ot? salt & hypertension? We Only Think We Know the Truth About Salt - NYT

[Guest guest]

> Salt, We Misjudged You

>

>

> By GARY TAUBES

>

>

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/06/03/opinion/sunday/we-only-think-we-know-the-truth\

-about-salt.html

>

> ...In 1972, when the National Institutes of Health introduced the

> National High Blood Pressure Education Program to help prevent

> hypertension, no meaningful experiments had yet been done. The best

> evidence on the connection between salt and hypertension came from two

> pieces of research. One was the observation that populations that ate

> little salt had virtually no hypertension. But those populations

> didn’t eat a lot of things — sugar, for instance — and any one of

> those could have been the causal factor. The second was a strain of

> “salt-sensitive” rats that reliably developed hypertension on a

> high-salt diet. The catch was that “high salt” to these rats was 60

> times more than what the average American consumes.

>

> Still, the program was founded to help prevent hypertension, and

> prevention programs require preventive measures to recommend. Eating

> less salt seemed to be the only available option at the time, short of

> losing weight. Although researchers quietly acknowledged that the data

> were “inconclusive and contradictory” or “inconsistent and

> contradictory” — two quotes from the cardiologist Stamler, a

> leading proponent of the eat-less-salt campaign, in 1967 and 1981 —

> publicly, the link between salt and blood pressure was upgraded from

> hypothesis to fact.

>

> In the years since, the N.I.H. has spent enormous sums of money on

> studies to test the hypothesis, and those studies have singularly

> failed to make the evidence any more conclusive. Instead, the

> organizations advocating salt restriction today — the U.S.D.A., the

> Institute of Medicine, the C.D.C. and the N.I.H. — all essentially

> rely on the results from a 30-day trial of salt, the 2001 DASH-Sodium

> study <http://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJM200101043440101>. It

> suggested that eating significantly less salt would modestly lower

> blood pressure; it said nothing about whether this would reduce

> hypertension, prevent heart disease or lengthen life.

>

> While influential, that trial was just one of many. When researchers

> have looked at all the relevant trials and tried to make sense of

> them, they’ve continued to support Dr. Stamler’s “inconsistent and

> contradictory” assessment. Last year, two such “meta-analyses” were

> published by the Cochrane Collaboration, an international nonprofit

> organization founded to conduct unbiased reviews of medical evidence.

> The first of the two reviews concluded that cutting back “the amount

> of salt eaten reduces blood pressure, but there is insufficient

> evidence to confirm the predicted reductions in people dying

> prematurely or suffering cardiovascular disease.” The second concluded

> that “we do not know if low salt diets improve or worsen health

> outcomes.”...

>

>

> see also, iatrogenics of low-salt recommendations & thus their

> financial ramifications for some among us:

>

> */Salt and our Health/*

> Written by Morton Satin, PhD

> March 26 2012

>

> http://www.westonaprice.org/vitamins-and-minerals/salt-and-our-health

>

> ....A reduced intake of sodium is characterized by the stimulation of

> the renin-angiotensin-aldosterone hormonal system (RAAS). Renin, the

> first enzyme taking part in the RAAS was clearly shown in a

> dose-response curve^1 to increase as sodium intakes fell below 150

> mmol sodium (or 1.5 teaspoons of salt) per day. At a point of intake

> below 110 mmol sodium per day renin begins to rise rapidly.

>

> The RAAS feedback mechanism is the most transparent measure of our

> dose response to salt intake and is a fundamental indicator of sodium

> intake sufficiency. Although this cascade of reactions is designed to

> sustain osmotic balance and blood pressure, chronically elevated

> levels of renin and aldosterone have significant negative effects on

> the condition of the circulatory system and may stimulate inflammatory

> agents within the body. Included among the negative outcomes of

> chronically elevated levels of renin and aldosterone are insulin

> resistance,^2 metabolic syndrome,^3 cardiovascular disease,^4

> cognition loss,^5 and others....

>

>

>

>

>

>

> ____________________________________________________________

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