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Salt not as damaging to health as previously thought, says study

theguardian.com

11–20 of 231 posts

Re: Salt not as damaging to health as previously thought, says study

#12

Salt in itself may not be bad. But salt makes food taste better, which tends to make people eat more, which causes people to gain weight. And being overweight brings with it health issues. It's the second order effects that you need to be aware of when asking if something is "good" or "bad".

Excellent point. In addition to my reply to blattimwind (1), this is a very significant reason to be suspicious of pro-salt research/advertizing.

(1) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17746708

Re: Salt not as damaging to health as previously thought, says study

#13

Salt in itself may not be bad. But salt makes food taste better, which tends to make people eat more, which causes people to gain weight. And being overweight brings with it health issues. It's the second order effects that you need to be aware of when asking if something is "good" or "bad".

This is some ass backwards reasoning. And life’s too short to eat bad tasting food on purpose.

Re: Salt not as damaging to health as previously thought, says study

#14
post #8

Hasn't that been known for a long time. The strong anti-Salt attitude was scientifically challenged for a long time but the knowledge is very slow to spread.

We have known that salt is a vital part of the diet since pre-history. The problem is the modern diet, (Western, Eastern, or other) is rich in rich foods, and essentially all land animals evolved to favor salt, by taste rewards, geography, or whatever other genetic conditioning. Salt was scarce. Now it's not. And the access to salt induces direct salt consumption, which can be lethal to a brittle hypertensive, but also encourages more food consumption in general because it makes almost any food more delicious.

Re: Salt not as damaging to health as previously thought, says study

#15

Relevant: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4xtnH0fxDUg

And then people wonder why anti-science is a thing today.

I basically stopped reading "science says that X is good/bad for your health" articles. At most I get entertaining value from them.

Re: Salt not as damaging to health as previously thought, says study

#18

Nutrition "science" caught again perpetuating findings based in assumption and hitting the data until it fits, not solid research? Oh no, nobody could've expected that... also "scientists who are on a crusade to reduce our salt consumption to near zero". Like pope Urban II always said, no better place to do sound research than on a crusade.

Salt increases intravascular osmolarity, which increases water retention to correct the osmolarity. This is freshman inorganic chemistry. There's plenty of biomedical science behind renal pathophysiology and the link between salt and blood pressure is as close to an if-then statement as there is in medicine. We use all sorts of drugs and methods to play with this central mechanism and can observe the effects in real…

Yeah, a lot of people have no idea about this "homeostasis" thing, which is how you get to stupid things like "foods matched to your blood type" or "alkaline diet"
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