> In the same way that increased salt intake causes increased water retention, and thus increased weight, but this increased level of water weight goes away after a few days if you start consuming less salt, and there's no evidence of this causing long term harm.
We've already gone over data showing that when we summate data from RCTs and salt consumption we see reduced salt consumption leads to reduced cardiovascular disease events, so it's demonstrably not the case that there's no evidence of this causing long term harm.
Additionally we have strong evidence of a dose-response curve regarding blood pressure and atherosclerosis, so that additional 5mmHg is contributing to additional plaque burden. Even after you reduce your salt intake, that plaque is still going to be there, increasing your risk of a CVD event.
Additionally when we look at the results of INTERSALT, age-related increases in blood pressure only seemed to occur in populations consuming more than 2-3g salt per day, which suggests that in addition to acute rises in BP, higher salt consumption than this may also be responsible for much larger rises in the long term that are not reversed when salt consumption is dropped.
Taking that whole body of evidence in totality, I think it's hard to argue that the effects of salt on the risk of adverse health outcomes is akin to water weight.
> I could see where if one already had severe CVD, maybe eating more salt could be the straw that breaks the camel's back, and thus until they heal the CVD it could be wise to limit salt. But this would be no indication that the salt is the cause of the CVD or causes any long term chronic problem. And it is the long term chronic CVD that is by far the most important to address IMHO. If salt is not causing that, this whole discussion is largely misdirected energy.
Again, even small increases in BP over normal range (and even slightly below - we tend to see increases in risk once systolic BP rises about 110) is associated with increases in CVD, so the raised blood pressure is one of the forces driving that long term chronic CVD.
> We disagree here but that's a separate issue from salt so I'll leave it. :)
Well if you're open-minded about the topic but think refined oils are a health risk, you're the same as I was a few years ago. I ended up changing my view on the topic. If you think there's a health concern not addressed by https://uprootnutrition.com/blog/seedoils I'd be genuinely interested to know.
> And this is where I think salt has been scapegoated in a way that probably just distracts from the root problem as I describe above.
I think the evidence very strongly suggests that sodium consumption is one of the root problems driving chronic health issues in the West.