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Low-Salt Diets May Pose Health Risks, Study Finds

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Re: Low-Salt Diets May Pose Health Risks, Study Finds

#21

Post by MealSquares »

The cochrane review (https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/21735439) already pointed in this direction, namely that although a reduced salt diet reduced blood pressure, that reduction was not correlated with decreased mortality in this case. Looking at sodium consumption without taking into account potassium consumption also appears to be a major issue with lots of previous salt studies. We had people recommend putting 1500mg (DASH diet level) in MealSquares, but we feel confident not going below the 2400mg level for health.

Soylent ran into issues by including around a gram of salt in their 1.0 version with people getting dizzy from too little sodium in the diet. They're now suggesting adding some extra.

Re: Low-Salt Diets May Pose Health Risks, Study Finds

#22

Post by colechristensen »

Swizec wrote: post #12
refurb wrote: post #6

You know what would be super helpful? If scientists came up with a rating system that described how confident they were in the results from a study. That way the public would know how much weight they should give the results. Independent body who runs a well-controlled double blinded study? A+ Biased organization who runs an analysis of questionable observational data with barely passible statistical significance? F…

Scientists do in fact report how confident they are in their findings. Read original sources, most of them say things like "in X% of observed cases there was a Y% of Z over the course of T with confidence level of P". But that sells a lot less clicks than "SCIENCE SAYS LOW SALT IS BAD FOR YOU OMG"

The truth of the matter is that the general public shouldn't be reading scientific publications, because without the context of the intended audience, reasoning about what you read is incredibly difficult or impossible. This is doubly true for 'science journalists' who so very rarely are educated to be able to correctly translate and very often distill a paper into an incorrect and baiting article with only the tiniest shreds of truth.

The confidence rating you mention has little value to the general public, and even among scientists, the value of 'p-value' is questionable and the matter of occasional debate.

http://annals.org/article.aspx?articleid=712762#ThePValueFal...

Re: Low-Salt Diets May Pose Health Risks, Study Finds

#23

Post by quattrofan »

ekianjo wrote: post #19
learc83 wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's been some evidence that sugar is actually worse for you that we used to think. It makes a bit of sense really. Fat and salt has always been part of the human diet, but large quantities of refined sugar are very recent.

> It makes a bit of sense really. Fat and salt has always been part of the human diet, but large quantities of refined sugar are very recent. That kind of reasoning is very much flawed. Why would the diet of x years ago be relevant versus having a better diet nowadays ? For all we know, our ancestors were eating berries and much less meat than we do, yet we seem to live longer those days and yet we ingest substances…

Possibly but two things to consider:

- big factor in longer life spans are the advances in medicine last 150 years - our increase in meat consumption and cooked meat goes ways back and likely tied to our (threefold) increase in brain size

Re: Low-Salt Diets May Pose Health Risks, Study Finds

#24

Post by ekianjo »

quattrofan wrote: post #23
ekianjo wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It makes a bit of sense really. Fat and salt has always been part of the human diet, but large quantities of refined sugar are very recent. That kind of reasoning is very much flawed. Why would the diet of x years ago be relevant versus having a better diet nowadays ? For all we know, our ancestors were eating berries and much less meat than we do, yet we seem to live longer those days and yet we ingest substances…

Possibly but two things to consider: - big factor in longer life spans are the advances in medicine last 150 years - our increase in meat consumption and cooked meat goes ways back and likely tied to our (threefold) increase in brain size

We have been eating meat for a long time, but the quantity of meat eaten since the second half of the 20th century is unprecedented. We are eating way more meat than before, that's for sure.

Re: Low-Salt Diets May Pose Health Risks, Study Finds

#25

Post by trhway »

considering the role sodium and potassium ions play (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sodium_in_biology#Animals), it isn't surprising that too low of them is bad. Of course it is already well known that too much of them bad also.

"Sodium is an essential nutrient that regulates blood volume, blood pressure, osmotic equilibrium and pH;..."

doesn't it sound like it better be not too low and not too much ? :)

Re: Low-Salt Diets May Pose Health Risks, Study Finds

#27

Post by jimmaswell »

trhway wrote: post #25

considering the role sodium and potassium ions play ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sodium_in_biology#Animals ), it isn't surprising that too low of them is bad. Of course it is already well known that too much of them bad also. "Sodium is an essential nutrient that regulates blood volume, blood pressure, osmotic equilibrium and pH;..." doesn't it sound like it better be not too low and not too much ? :)

>doesn't it sound like it better be not too low and not too much ? :)

That statement is pretty much impossible to logically disagree with so yes

Re: Low-Salt Diets May Pose Health Risks, Study Finds

#28

Post by trhway »

jimmaswell wrote: post #27
trhway wrote: post #25

considering the role sodium and potassium ions play ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sodium_in_biology#Animals ), it isn't surprising that too low of them is bad. Of course it is already well known that too much of them bad also. "Sodium is an essential nutrient that regulates blood volume, blood pressure, osmotic equilibrium and pH;..." doesn't it sound like it better be not too low and not too much ? :)

>doesn't it sound like it better be not too low and not too much ? :) That statement is pretty much impossible to logically disagree with so yes

>That statement is pretty much impossible to logically disagree with so yes

not impossible. At least for proponents of low sodium it is possible.

Re: Low-Salt Diets May Pose Health Risks, Study Finds

#29

Post by egypturnash »

IMHO it is damn near impossible to cut salt out of your diet in America unless you prepare everything you eat from scratch. Salt is everywhere.

This sort of study makes me feel better about my intuition of what to do when my doctor told me to cut back on the salt, though: stop letting myself use it as a seasoning, think a few times before grabbing a snack whose entire purpose is to shovel salt into my mouth, but still eat things that had salt involved in their preparation. My blood pressure has gone from "why are you not keeling over right now" to "slightly elevated" thanks to this.

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