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Salt, We Misjudged You

nytimes.com

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Re: Salt, We Misjudged You

#121

Post by DeepDuh »

jswinghammer wrote: post #100
rubashov wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well Loren Cordain, godfather of "paleo", remains convinced that salt is bad. He claims the chloride does some bad stuff (I forget) and also the sodium screws up potassium and magnesium levels somehow.

I avoid processed foods as a rule so it's hard for me to get a lot of salt anyway. I really don't worry about it one way or the other.

Avoiding processed food might be what's keeping you healthier in general. Not because processed food has bad nutrition but because the additives are tricking our bodies. I feel that if you stick to basic ingredients (at least nothing with taste additives) you can pretty much go on cruise control and let your body decide.

Re: Salt, We Misjudged You

#122

Post by eco »

Panoramix wrote: post #30
juliano_q wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The Primal Blueprint by Mark Sisson is also great and changed my life. Reading 'Good Calories Bad Calories' now from Gary Taubes (the author of the op) and it is awesome too.

Thanks for the references. Are they solid science? all I have personally come across about the paleo diet is unconvincing and does not stand up to scrutiny. "I want to believe" would be my stance.

Good Calories, Bad Calories has over a hundred pages of citations in the back so it's at least well referenced. I have yet to read it though so I can't comment on the quality.

Re: Salt, We Misjudged You

#123

Post by rsheridan6 »

arn wrote: post #25

So, I always cringe a little when I read medical conclusions in the mainstream media. And I'll be upfront. I'm probably biased on the side of medicine on this one. I'm a former nephrologist. The one study this person mentions by name (and dismisses) is the DASH-Sodium Study. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DASH_diet#Study_Results "Like the previous study, it was based on a large sample (412 participants) and was a multi…

If you look at the numbers in the Wiki link you provided, the reduction in BP in DASH dieters was small in non-hypertensives and not exactly huge in hypertensives.

"Respectively, the DASH or “combination” diet lowered blood pressures by an average of 5.5 and 3.0 mm Hg for systolic and diastolic, compared with the control diet. The minority portion of the study sample and the hypertensive portion both showed the largest reductions in blood pressure from the combination diet against the control diet. The hypertensive subjects experienced a drop of 11.4 mm Hg in their systolic and 5.5 mm Hg in their diastolic phases."

I question whether the 5.5/3 mmHg is really worth eating bland low sodium food. Statistical significance does not necessarily imply clinical significance, and you're asking people to give up something pretty big. Willpower is a limited resource. We should have good reasons to ask people to use it up.

Here's an abstract of a metaanalysis which reaches roughly the same conclusion: http://www.nature.com/ajh/journal/v24/n8/full/ajh2011115a.ht...

Re: Salt, We Misjudged You

#124

Post by rsheridan6 »

arn wrote: post #93
joe_the_user wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Uh, He points out that the study followed people for 30 days . And made recommendations for life-long behavior. And wasn't looking at final results but markers (blood pressure). And was the main argument against salt consumption when we do have some data on people's life-long behaviors and their result. And this wasn't "medicine" that spoke but a particular institution making recommendations. Edit: removed possibly i…

Re 30 days. I get it. If you want to argue that the general mass population doesn't benefit from salt restriction, I wouldn't argue very strongly against it. But he seems to suggest salt restriction harmful to the masses? I want more data on that than what's offered.

This study, which received a lot of attention about a year ago, is probably what he's referring to: http://jama.jamanetwork.com/article.aspx?articleid=899663

"The associations between systolic pressure and sodium excretion did not translate into less morbidity or improved survival. On the contrary, low sodium excretion predicted higher cardiovascular mortality."

Re: Salt, We Misjudged You

#125

Post by dbbolton »

goostavos wrote: post #87
dbbolton wrote: post #48

Increased blood osmolarity will lead to an increase in blood volume, period. If you add fluid to a closed system, the pressure of that fluid on its container will increase. However, in most cases, excess solutes should be excreted relatively quickly and blood volume will return to normal.

>If you add fluid to a closed system, the pressure of that fluid on its container will increase. Does the inverse hold up as well (in regards to the human body)? If people have high blood pressure, if the gave a couple of pints of blood each month, would that do anything to lower the pressure?

Of course it would lower the pressure temporarily, until the body restored blood volume to normal levels. But hypertension is defined medically as a chronic condition.

Re: Salt, We Misjudged You

#126

Post by Tyrannosaurs »

rubashov wrote: post #103
mark_l_watson wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I believe that we all have unique metabolisms and the real "science" is the personal study of how we feel physically correlated with what we have been eating, amount of exercise, lack of tension, etc. I ended up as a vegetarian (with a little fish) because I kept track of how I felt and compared with recently eaten food. I have friends who thrive on high meat diets. We are all different.

A lot of people "feel" fine but blood work shows they're insulin resistant, have various deficiencies, or are loaded with cortisol. Going by "feeling" really doesn't work. Also, the evidence against a vegetarian diet is overwhelming.

"the evidence against a vegetarian diet is overwhelming."

Pics or it never happened.

I mean citations please.

Re: Salt, We Misjudged You

#127

Post by gaius »

iand wrote: post #74
psykotic wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You don't mention insulin by name, but that's what underlies Taubes's thesis about the link being carbs and obesity. James Krieger dispels much of that argument here: http://weightology.net/weightologyweekly/?page_id=319 > Low-carber thesis is that raising intake of fats suppresses appetite so you can eat what you like until you are full. Eating pounds of fruits and vegetables won't you make you full? Or rice and pot…

>Eating pounds of fruits and vegetables won't you make you full? Or rice and potatoes for that matter? Eating pounds of lean protein sources like tuna and chicken breast won't make you full? Of course it will. I didn't claim otherwise Fat accumulates due to an excess of calories. But this isn't the cause of us getting obese, it's a proximal cause, not the ultimate cause. What causes us to eat more calories than our b…

What causes us to eat more calories than our bodies require?

Remember that your body doesn't care that you want to look good on the beach. It wants to load up when times are good, incase there is a famine around the corner. Piling on the pounds is a survival mechanism, people who tend towards fat are in fact highly tuned survival machines.

It's too soon to tell if this is still a useful mechanism. Mankind has only been "civilized" for a heartbeat in evolutionary time. Nevertheless, if you want to shed fat, the key is to convince your body that starvation is not around the corner.

Re: Salt, We Misjudged You

#128

Post by gurkendoktor »

ktizo wrote: post #115
rubashov wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A lot of people "feel" fine but blood work shows they're insulin resistant, have various deficiencies, or are loaded with cortisol. Going by "feeling" really doesn't work. Also, the evidence against a vegetarian diet is overwhelming.

the evidence against a vegetarian diet is overwhelming Someone better warn the Buddhist monks, they've been at it a while and if only they'd known they might have lived a bit longer.

There are many vegetarian Buddhists here in Taiwan and their food is sadly well-known for being overly greasy (as to add flavor). It doesn't help that the local Buddhists avoid onion and garlic, two staples in non-vegetarian local food. It's considered normal to eat supplements, but that's of course a recent phenomenon.

I'm not saying it's all bad (I'm mostly vegetarian), but the studies are all over the place as with everything in nutrition :)

Re: Salt, We Misjudged You

#129

Post by gurkendoktor »

mark_l_watson wrote: post #92
jswinghammer wrote: post #7

As someone who has lost around 40 pounds of fat switching to the high fat paleo diet I'm not at all surprised that the current state of the conventional wisdom on food is wrong in any number of ways. It is funny that we really have no idea what we should be eating naturally at all. Grains were making me sick and I didn't notice for years. It wasn't until I read a book listing side effects of grain consumption that I…

I believe that we all have unique metabolisms and the real "science" is the personal study of how we feel physically correlated with what we have been eating, amount of exercise, lack of tension, etc. I ended up as a vegetarian (with a little fish) because I kept track of how I felt and compared with recently eaten food. I have friends who thrive on high meat diets. We are all different.

I'd even guess that people who are happy and at peace with what they eat might outlive hardcore perfectionists. Are there any studies about that? (I'm thinking of a parallel to the study where religious people lived longer.)

Re: Salt, We Misjudged You

#130

Post by Tyrannosaurs »

gurkendoktor wrote: post #128
ktizo wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

the evidence against a vegetarian diet is overwhelming Someone better warn the Buddhist monks, they've been at it a while and if only they'd known they might have lived a bit longer.

There are many vegetarian Buddhists here in Taiwan and their food is sadly well-known for being overly greasy (as to add flavor). It doesn't help that the local Buddhists avoid onion and garlic, two staples in non-vegetarian local food. It's considered normal to eat supplements, but that's of course a recent phenomenon. I'm not saying it's all bad (I'm mostly vegetarian), but the studies are all over the place as wit…

There are so many varieties of vegetarian diet the term is a little meaningless in terms of understanding nutrition.

I've been vegetarian for about 20 years, I eat a lot of fresh veg, not much fried stuff, not much processed stuff, try and make sure I mix things up and get some protein. Broadly speaking I think I've got a pretty good diet.

But I also know vegetarian's who are massively overweight, eat crap (and too much of it), drink too much and so on.

As a broad group I suspect vegetarian's eat better but I think that's more likely to be linked to the fact that this is a group of people who have thought about what they eat as much as anything inherent in the lack of meat.

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