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And now for something true

Don’t bother with a low salt diet – it may not lower your blood pressure after all, study finds
Researchers followed more than 2,600 men and women over a period of 16 years
They discovered that consuming less salt wasn’t linked to lower blood pressure
New findings call into question salt limits recommended by dietary guidelines

Quite, that’s one of the things kidneys are for, regulating salt levels.

18 thoughts on “And now for something true”

  1. I think many of us already knew this, there have been plenty of studies to indicate that only a minority of people are at risk from high salt diets.

  2. Government advice in complete load of bollocks shocker. My approach is to ignore it all. But this is a moral crusade, so don’t expect something as trivial as evidence to get in the way. Still the action on salt lot took the precaution of transforming themselves into the action on sugar people a while ago. They may know nothing about science, but they are World class at bandwagon boarding, and fleecing the public purse though.

  3. So Much For Subtlety

    Yet again our elites have let us down. Pretty much all the advice they have been giving us about health is nonsense. As James Le Fanu said, all doctors can really say is eat what you like in moderation and do some exercise.

    The rest is a shameless grab for power, money and influence.

  4. Food faddism might be acceptable or even endearing in a personal context but when it becomes the substance of socialist tyranny it needs to be stamped on–hard.

  5. Last I read, the people for whom salt was a problem were those who already had a tendency toward high blood pressure. But whatever.

    Funny this after yesterdays BBC R4 Life Scientific where the guest was extolling the virtues of a low salt diets, the incontrovertiblity of the evidence linking high BP to salt intake, and the £ billions a low salt diet would save the NHS.

    Still, it’s the Daily Mail, next week they’ll be banging on about salt being the prime cause of dementia.

  6. Sneering at the Mail is foolish; the sneers should be directed at the incompetent and bent medics and scientists who publish the stuff they quote. Otherwise you’re just shooting the messenger.

  7. Not so sure about that – I think it’s right scientists publish what they find (yes, peer review and all that stuff needed). It’s the idiots with “Social sciences” (sic) and “Meejah Studies” degrees that are employed by news organisations to interpret it that screw up. Not to say that there aren’t bent scientists though, of course.

  8. Prof Graham MacGregor was the guest on The Life Scientific, advertised as “the man who has saved more lives than any other medic” by campaigning for low salt/sugar diet. His claim that it’s only salt that causes raised blood pressure appears to have been based on research into stone-age Amazonian tribes that have a virtually salt-free diet. But don’t they have an expected age at death of around 45?

  9. “It’s the idiots with “Social sciences” (sic) and “Meejah Studies” degrees that are employed by news organisations to interpret it that screw up.”

    I disagree. The last newspaper article I read on this sort of thing was in the Tel and the lass who wrote it reported the key points spot on. It was the ‘medical scientists’ who were spouting the bollocks she was obliged to report. Hell, just consider the relative incentives. To a journo it’s just another article. To the ‘scientists’ it could be a whole career at stake.

  10. Bloke in North Dorset

    “Has there ever existed a human so mad that she wouldn’t put plenty of salt on her fish’n’chips?”

    Me. I don’t like salt and never put it on food. I add a little to cooking and occasionally get yearnings for strong cheddar cheese, which tends to have a lot of salt in it.

    Despite that and bent fit and in the meaningless BMI normal zone my BP is at the top end of normal/low end of high.

  11. “my BP is at the top end of normal/low end of high”

    I once asked a doc whether by “normal” he meant average, commonplace, somewhere about the median; or did he mean recommended, a desirable standard, the very model of what is required?

    He just goggled: he’d never considered that ‘norm’ can have two different meanings. I don’t think doctors tend to reflect much on matters of principle nor even on what the meaning of their jargon might be.

    The greatest benefit a GP brings is often his or her accumulated experience on which they sometimes have indeed reflected. Then I am grateful for their advice. If I think they are just uncritically passing on some item of medical conventional wisdom with no idea whether there’s any decent evidence to back it up, then I might well ignore their recommendations.

  12. @Chris Miller

    Yes I heard it and it was one of the more pathetic editions. Prof. Jim had his nose wedged firmly up the arse of the good Prof MacGregor and never really got around to discussing contrary scientific views.

    If they’d been talking about the man’s life or how he did his work, fine, but it devolved into political advocacy, the evils of food companies, advertisers and the suggestion that the government were powerless to face them down because Brexit.

  13. Bloke in North Dorset

    dearieme,

    My GP is definitely in the camp of using experience, in my case he just told me to carry on, I’m in that group whose BP is in that range. He wasn’t going to push drugs on me or lecture me on lifestyle. When he does recommend some treatment it’s usually with the comment that he would give it to his family.

  14. I’m alongside BiND on the selaphobia thing. And the reason’s people like dearieme. In my case my father. Who thought it would be beneficial to tip salt all over my food until it tasted like a fucking chemistry set.
    Now I have the problem I have to eat salt to compensate for living in a hot climate & sweating so much out. But I still find it a disgusting taste.

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