Tag Archives: Salt

On Salt: The Empire Strikes Back

Salt in Cheez-Its:

Salt sprinkled on top gives the tongue a quick buzz. More salt in the cheese adds crunch. Still more in the dough blocks the tang that develops during fermentation. In all, a generous cup of Cheez-Its delivers one-third of the daily amount of sodium recommended for most Americans.

As a demonstration, Kellogg prepared some of its biggest sellers with most of the salt removed. The Cheez-It fell apart in surprising ways. The golden yellow hue faded. The crackers became sticky when chewed, and the mash packed onto the teeth. The taste was not merely bland but medicinal.

Salt in soup:

“The sweetness of the carrots [in vegetable beef soup] isn’t pronounced. The broth, you don’t get an explosion of flavors.”…

Chicken noodle soup has been especially vexing… With only 150 calories, a single can of the condensed soup has more than a whole day’s recommended sodium for most Americans.

“It’s a very unique recipe,” Dr. Dowdie said. “Consumers of chicken noodle, they love it and they know it and they have a strong bond with it. And any slight change they will recognize.”

Continue reading On Salt: The Empire Strikes Back

The Uneasy Case Against Salt

Other than Lot’s wife, it is hard to point to a single human being who has been harmed by salt. This is from a 2006 paper by Franco and Oparil:

High dietary sodium has been adduced as a cause of hypertension and its target organ damage for millennia; yet careful observations using sophisticated techniques have revealed only a weak relationship between sodium intake/excretion and blood pressure in the general population. Further, studies of the effects of dietary sodium reduction on blood pressure have revealed minimal achieved reductions in blood pressure, no relationship between the magnitude of reduction in sodium intake/excretion and the blood pressure effect, and no evidence of an effect of sodium reduction on death or cardiovascular events. While blood pressure in the population as a whole is only modestly responsive to alterations in sodium intake, some individuals manifest large blood pressure changes in response to acute or chronic salt depletion or repletion, and are termed “salt sensitive”…

salt-shaker

“When it rains, it pours.

 

Continue reading The Uneasy Case Against Salt

Hits & Misses – 2009/9/21

Medicare will pay $8,000 for a computer that will turn typed words into speech for the speech-impaired. It will not pay $450 for an iPhone that will do the same thing.

The pancreas. Gone awry, it is the source of diabetes, affecting 23 million people and it is at the front lines of our expanding waist lines.

Sixty percent of adults can’t digest milk, including most of Asia, half of Africa and 3/4 of Mediterranean.

One FDA bureaucrat is holding up many new cancer treatments.

salt-and-pressure-cuff

The Uneasy Case Against Salt

John Tierney sifts through the science and the folklore about low-sodium diets:

New York mayor….. Michael Bloomberg…..  is starting a "nationwide initiative" to pressure the food industry and restaurant chains to cut salt intake by half over the next decade…..The health department's Web site announces, "that action will lower health care costs and prevent 150,000 premature deaths every year."

But that prediction is based on an estimate based on extrapolations based on assumptions that have yet to be demonstrated despite a half-century of efforts. No one knows how people would react to less-salty food, much less what would happen to their health.

Rejoinder on Salt

We previously reported on plans by the nanny mayor and the nanny health commissioner in the nanny city of the nanny state to regulate our intake of salt. Now, there is this in the New York Times this morning:

Only one [randomized] clinical trial on salt intake has been reported so far, and it focused on patients with fairly advanced heart problems. As it turned out, the group that adhered to a lower sodium diet actually suffered significantly more cardiovascular deaths and hospitalizations than did the one assigned to the higher sodium diet.