You know how salt is bad for everybody and we all need to eat less of it?

Not so much.

Just one more reminder that most diet advice is wrong.

I've been aware of this evidence for some time, but it's nice to see Scientific American publicizing and editorializing on the issue.

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Author: Jimmy Akin

Jimmy was born in Texas, grew up nominally Protestant, but at age 20 experienced a profound conversion to Christ. Planning on becoming a Protestant seminary professor, he started an intensive study of the Bible. But the more he immersed himself in Scripture the more he found to support the Catholic faith, and in 1992 he entered the Catholic Church. His conversion story, "A Triumph and a Tragedy," is published in Surprised by Truth. Besides being an author, Jimmy is the Senior Apologist at Catholic Answers, a contributing editor to Catholic Answers Magazine, and a weekly guest on "Catholic Answers Live."

5 thoughts on “You know how salt is bad for everybody and we all need to eat less of it?”

  1. I do know that economically, salt has about the lowest elasticity of demand of any commodity known. That is, people will pay everything they have to get it if they don’t have it. Addictive vices are known to have low elasticity also, as do utilities, food, education, and healthcare. If you have a low elasticity of demand for anything, be sure that someone will find a way to drive the price up.
    Luxury goods tend to have high elasticities, and so taxes on these kinds of goods tend to drive consumption to zero. However, salt was highly taxed in the Roman Empire.

  2. Great that you posted that! It’s like my biochemistry professor used to say “too much salt doesn’t cause hypertension; bad genes causes hypertension.” He said that somebody with normal, healthy kidneys could handle 50 grams of sodium a day. And yes, if one has the “bad” genes for Essential hypertension (the primary form of the disease, that occurs in about 90% of the cases), then it is possible for them to virtually never show the symptoms if they live a healthy lifestyle. Reduced sodium intake in people with elevated blood pressure has a useful effect to reduce blood pressure in the short-term (based on simple physiological/physics principles of a decreased number of solutes present in a solution), but there is little evidence for long-term benefit from reducing salt intake. By far the worst thing about salt (like fat), is that it makes food taste significantly more delicious, so people end up eating more of it. This needs to be a principle that’s first and foremost on every health-conscious person’s mind.

  3. Nuanced and complicated scientific and medical research is often oversimplified or even wilfully misrepresented by mainstream media editors, who usually have no science background. At least Jimmy’s link is to a scientific publication – albeit a polemic editorial.
    The web site NHS Choices Health News attempts to explain medical news reports by people who understand the science, so that intelligent laypeople can get some of the benefits of peer-reviewed medical research. I recommend this site as a fact-checker on medical stories.
    This is their more balanced explanation of the Cochrane Review referred to by Moyer in Scientific American.
    Some extracts, chosen by me, to “balance” Moyer
    although there is evidence that reducing salt leads to a reduction in blood pressure, no reviews had directly looked at these outcomes. …
    The researchers concluded that there is not enough evidence to say with certainty that advising a reduced-salt diet is linked to reductions in death and CVD events, but crucially they have not said that salt reduction has no effect …
    The review’s authors have called for further high-quality, long-term research to determine conclusively the effects of salt reduction. The NHS’s current advice, that adults should limit their salt intake to 6g a day, remains unchanged. …
    although the number of individuals pooled in the analysis was large (approximately 6,500 people), the number of events which occurred was relatively small, reducing certainty as to what impact the interventions may have had. One of the study authors has estimated that at least 18,000 participants would need to be analysed in order to identify any effects clearly.
    …
    The reduced-sodium interventions did actually produce the expected positive effect, but the researchers could place little confidence in those measurements due to the relatively small number of events observed.
    The researchers were not able to detect a clear effect, which is very different from detecting that no effect exists: the review did not find that salt reduction was not beneficial; it found that there was not enough evidence to determine conclusively the effect of salt reduction on death and CVD events.
    Another NHS Choices report of one of the papers referred to by Moyer.

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