With soy sauce and miso staples of the national diet, Japan has one of the highest salt consumption rates in the world, with a daily intake of 10.8g for adult men and 9.4g for women, double the amount recommended by the World Health Organisation.
So, does Japan suffer from higher rates of those things WHO says salt will produce?
Sure, difficult thing to evaluate, for a centuries – millennia in fact – long diet will have culled those likely to suffer from the local diet…..
Causal web research indicates Japan is very low on the ranks of nations suffering hypertension and modestly high in terms of chronic kidney disease.
Beats me how the WHO can have a recommended consumption for salt. It’s going to depend on how much you sweat. Something I became aware of, moving down here. I’ve never much liked salt. Don’t like salty food & never condimate. Until I paid the penalty. Jeez you feel rough. Now I suffer the stuff.
ISTR that salt isn’t really a problem for the vast majority of the population (ie those who do not have a specific intolerance) unless the stuff is consumed in alarming quantities (ie drinking seawater) at which point the kidneys are unable to extract it sufficiently quickly. In the “normal” population homeostasis keeps your salt at a healthy level. Mind you, low salt can be bloody dangerous!
Just another “authoritative report” produced by zealots!
MC, the CKD is largely because the population is old. Also it’s definitionally difficult, and one of the few things where there is a real “race” correlation with important markers of the disease, so very difficult to compare across populations.
It is also the only (common) thing that means you ought to be concerned about your salt consumption.
We have multiple surveys that show that low salt consumption is far more dangerous than high. There is no negative outcome correlation between cardiovascular disease and high sodium consumption: the reverse in fact.
Once again the inherent conservatism of public health officials wins. cf. fat, alcohol, et cetera
The one they did a successful PR number on at least in the west – was MSG. Supposedly 10x worse than salt and salt is very bad. I always suspected that Stat as bullshit but don’t actually know- don’t eat chinese everyday so not going to do any harm (that is unless they secretly use it ubiquitously in western food too).
@BiS > It’s going to depend on how much you sweat.
Another consequence of the shift from widespread manual labour to sedentary. Diets take time to catch up. Once knew a guy who’d retired to Spain and had a taste for Campbells condensed tomato soup. You could get it in Spain, but they’d tweaked the recipe to suit the Andalucian taste for salt. When we visited him we always used to take two or three cans of the UK version.
ISTR that they suffer from strokes more than we do in the West. Though they seem to have made progress:
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/27333738/
Why would anyone take the WHO seriously now? Or pretty much any Public Health officials?
Incompetence and dishonesty have marked their performances throughout the pandemic.
MSG
Wasn’t there a panic amonst men in Asia in the 1970/80s that MSG shrank penises?
They also smoke like dragons and drink like fish.
@TD
Not sure about the fish emulation – Mongoloids tend to lack the gene needed to metabolise alcohol, thus can get steaming on a couple of Asahis. See also
Red InjunsNative Americans.