Via Samizdata, I see that the puritans are at it again. Once more, salt is in the firing line.
The European Society of Cardiology (ESC) welcomes new research published in the New England Journal of Medicine (online January 20) (1) which quantifies for the first time the annual number of new cases of coronary heart disease (CHD), stroke and Myocardial Infarction (MI) that could be prevented by populations reducing daily intakes of salt. The data, says the ESC, underlines the urgent need for European Union public health measures to substantially reduce the population’s salt intake across Europe.
“This study provides excellent ammunition both to convince patients about the benefits of reducing their individual salt intakes and also to persuade the EU of the urgent need to introduce legislation to restrict the salt content of processed foods,” said ESC spokesman Professor Frank Ruschitzka, a cardiologist and hypertension specialist from the University of Zurich, Switzerland.
Here we go again… Note the weasel word “could”. Could, but might not. Given that it could, but might not and therefore the evidence is uncertain, there is no need for any urgent action. Sodium is an essential part of our diet. If we ingest too much, our bodies excrete the surplus. Yes, if one has high blood pressure, then salt can be a problem, but if not, then the evidence so far produced is at best ambiguous. And, let’s be clear here, a low salt diet is dangerous for our health.
Still, the righteous don’t let things like facts, evidence, human history and personal choice get in the way of a crusade – especially if it means troughing taxpayers’ money. So, directly from the ministry of made up statistics we get this cack:
In the paper, Kirsten Bibbins-Domingo and colleagues, from the University of California, San Francisco, USA, undertook a computer simulation showing the effects of population wide reductions of dietary salt intakes in all adults aged 35 to 85 years in the USA. Reducing dietary salt intake by 3 g per day (1200mg less sodium per day) could result in 60,000 to 120,000 fewer cases of heart disease , 32,000 to 66,000 fewer strokes and 54,000 to 100,000 fewer heart attacks.
A reduction in dietary salt of 3g per day, the authors went on to say, would have approximately the same effect on reducing cardiac events as a 50 % reduction in tobacco use, a 5% reduction in body mass index among obese adults or the use of statins to treat people at low or intermediate risk for CHD events. Furthermore, reducing dietary salt intakes by 3g per day would save $10 billion to $ 24 billion in annual health care costs.
There you go, straight from the computer simulation’s mouth – a pile of utter cockwaffle. The computer simulations says it’s so, ergo, it is so. Now… where have we heard that one before?
GPs are to be instructed to treat us as infants:
But calls for legislation do not mean that physicians should stop their efforts to persuade patients to introduce individual changes in lifestyle. Patients, they stress, need to be taught about the importance of reducing salt in their cooking and also for the need to check food labels. People need to learn to appreciate that the salt contents can vary widely even in the same product.
Ferfucksake! I know this stuff already – and I have rejected it. I like to sprinkle some salt onto my dinner and fully intend to carry on doing so. I also like a bit of butter on my bread. It’s my fucking life and I’ll live it as I please, not how some health Nazi tells me I should. I’d rather live an interesting life that is a bit shorter than a long one that is bland, tasteless and risk free. We all die eventually; might as well go out enjoying life to the full. Indeed, all this puritanism is enough to make me take up tobacco and alcohol.
Salt will again be on the agenda with World Salt Awareness Week 2010 , which runs from February 1- 7
Remind me to get some salt in. I’ll be needing some extra on my chips that week.
The week is being run by World Action on Salt and Health (WASH), a global group that works with governments to highlight the need for widespread introduction of population based salt reduction strategies.
Translation; an international quango. Just what we need. Someone else troughing my money for their own agenda.
Much can be done to reduce salt intakes through public health policy, say WASH. They cite the success of Consensus Action on Salt and Health (CASH), launched in 1996 to encourage food manufacturing companies in the UK to make voluntary reductions in their salt content. Since the start of the policy salt intakes among UK adults (calculated from 24-hour urine samples) have fallen from 9.5 to 8.6 g per day.
CASH? Do I smell a fake charity? 24 hour urine samples? The mind boggles. However, go back to my first point. If there is salt in the urine, the body has got rid of the excess – it’s in the urine, therefore it is not in the body. Didn’t these people do biology at school? Nor, it seems, did they do domestic science. Salt is an essential part of the chemical process in cooking, so I’ll keep doing that, too.
Pass the salt, will you, please? Ta.
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Update: I see Leg Iron is onto this one, too.
I find the only answer to these shrill little harpies is to ‘cop a deaf ‘un’. Any legislation they bring out can be readily circumvented, and all their self justifying shrillness mostly ignored.
As you rightly point out via the linked articles, too little salt is far more dangerous than too much.
I don’t plan to just ignore them, I’m going to actively defy them. There’ll be extra salt on the table at Longrider Towers during salt awareness week. I will be aware just how nice it tastes 😀
One thing that always queers the results when you’re looking at hypertension in people is if the original research has been done in America. The thing is, in America black people have a much, much higher salt-related hypertension rate than the whites, or black people from African populations.
The reason for this is very, very simple: American blacks aren’t a cross section of an African population; they’re those members of the African population who survived the trip on a slave ship from Africa to America. As it happens, slave ships were absolute hell-holes to live in; massively overcrowded and during the initial phase of the journey from Africa to America the slaves were kept chained up belowdecks, at least until well out of sight of land, to prevent them rioting and escaping.
Being kept confined belowdecks on a slave ship in African heat and humidity was lethal for a lot of slaves, but the ones who survived best were those who retained bodily water best. These were also the ones who had a natural propensity to retain salt.
Now, in Africa a propensity to hang onto salt is no big deal; salt is quite hard to come by so oversalted food is rare. In modern America salt is a common and cheap condiment and food taste enhancer, so if you’ve a propensity to retain salt then you’ve got a bit of a problem, which is compounded by American blacks being on the whole poorer than the whites, and also by lower educational standards. Basically the poor buggers got shafted by genetics, and shafted again by commercial food manufacturers and so any study that uses American hypertension patients is going to include a lot of people who are genetically much, much more prone to salt retention than are the bog-standard British genotype of people.
Very interesting, but I take all of the above with a large pinch of salt.
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