide was drinking water saturated with table salt. One ounce of salt causes the body to hold six pounds of excess fluid. Salt in large quantities can be lethal.

When you eat salty foods the body has to compensate to maintain homeostasis. If you eat salty foods for a long period of time, as with caffeine, heroin and nicotine, the body becomes dependent on salt to maintain balance. Therefore reducing salt intake can create physical withdrawal.
http://www.freedomyou.com/