OT: Low-Salt Diet Ineffective

[Todzo]

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/05/04/healt ... .html?_r=0

[PreemieNrsTiffy]

I've always had an issue with this low-salt thing. Too much research is not supporting low-salt as a diet that improves health. What is sad, it that when there is a study showing an effect from low-sodium diet, it will show something like 1-3.5% decrease in blood pressure. Seriously? My blood pressure varies way more than that during a commercial break (and I have absolutely no BP issues). The article below describes and links up to several other peer-reviewed studies:

http://www.peoplespharmacy.com/2012/06/ ... -emotions/

[Janknitz]

Not 1-3%, 1-3 millimeters !!! That's the average BP improvement. Big whoop!


Most people eat the standard American diet (SAD) which is LOADED with sodium, so adding salt with a salt shaker is way over the top. One of my favorite things from eating a real, whole food diet is that my tastebuds have stopped being dulled by salt overload. Food tastes SO great now. I can use salt ad lib, but a little goes a long way. And my BP improved because reduction in glycogen stores took excess body fluid along with it.

Sodium is essential to life, just not in the alarming quantities packaged foods provide.

[John from Brookston]

Oh, I loved this line: "It would be impossible to keep people on a low-sodium diet for years with so much sodium added to prepared foods. "
Yet that is EXACTLY what our physicians are demanding that we do.

increases my chances of having (another) heart attack and insulin resistance. Just what I need...

I'm dreading Cardiac Rehab sessions, not because I don't want to get better, but because I know they're going to be pushing this low-salt nonsense and that stupid no-fat, high carb fad diet invented by Ancel Keyes at me constantly Not only has Keyes' diet NOT decreased the incidence of heart disease, it's also responsible for the obesity epidemic we're going through.

[Todzo]

Asian diets seem to contain even more salt than ours, yet they are so much healthier than we. Perhaps if you eat better otherwise salt is not so much of an issue?

[Space Oddity]

Asian diets seem to contain even more salt than ours, yet they are so much healthier than we. Perhaps if you eat better otherwise salt is not so much of an issue?

You are thinking about "Asian" food as prepared by Americans. In Asia the food typically has a bit less salt than U.S.

[Space Oddity]

I know some people who have lost huge amounts of weight by going on a low-salt diet prescribed by their doctors. However, if you look into the details, you will see the new diet eliminated so many foods that they were consuming much fewer calories. It was the calorie restriction that caused the weight loss.

[Todzo]

Asian diets seem to contain even more salt than ours, yet they are so much healthier than we. Perhaps if you eat better otherwise salt is not so much of an issue?

You are thinking about "Asian" food as prepared by Americans. In Asia the food typically has a bit less salt than U.S.

What I believe I recall are dietary standards. I know they often perserve with salt.

[Not Fade]

Asian diets seem to contain even more salt than ours, yet they are so much healthier than we. Perhaps if you eat better otherwise salt is not so much of an issue?

You are thinking about "Asian" food as prepared by Americans. In Asia the food typically has a bit less salt than U.S.

Maybe so, but it is still too high according to this article,

Chinese eat too much salt

The China National Salt Industry Corporation, the country's biggest salt producer, on Tuesday launched a plan to reduce the nation's salt consumption.

Chinese people eat about three times the amount of salt recommended by the World Health Organization.

The company's general manager, Mao Qingguo, said the company will implement a plan to develop low-sodium salt products and establish a uniform standard for salt substitutes to promote the healthy use of salt.

According to the company, the Chinese population consumes 5.5 million metric tons of salt annually, while the salt output is at about 9 million tons, including about 50,000 tons of low-sodium salt.

Each person consumes on average at least 15 grams of salt every day, compared with the 5 grams recommended by the WHO.

Excessive consumption of salt is believed to be associated with cardiovascular diseases, high blood pressure and other chronic diseases, which lead to about 85 percent of deaths in China every year, said Zeng Yixin, president of the Peking Union Medical College. http://usa.chinadaily.com.cn/china/2012 ... 499518.htm

[Todzo]

Asian diets seem to contain even more salt than ours, yet they are so much healthier than we. Perhaps if you eat better otherwise salt is not so much of an issue?

You are thinking about "Asian" food as prepared by Americans. In Asia the food typically has a bit less salt than U.S.

What I believe I recall are dietary standards. I know they often perserve with salt.

The Japanese live the longest: http://www.webmd.com/diet/features/diet ... anese-diet

[Janknitz]

I know that there are a lot of pickles and preserved fruits veggies in the Japanese diet, shoyu, and sea vegetables, so yes, it is high in salt. One of my favorite childhood treats (growing up on the island of Okinawa) was salted preserved plums. The traditional diet is NOT low salt (but still probably doesn't rival the sodium in the manufactured Standard American Diet).

When I worked in the healthcare field in Hawaii, the biggest generational gap was between older first and second generation Japanese ancestry parents and their children. As the parents had strokes and heart attacks, they were urged to avoid the pickles and preserved foods by their healthcare providers and their children (and generally reluctant to do so) and adopt a more Americanized diet. Reflecting back with what I know now, I think there's good reason to believe it was not the salty foods (which had always been eaten by their forebears who rarely had strokes and heart attacks) but the Standard American Diet influences that crept into their diets--the very things they were being urged to swap for the traditional foods.

[Todzo]

I know that there are a lot of pickles and preserved fruits veggies in the Japanese diet, shoyu, and sea vegetables, so yes, it is high in salt. One of my favorite childhood treats (growing up on the island of Okinawa) was salted preserved plums. The traditional diet is NOT low salt (but still probably doesn't rival the sodium in the manufactured Standard American Diet).

When I worked in the healthcare field in Hawaii, the biggest generational gap was between older first and second generation Japanese ancestry parents and their children. As the parents had strokes and heart attacks, they were urged to avoid the pickles and preserved foods by their healthcare providers and their children (and generally reluctant to do so) and adopt a more Americanized diet. Reflecting back with what I know now, I think there's good reason to believe it was not the salty foods (which had always been eaten by their forebears who rarely had strokes and heart attacks) but the Standard American Diet influences that crept into their diets--the very things they were being urged to swap for the traditional foods.

Hi Janknitz!

Our research is critically flawed. We look at one thing at a time - so we miss the Forrest for the blade of grass!!

Have a great weekend!

Todzo

[Kate M]

Our research is critically flawed. We look at one thing at a time - so we miss the Forrest for the blade of grass!!

Hmmm... I think that a study that uses multiple variables can often be very misleading unless they are very very careful to consider all possibilities, which becomes more and more difficult the greater the number of variables. An example would be the studies on the Dean Ornish Diet in the 1970s & 1980s. One of the conclusions of the Ornish study was that a low-fat diet could reverse heart disease. The published study was responsible for many many people drastically changing their eating habits to low-fat and through extension, responsible for much of the low-fat eating craze to reduce heart disease. The study looked at 48 middle-aged white men with existing moderate to severe coronary heart disease. The researchers then did five simultaneous interventions with these men.

• They stopped smoking
  They participated in a stress-reduction program.
  They participated in group therapy and support.
  They began daily aerobic exercise.
  They ate a very high-fiber diet, which also happened to be very low in fat.

Now, why would anyone believe that it was the low-fat portion of this study that had the most significance? IMO, Confirmation bias-- but that didn't stop folks from killing themselves with low-fat diets despite the fact that the positive results could have been due to any one variable or any combination of the other four, or the high-fiber portion of the diet, or the aerobic nature of the exercise, or maybe just exercise and the aerobic part didn't matter, or maybe it was the smoking cessation, or... you get my point. Since then, we have learned that a low-fat diet pretty much does bupkis to reduce heart disease let alone reverse it.

My point is, when you isolate each variable and study that first, the results are much more reliable. After studying the variables individually, then taking them two at-a-time, etc might give more info.

Blessings,

Kate

[chunkyfrog]

Many years ago, my doctor put me on a very low sodium diet. (HBP)
It didn't work, but I developed a taste for much less salty foods.
For example, I can't STAND canned soup or those nasty soup in a bag mixes.--scratch only!
Teriyaki: ewww!

[Janknitz]

I was never a fan of overly salted stuff. In the days when I still ate tortilla chips and potato chips, I'd look at the nutritional info on every bag to find the ones lowest in sodium. The chips with about 80 mg. of sodium were still incredibly salty, IMHO, but the ones with 120 mg or more (MOST of the ones on the market) were hideous--you could not taste the potato or corn chip, ONLY the salt. BLECH!

Now that I'm not eating processed foods, things taste SO good--I can taste the food, not the salt, sugar, and MSG added to make me crave things even more. I add salt to my food, more than I used to because processed food was already so salty.

My BP is much lower, but I know it's not the reduced salt. Instead, when carbs are kept low, excess glycogen stores are reduced, and with them, excess body fluid. That made a HUGE difference in my BP, a lot more than a measly 3 mm Hg that is the average BP reduction from salt restriction.