Salt not as damaging to health as previously thought, says study • Hacker News Board

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

#161

Post by dragonwriter » Mon, Aug 13, 2018, 6:34 AM UTC

macspoofing wrote: post #54

clumsysmurf wrote: post #16

And to play devil's advocate, the opposite findings from just this June https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2018/06/180622012101.h...

Nutrition Science is a huge mess even though it is a core part of human health. As in, it is a total disaster. Here's something depressing to think about: if the Keto people are correct, mainstream nutrition science was a key contributor to American obesity crisis and resulted in countless premature deaths and major suffering over the last few decades. Anyway, recently I wanted to look into whether or not eggs are go…

> if the Keto people are correct, mainstream nutrition science was a key contributor to American obesity crisis

Mainstream nutrition fads clearly were. A big part of of those fads were about lay generalization of what science supported for very specific diseases as general advice. Another big part was commercial propaganda from food vendors.

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

#162

Post by dragonwriter » Mon, Aug 13, 2018, 6:37 AM UTC

edanm wrote: post #156

macspoofing wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nutrition Science is a huge mess even though it is a core part of human health. As in, it is a total disaster. Here's something depressing to think about: if the Keto people are correct, mainstream nutrition science was a key contributor to American obesity crisis and resulted in countless premature deaths and major suffering over the last few decades. Anyway, recently I wanted to look into whether or not eggs are go…

> if the Keto people are correct, mainstream nutrition science was a key contributor to American obesity crisis and resulted in countless premature deaths and major suffering over the last few decades. I am kind of under the impression that this is generally accepted, at least partially, by pretty much everyone these days, not just Keto people. As in, the move to remove fats entirely and replace them with carbs is co…

> As in, the move to remove fats entirely and replace them with carbs is considered today to have been a bad idea

The move to reduce fats may or may not have been backed by “mainstream nutrition science”, but replacing them with carbs never was.

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

#163

Post by calvinbhai » Mon, Aug 13, 2018, 6:41 AM UTC

Was this study funded directly or indirectly (through a bunch of shell research organizations / industry bodies) ?

What sustained the costs of the study?

Without knowing the funding situation, what's the point debating about this study?

Skeptical me wonders if this was funded by industry that has been affected badly by sodium horror stories, and subtly plugs in potassium as a healthier alternative.

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

#164

Post by firmgently » Mon, Aug 13, 2018, 6:49 AM UTC

cies wrote: post #65

barking wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

WFPB, whole food plant based diet. No meat, no fish, no dairy. You can eat fruit but you can't juice it. Seems a bit of a misery diet to me.

Juicing, cooking, tofu making is minimally pocessed and generally accepted in WFPB circles. I't the point where you refine something (oil from seeds, sugar from beets) where it is against the protocol. > Seems a bit of a misery diet to me. I was not trying to make you happy. I stated it has a lot of science on it's side. There are some great cooking resources on how to make it taste/look/whatever great. Wanna know mo…

It seems weird to suggest that tofu is less processed than butter. I suppose if you're buying the most high-end expensive tofu it might be a bit better but from what I know of how it's made I don't find it very appealing.

I'd say it's a lot easier to make butter in your kitchen than it is tofu.

There's a really good book about the food industry called "Eat Your Heart Out" by Felicity Lawrence. I already thought tofu was a plasticky non-food but that book put me off it for life.

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

#165

Post by firmgently » Mon, Aug 13, 2018, 7:03 AM UTC

cfuen71 wrote: post #62

quakenul wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Getting definitive information on nutrition always seems to be a lot harder than it should be in 2018

Nutrition is a pseudo-science.

I think the problem with it (as with a lot of science) is that control is very difficult. The more you want a controlled experiment, the more abstract and unrealistic you have to be. Eg. (completely made-up illustration) eggs might be good for you if you eat a lot of tomatoes, bad for you if you don't eat a lot of tomatoes, better if you eat tomatoes a couple of hours before the eggs rather than afterwards. Maybe if you have curly hair the rules are reversed... but not if it's red curly hair.

To get any consistency in results you have to control things to a point of being unrealistic, and then the results aren't very useful because nobody's real diet and genetic makeup fits with the fake abstract setting of the experiment.

Then results get simplified and abstracted even more to make easily understandable conclusions... like maybe for 78% of people cacao is good, but for 0.3% of people it doubles the risk of stroke (although this bit doesn't get studied because it wasn't in the initial hypothesis). Results are reduced to "cacao is good for you"... but you might not part of the 78%. Maybe you're in the 0.3%.

I'm not trying to say that science is useless, just that applying it isn't as simple as people like to make out (and a lot of people don't want to accept that life may not be as methodical and predictable as they want it to be). Nuance is too hard.

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

#166

Post by venomsnake » Mon, Aug 13, 2018, 7:26 AM UTC

Overeating is damaging to health. You will find all kind of extreme and outlier diets around the world. The populations eating them are still healthy.

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

#167

Post by rleigh » Mon, Aug 13, 2018, 7:34 AM UTC

conception wrote: post #142

philliphaydon wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

America said cooking with lard was bad for us and all that resulted in was lard being substituted with sugar. Cos the moment you take the fat away everything is tasteless.

Unless you add salt!

Yep, and there's so much salt in mass manufactured biscuits and the like I can no longer bear to eat them. Add more butter instead!

Cutting back on refined sugar really makes things taste better, lots of subtle flavour makes previously bland stuff like oats taste really nice. But the downside is being unable to stomach the excessive amounts of salt and sugar in a lot of stuff. The upside is I save a fortune on buying junk food since most of it now tastes awful.

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

#168

Post by Scarblac » Mon, Aug 13, 2018, 8:42 AM UTC

ramblerman wrote: post #153

j88439h84 wrote: post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What are your criteria?

I'm not OP, but Karl Popper's notion of falsifiability places a lot of the social sciences in the domain of myth vs actual science.

And yet, we want to know more about those subjects. We just have to make do with very limited falsifiability.

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

#169

Post by rwnspace » Mon, Aug 13, 2018, 8:46 AM UTC

ramblerman wrote: post #153

j88439h84 wrote: post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What are your criteria?

I'm not OP, but Karl Popper's notion of falsifiability places a lot of the social sciences in the domain of myth vs actual science.

Good job Popper's falsifiability is flawed then; else evolution is not science.

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

#170

Post by tim333 » Mon, Aug 13, 2018, 9:09 AM UTC

rossdavidh wrote: post #129

Whenever I hear discussion of whether we should defer to the judgement of scientists, I always want to ask, which field of science do you mean? In some, like physics, chemistry, evolutionary biology, geology, there is still much to be learned but what we have so far is pretty solid. You don't hear about the basics (matter is made of atoms, species emerge from natural selection, plate tectonics) getting overturned. Th…

I find a lot of the problems is people seem to have a job dealing with correlation not being causation. Maybe there's a correlation between salt and heart attacks but perhaps that's because the high salt folk eat a lot of junk food and its the junk food and lifestyle that's not the problem rather than the salt. You need further evidence to figure what's going on with any certainty but you almost never see an article saying that.