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

theguardian.com

221–230 of 231 posts

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

#221

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People are very prejudiced against economics because economists don't predict well and have contradictory policy recommendations, but the basis of economics is quite solid. (My favorite illustration: if there were no underlying laws to economics, then dictators would just issue edicts about currency and markets which would then just plain work rather than causing havoc -- and yet dictators very much suffer side effec…

Really, I got downvoted for something where every word was inarguably true in the sense of objective fact not opinion, and informative about half a dozen subjects? This place is as bad as reddit and slashdot. I haven't returned here very often over the years; this kind of experience makes one feel unwelcome.

My best advice is to quit caring about the downvotes.

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

#222
post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>"sugar is essential for the human body" Sugar is not essential to the diet, the body can make it from fat and protein. Ie, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gluconeogenesis However, afaik, you cannot live without fat or protein in your diet. >"Try exercising without a healthy blood sugar level due to lack of complex sugars." You assume "healthy blood sugar level" must be related to "amount of sugar in diet". Not true, y…

Consuming only fats and proteins stresses the body quite heavily. Carbs are the easiest calorie source to digest, there is almost no digestion required. Plus one can overload their body's compensatory mechanisms for acid base balance, due to the acidic ketones produced by gluconeogenesis. Its a terrible idea to do no carbs long term.

The first sentence seems almost sense free. The second one is probably true, the third is complete nonsense, and the fourth is a value judgement.

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

#223

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If a person has high sodium levels, they shouldn't feel attracted to salt. Some people don't listen to their bodies..

>If a person has high sodium levels, they shouldn't feel attracted to salt. Some people don't listen to their bodies. Do you have a reference that supports any of this? It runs counter to all of my observations.

Anecdotally: this works for me. It is easy to eat without much salt (and sometimes even avoid salty food) when I don't crave it.

I do crave it often though, especially when I exercise more or don't eat much for longer time periods. I also drink a lot of water.

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

#224
post #171
post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How does fat block insulin?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fRZduVxlP_U Here you go. I hope it helps someone, because I took a bit karmic penalty on HN spreading what I think is proven truth. (still worth it for me)

Looks like nonsense to me. You can find other people saying the exact opposite. Nutritional research is unfortunately in a pretty bad state, and I don't know how it is ever going to get better.

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

#225

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

Coming from a hard science background, I just ignore nutrition studies altogether nowadays. The reproducibility seems even worse than psychology research. This isn't a knock on the researchers themselves — these are hard subjects to make definitive conclusions in — but we do need to at least be able to accurately quantify the uncertainty on the results. It's not acceptable to have so many studies contradicting each o…

Nutrition research is really hard. You want a good study, you have to take a large population, randomly assign them to two different diets, then make sure they follow those diets, for some long period of time. This is incredibly expensive.

One of the ways people have tried to get around this expense is to take a large population and ask them what they have been eating over their lives. This has two major problems that make it almost useless: People don't remember what they actually ate, only what they think they ate. And there are too many co-founding variables. Some people try to be healthy, so they make lots of changes to their lifestyle, and you can't separate out the effects from diet, exercise, stress levels, and everything else people do.

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

#226

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People are very prejudiced against economics because economists don't predict well and have contradictory policy recommendations, but the basis of economics is quite solid. (My favorite illustration: if there were no underlying laws to economics, then dictators would just issue edicts about currency and markets which would then just plain work rather than causing havoc -- and yet dictators very much suffer side effec…

Really, I got downvoted for something where every word was inarguably true in the sense of objective fact not opinion, and informative about half a dozen subjects? This place is as bad as reddit and slashdot. I haven't returned here very often over the years; this kind of experience makes one feel unwelcome.

People often come along eventually and correct unfair downvotes.

That's one reason the site guidelines ask you not to complain about getting downvoted; by the time most people read the complaint, it's obsolete.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

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

#227
post #212

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't buy your premise, but supposing I did, what alternative do you propose? The purpose of social science is to understand human society. Do you have some concept of a way to do that which you feel would be more clearly accurate or scientific than what's currently done? Bear in mind that the 'hard' sciences use theories which are partially or wholly incorrect, too; we still use Newtonian physics in many cases bec…

> what alternative do you propose? That they don't call themselves science. Maybe call themselves studies and that they put more effort into what they call experiments. > we still use Newtonian physics in many cases because they're easier to use as a model, even if they don't capture everything. This is frankly a terrible example. Because it does not tell the whole story does not mean it is incorrect. There is no uni…

> That they don't call themselves science. Maybe call themselves studies and that they put more effort into what they call experiments.

I'm sorry, let me clarify: My question is not "what would you do with what we have now?", rather, it's "assuming we throw all of what we have now out, how would you do it in a way you consider to be science?" My assertion is that disregarding all our progress up until now in these fields on the grounds that they have not yet reached the level of maturity of physics or other hard sciences is unfair and will create a self-fulfilling cycle whereby we never gain any actual progress in these fields.

> This is frankly a terrible example. Because it does not tell the whole story does not mean it is incorrect. There is no unifying theory of sociology either.

Except that's exactly my point. Sociology doesn't tell the whole story, but your assertion that everything that comes out of it is tainted isn't right, either. You're comparing relatively nascent fields to relatively well-developed ones and expecting them to be exactly the same in terms of replicability, reliability and applicability, generally. That's unfair, and totally disregards history.

If we regressed even further, to before Newton, to the ancient Greeks or Romans or Egyptians, sure, they got a lot wrong - most things. But everything is a building block. I think that we are just now beginning to make real progress in fields like psychology, sociology, etc. You can call them "baby sciences," if you'd like, or invent whatever other word or term you prefer, but it doesn't change what they are, and it doesn't make them not worth proceeding with.

Further, we can't say that because some sciences progress quickly (e. g. computer science), all sciences should be expected to do so. As many in this thread have pointed out, good social science is harder to find and harder to do than good computer science. Progress will therefore be slower. It doesn't make said progress unimportant or impossible.

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

#228

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Salt really only tastes good when you need salt. It's satiation depends on the body's current levels/needs.

>Salt really only tastes good when you need salt. It's satiation depends on the body's current levels/needs. So people who scarf down potato chips by the bag are low on salt?

Yes... The evidence suggests that humans self regulate sodium levels.

https://www.nytimes.com/subscription/multiproduct/lp8XRTS.ht...

https://www.washingtonpost.com/national/health-science/we-ea...

>People tend to consume about the same amount of sodium no matter where they live, and this amount hasn’t changed much in decades. Those facts hint at the biological basis of our sodium appetite.... “Over the last five decades, salt content of commercial food in our food [in the United States] has gone up. But if you look at people’s 24-hour urinary sodium excretion, you see that the amounts of salt people consume have been constant,” he says. Irrespective of age, sex or race, between 1957 and 2003 Americans have been eating on average 3.5 grams of salt a day. “This suggests that we are somehow regulating the amount of salt we are eating,” Breslin says.... In one of Leshem’s studies, babies who had low concentrations of sodium in their blood in the first weeks of their lives grew up to be teenagers with a penchant for salt, even salt that is seemingly hidden in processed foods. “Even if you can’t taste the salt, apparently your body does. It’s working on an unconscious level to condition a preference for sodium,” Leshem explains.

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

#229
post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> too much is bad In what way? Your kidneys dump any excess salt your body doesn't need. The long standing 20th century salt alarmism has no basis in reality.

> > too much is bad > In what way? “Of course too much is bad for you. Too much of anything is bad for you. (…) That’s what “too much” means. (…) “Too much” is precisely that quantity which is excessive. That’s what it means.” From https://youtu.be/XewVicFzRxw?t=2m44s

If we are playing semantics, too little salt will kill you, sodium is vital for life.

Some studies have found that the people who have the lowest salt consumption have increased risk of death, so combined with sodium being essential for life, and no increase in the salt consumption over the last half century, I'm not confident that we should, as a population, be artificially moderating our salt intake, the evidence is just not there.

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

#230
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 al…

The amount of salt consumed per capital has NOT increased in the last 50 years, it's stayed remarkably consistent even as packaged food has increased in saltiness. That suggests access to salt does NOT induce a direct salt consumption, it suggests humans regulate their salt consumption based on their biological needs.
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