4 ms·
Living in the UK what I appreciate most of all is the amount of information now available on food packaging. You can give me all the advice in the world, but wi
by ukdm 17y ago
Living in the UK what I appreciate most of all is the amount of information now available on food packaging. You can give me all the advice in the world, but without that information on the pack it means very little.
The recommended daily limit for salt is 6 grams as far as I know. It's quite difficult to stay within that limit if you eat what is seen as a healthy diet. Breakfast cereals can have a surprisingly high salt content. Two slices of bread instantly take a gram of salt out of your allowance. Like soup? Most cans contain 2-3 grams of salt. Packaged meals can be packed full of salt, especially curry.
The only way to be healthy is a balanced and varied diet in my opinion. Keep your saturated fat levels down (> 20g a day), eat fruit and veg regularly, and at least keep an eye on your salt. And of course, combine it with some regular exercise.
- jerf 17y agoImmediately after reading an article that points out that we don't know what salt intake does, in a fully scientific sense of "don't know", you feel empowered to make a recommendation about what salt intake I should have? "Don't know" does not mean "Well, play it safe and cut it down", it means don't know. Cutting down salt can have an adverse effect too; it is an essential nutrient you are recommending we "keep an eye on" after all! I find myself wondering how many more times we're going to read things like "Before changing public policy, Dr. Alderman and Dr. McCarron suggest trying something new: a rigorous test of the low-salt diet in a randomized clinical trial. That proposal is rejected by the salt reformers as too time-consuming and expensive. But when you contemplate the potential costs of another public health debacle like the anti-fat campaign, a clinical trial can start to look cheap." (Emphasis mine.) No, your judgment is not so awesome we can just bypass the scientific process, for any value of "your judgment". Might I also add that you still seem to be stuck on the "public health debacle like the anti-fat campaign"; I find the scientific evidence against saturated fat to be wanting. As that paragraph implies, ultimately they did the same thing you're advocating here for salt: They skipped over science because we had to act now!!! and it was OK to substitute their judgment for science. We'll be another decade or two minimum flushing out the wrong idea that fat is bad for you, decades in which those wrong ideas will cost hundreds of millions more their lives and health. (Excluding transfats, which I think the evidence is clear that they are.) The stakes on this stuff are high, you'd better be damned sure you're right before you make public health pronouncements.
- sailormoon 17y agoAmen to that.
- CWuestefeld 17y agoThe stakes on this stuff are high, you'd better be damned sure you're right before you make public health pronouncements. Unfortunately, this seems to be the standard process when government steps in. Whether the topic is an economic bailout or taking action on AGW, it seems to be driven more by the desired means than a well-understood model of how to get to the ends.
- ukdm 17y agoIt was opinion. They don't know with concrete scietific evidence how much salt is good or bad for you. I'd suggest that too much of most things is bad for you therefore I choose to have everything in moderation and follow guidelines given out by the Food Standards Agency (http://www.eatwell.gov.uk/healthydiet/fss/salt/ http://www.eatwell.gov.uk/healthydiet/fss/salt/). Whether you follow that advice or not is up to the individual. Am I overweight? No, Is my blood pressure high? No. Is this due to controlling my salt and fat intake? I have no idea. But it works for me.
- jodrellblank 17y agoIf it's not due to controlling your salt and fat intake, then it doesn't work for you, it's just correlated with some behaviour which does.
- LargeWu 17y agoThe way to eat healthy is to eat food, which is to say, don't eat a lot of processed stuff that resembles food. There's no salt, high fructose corn syrup, refined carbs, etc. in pretty much all whole foods.
- zaphar 17y agoI really think that sort of misses the point. There are lots of "whole foods" that eaten in the wrong quantities are unhealthy. Like the article suggests I think the human body is pretty good at regulating what it needs. The key is moderation and diversity. Pay attention when your body tells you it's craving something. And don't keep eating when your full. This works whether your eating "whole" foods or "processed" foods.
- blueben 17y agoNo salt in whole foods? That's hardly true. Perhaps if you consider plants to be the only whole foods, I suppose. Meat of all kinds has plenty of natural salt content.
- jodrellblank 17y agoBreakfast cereals, bread, tinned soup, package meals, these are hardly "what is seen as a good diet". And what makes you recommend a varied diet for health anyway? How many creatures on Earth eat anything other than a limited and pretty monotonous diet?
- blueben 17y agoI know of at least one: Homo Sapiens Sapiens. But really, any one of the thousands of omnivorous and scavenging species fits the bill nicely.
- maximilian 17y agoKeep your saturated fat levels down (> 20g a day) You used the bracket wrong. Correct: "fat levels down (< 20g a day)"