11 ms·

Anti-Salt Narrative Needs a Shakeup

88 points by petethomas 8y ago

ralusek 8y ago
As someone who loves salt, I will gladly add this to my collection in the game of Cherry Pick Evidence For Your Preferred Nutrition. You'd think that science would make things here a little more conclusive by now...
- rgrieselhuber 8y ago
  One of the little talked-about but very prevalent problems in research is the endless number of lobbyists behind “scientific” findings and the products they promote.
  - matte_black 8y ago
    Why isn’t research more decentralized?
    - coaxial 8y ago
      Because most people can't understand research or how it's done, so there is not enough pressure to change anything. I found the books by Ben Goldacre to be enlightening. He has a ted talk as well I believe.
    - marcosdumay 8y ago
      Who would do that decentralized research? Why would they do that? The real question is why do governments watch private interests take over public research institutions and not only do nothing to preserve the lack of bias, but even go out of their way to help the process? (And yes, the answer is not secret.)
      - skookumchuck 8y ago
        Do you really think government research absent private bias is free from bias? How government money gets spent is a very political process, and naturally that puts a lot of pressure on research organizations to produce the politically correct result.
    - yorwba 8y ago
      Those lobbyists and the scientists they fund are decentralized. Decentralization isn't guaranteed to improve anything, usually it only adds overhead. Decentralized consensus works in Bitcoin (a minority can never fool the majority) because verifying work is much easier than doing the work. Decentralized consensus doesn't work very well in research, because verifying work is even harder. If you repeat someone's experiment and get different results, maybe you just didn't do it correctly? So you need multiple replication attempts before you can be sure to have falsified it, and in that time someone else has already published the next bogus study.
- smrq 8y ago
  I have arguments with my girlfriend about this. She says she's concerned for my well-being because I am skeptical of most dietary recommendations. I have to convince her that detox shakes are a scam perpetrated by snake-oil salesmen trying to make a buck off people who don't know any better. I'm not sure how to defend the latter without conceding to the former.
- tim333 8y ago
  >You'd think that science would make things here a little more conclusive by now... One of the troubles is human bodies are quite complex and able to thrive on a wide variety of diets so any simple looking at the correlation of factor A and result B is likely to be shaky due to all the other stuff that happens. One example I found amusing is the correlation between alcohol intake and health. My recollection is the UK government did some study to do health recommendations on how much to drink but found the healthiest drank something like 4 pints a day so thought we can't say that and recommended max 2 pints or some such but the thing is cause and effect are basically the wrong way around - people drink till they feel ill and the healthy can drink more. There's a lot like that. My rule of thumb is to ignore the 'science' stuff unless they can quantify how many years the bad habit takes off your life. Salt was never like that. The big ones are smoking - 10 years or so, obesity - of the order of 10, air pollution - of the order of 2 years.
joshgel 8y ago
There is just such a lack of good, well-done dietary research that it's almost impossible to know what advice is true, what advice is probably true and what advice is just made up. Obviously these studies are extremely difficult to do well, and hence why they haven't been done. But the cost to society is much, much greater than the cost of these studies.
- coaxial 8y ago
  I remember reading that it's because they're impossible to do: the only option would be to lock people up in a room and only feed them exactly the same food on a schedule for months.
  - enturn 8y ago
    There were some interesting observations about salt with people who did a 135-day simulation of life on the Mir space station. https://www.nytimes.com/2017/05/08/health/salt-health-effects.html https://www.nytimes.com/2017/05/08/health/salt-health-effect...
  - stevenwoo 8y ago
    There is also the confounding factor of gut microbiome (people who had more fiber continuously IIRC having a more diverse/probably better for health, microbiome) influencing results of diet or vice versa.
  - cimmanom 8y ago
    Haven't they done nutrition studies in the military and in prisons because of the level of control over food intake?
    - coaxial 8y ago
      Maybe, but how biased is the population? People in the army do a lot more physical exercise than most, people in jail have a different way of living than the rest of the population because of their circumstances.
jgrowl 8y ago
I'm on a ketogenic diet and I measure out a full tablespoon of salt for my daily consumption. I usually get somewhere between 7-8 grams of sodium a day. My mind was blown when I saw the McMaster study on sodium that found that for normal diets, 5 grams daily showed no increased mortality of all causes. I think it was too much below 3g or much above 7g is where things start to get dangerous. I had to do some trial and error to find the right amount of salt for me and I'm still tweaking it here and there.
- DanBC 8y ago
  But they're talking about all source sodium, not just added sodium. How much sodium is in the rest of your food? EDIT: one tablespoon is 18 gm of salt. That's over 6 gm of sodium. EDIT2: Also, the study you're talking about says this: > We noted that most of the world’s population (about 95%) studied consumes more than 3 g/day of sodium, regardless of hypertension status and only 22% consume 6 g/day or more of sodium—the threshold above which we note an increase in mortality and cardiovascular disease risk.
  - jgrowl 8y ago
    I don't really eat any prepackaged foods besides macadamia/coconut milk. Mainly broccoli, spinach, celery, eggs, chicken, turkey, tuna and a ton of coconut/olive oil. A tablespoon of salt is 7080 mg of sodium. There haven't been any studies looking at ideal sodium intake for people on keto as far as I know, though it is generally accepted that there is a higher need since the liver gets efficient at excreting sodium. I wouldn't necessarily recommend others take as much sodium as I do, only that personally I seem to feel better around that level. I have heard from some people that take as much as 11g a day on keto. I would definitely not exceed 5g much if I was on doing a standard diet though.
nxc18 8y ago
Very interesting. I'm affected by high blood pressure so I monitor it pretty closely. If I need to get my blood pressure down, there are three levers that consistently work: ° reducing sodium - note: I really like salty things, so it's very easy for me to push 6-7k mg or more, especially when I was in college eating cafeteria and frozen food constantly. Also, drowning things in hot sauce, to which I am mildly addicted. ° exercising. ° cutting out alcohol and certain other vices. Everyone's different, so if you're worried about it, talk to your doctor and consider starting a monitoring program. I like home monitoring; IME knowing exactly the impact of my choices on my blood pressure helps me make good choices. It's good to hear the guidance might become a little more sane - it is extremely difficult to eat a normal (by any American standard at least) diet and be less than a few thousand mg.
- Swizec 8y ago
  > 6-7k mg Why not say grams? A thousand miligrams is a gram. I've always "suffered" from low blood pressure. Never quite to the point of fainting when I stand up too quick, but it's been close a few times. Exercise for me means I have to go out of my way to supplement sodium or I start getting muscle cramps. So I wonder, what does high pressure feel like? How do you know when it's too high? Or is it just something you notice on a device and know to fix because doctors say so?
  - greglindahl 8y ago
    Most people find out from having it measured at a doctor's checkup, but, if it gets high enough it feels like someone's squeezing your brain. The lack of symptoms for most people is why the US has things like free blood pressure checkups, and automated machines in the waiting areas of pharmacies.
  - smhost 8y ago
    It feels like there's too much blood in my head/face.
  - dharness 8y ago
    Most food packaging measures sodium in mg, so I feel using those units is easier to reason about for most people.
Barrin92 8y ago
>I found an advocate for rationality in Richard Sloan, a professor of behavioural medicine at Columbia University. He said that when it comes to hypertension and other health problems, Americans put too much faith in the power of personal agency. Isn't that the truth. Another example came to mind immediately which is the treatment of alcoholism. AA is really big in the United States but has abysmal recovery rates, whereas preliminary studies with muscle relaxants have shown great promise. Yet in public discourse diseases are treated like one's 'personal demons', a 'challenge that has to be overcome' and so on. It almost seems like a personal growth lifestyle change rather than an objective medical assessment with programs like AA suggesting opening oneself up to 'higher powers' in their official guidelines. There really needs to be a big culture shift that moves health debate from a sort of Puritanism to objective medical evaluation that keeps the personal angle out. Especially when it comes to drug abuse and dietary related illnesses. Obesity is a big issue as well.
- eanzenberg 8y ago
  What are you talking about? There's plenty of stories out there of obese people who lost weight on their own and got their life back into shape (myself included). This ivory tower elitism is nonsense. They are worried that if enough people took actions into their own hands they'd be out of business.
  - dpark 8y ago
    The percentage of people who manage to successfully lose and keep off a significant amount of weight is tiny. No one disputes that some people manage it. The concern is that depending exclusively on willpower clearly doesn’t work for most people.
  - throwawayjava 8y ago
    Who is "they" and what does Columbia have to gain from keeping people fat?
  - asveikau 8y ago
    I think a lot of people could "will" to fix some of these problems in an ideal world, but other factors beyond their control prevent them. I "beat" obesity in the last year. My BMI was low 30s and it's now low 20s. Knock on wood, after some time I don't seem to be regaining it like a lot of people do (as suggested by my sibling post). Without getting into too many personal details, the biggest thing to cause that was a radical re-shift of my work habits. A vast majority of people do not have the luxury of chosing when and how they work. I do not fault them for not replicating what I did. I struggled with it myself for a long time, before my recent success, until I was able to make these latest changes. In general I think things which lead to judging other people for their circumstances is a bad idea. There are probably people who could will it away. Is it their fault that they don't? Honestly, probably not usually.
BadassFractal 8y ago
Stan Efferding, who not only holds world records in power lifting but who also trains Hafþór of Game of Thrones fame, is big into recommending at least 6g of sodium a day for people who are pretty active and exercise regularly: https://youtu.be/BeOc7TRo9Os?t=16m49s https://youtu.be/BeOc7TRo9Os?t=16m49s Admittedly, some of the practices that work for genetic outliers of the caliber of Stan Efferding and Dan Green (or people who train as hard) don't apply to the rest of us regular mortals.
- 3131s 8y ago
  Dan Green and Stan Efferding both take steroids though (or at least Stan did at one time), and they weigh a ton. Not sure anything that applies to them would apply to most anyone else. It's probably best not to glean health tips from powerlifters in general...
  - BadassFractal 8y ago
    It'd be pretty shocking to find someone performing at that level who doesn't increase their testosterone levels (and much, much more) artificially. I'm pretty sure Stan is still on HRT these days. It's sort of a loophole in the system these days for how to obtain it legally. It's not nearly as powerful as cycling it, but it's better than nothing. I always find the whole "but they take steroids" argument strange. It's actually funny you should mention taking health advice from powerlifters, bodybuilders and strongmen. Stan Efferding has an entire video on the subject, where he makes it clear that if you want to look or perform like him or some of his peers, you will most likely not be healthy: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yxHZrF4AFRg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yxHZrF4AFRg . The part that struck me the most was that some of these guys need CPAP to sleep once they get into the 300-400lbs weight category, just because a human body isn't supposed to weigh that much.
carapace 8y ago
Eat freshly picked organic vegetables, a lot. Some fruit. No dairy. No grains. Meat once a week or so. Within a month or so you will positively glow with health.
- ac29 8y ago
  Is this hypothetical diet, where does the protein come from? Soy? Nuts?
  - carapace 8y ago
    Meat. Once a week or so, two or three steaks. I forgot to mention eggs. I should add that, in this very non-hypothetical diet, you eat a lot of veggies. Five or six giant salads a day. Eat a whole cucumber like a banana. Once your microbiome adjusts it will tear though that stuff surprisingly well. You'll be dropping the deuce five times a day. (And they won't stink. That's a side-effect.) You have so much energy you can run up mountains and you're always giggling because you feel so good. As your cells start to clean out the molecular junk in your system you'll age in reverse for a while.
    - raarts 8y ago
      > meat, once a week or so, two or three stakes. You say people should eat two or three steaks on one day or even in one meal?? > six giant salads a day Seems a lot? > drop the deuce five times a day Five times a day??? > age in reverse for a while Please back all this up with science, because it sounds like snake oil to me.
      - carapace 8y ago
        >> meat, once a week or so, two or three steaks. > You say people should eat two or three steaks on one day or even in one meal?? No, although for some folks that wouldn't be a problem in the least. :-) More like, fast Friday afternoon until Saturday morning. Have steak and eggs for breakfast, with potatoes if you like[1], Then a (bun-less) hamburger for lunch. Salads for dinner. Repeat Sunday. But that's just an example. Also, it doesn't have to be beef. Eat a whole chicken over the weekend. I forgot to mention grubs and bugs, fantastic sources of protein if you can handle eating them. (I personally can't, but I just read about how cockroach farming is taking off in China. It's brilliant, apparently the company doing it is on track to consume all of China's kitchen scrap waste by 2020 or something crazy like that. The bugs grow in huge buildings surrounded by moats filled with carp to eat escapees. So wonderful and so gross!) >> six giant salads a day > Seems a lot? Yes, it does. See below. >> drop the deuce five times a day > Five times a day??? Four or five, yep. Tidy human-size rabbit turds that barely stink. What's going on is you're biasing your microbiome to the organisms that feed on plants[2] rather than milk or bread. The bulk of most plant matter that you're eating is water. The rest is largely fiber and "nutrients" which is a huge catch-all term in this context. In your gut the microbiome rapidly consumes the plant matter in a kind of internal "farm" and your cells actually eat the microbes. It's gross, but feces isn't "waste", it's a microbial culture, about 80% of it in fact. In a normal scenario feces is deposited on the ground and rapidly invaded by micro-rhizome which then begins to integrate the internal ecosystem of the "nuggets" with the ecosystem in the soil. Digestion isn't consumption. You take what you need, incubate the rest, and pass it along, having added your own contribution. From the microbes' POV none of us are at the apex. With a large steady flow of nutrients and no milk or bread to gum up the works your system uses way less energy to pick and choose the molecules it needs. It's also much easier to dispose of waste molecules. Under a "normal" diet your cells literally get jammed up with too many of the wrong molecules. In severe cases there's nowhere to put them and you get e.g. cholesterol building up in the blood vessels. Take away the bad inputs and provide for the existing crap to leave easily, and that's what causes you to ... >> age in reverse for a while > Please back all this up with science, because it sounds like snake oil to me. All of this stuff has science behind it. But I'm afraid you're gonna have to do your own homework. I'm busy. It's your health. It might sound cold, but uh, "evolution in action". What I'm talking up here is a paradigm shift. The new paradigm is no less scientific and rigorous than the old one, it's just different. Here's a decent introduction, with science: "The Soil Will Save Us" : "How Scientists, Farmers, and Foodies Are Healing the Soil to Save the Planet" http://www.kristinohlson.com/books/soil-will-save-us http://www.kristinohlson.com/books/soil-will-save-us Start with that and follow th references. The science is happening. As for my specific claim about aging in reverse, yes, I admit that's anecdotal. However, I maintain that the best way to check the veracity of that claim is to try it yourself. Get your biological markers recorded, try the diet for N months, and keep track of your "biological age" throughout. This is a study I'd love to perform on a large scale. Let me emphasize the importance of freshly picked food! This requirement almost demands that your kitchen is within walking distance of a garden. Food has a half-life. An organically grown vegetable in the supermarket is only marginally better than one plucked fresh from the garden and eaten immediately. You simply haven't tasted e.g. corn or carrots otherwise. [1] If the tummy likes, not the tongue. [2] vegetables, fruits, nuts, etc. But not grain. Grains are emergency food, eating them as a staple feeds the "wrong" gut microbes.
noetic_techy 8y ago
Recommend people read the book The Salt Fix, by Dr. James DiNicolantonio. Just like cholesterol and Ancel Keyes, opinions of just a handful of people, in particular Dr. Walter Kempner, changed public health policy against salt with very little evidence to back it all up. Now you are starting to see all this terrible advice unravel.
chrisbennet 8y ago
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/its-time-to-end-the-war-on-salt/ https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/its-time-to-end-t... Scientific America (2011) ”This week a meta-analysis of seven studies involving a total of 6,250 subjects in the American Journal of Hypertension found no strong evidence that cutting salt intake reduces the risk for heart attacks, strokes or death in people with normal or high blood pressure. In May European researchers publishing in the Journal of the American Medical Association reported that the less sodium that study subjects excreted in their urine—an excellent measure of prior consumption—the greater their risk was of dying from heart disease. These findings call into question the common wisdom that excess salt is bad for you, but the evidence linking salt to heart disease has always been tenuous.”
pfarnsworth 8y ago
High salt diets == Hypertension and High fat == heart disease are two "scientific truths" that have been propagated for decades and have turned up as bad science. I've heard the argument of "all the scientists believe this, so you must be wrong" so many times with these and it turned out I was right. I believe the same will go for other incidents of bad science that most people believe these days.
- graeme 8y ago
  Did anyone familir with the literature say "all the scientists believe this"?
  - reitanqild 8y ago
    We've all heard it in school and through major newspaper and TV shows since we entered school. It doesn't matter what the best experts says as long as those picked up by mainstream media and textbook authors consistently agree on the wrong thing.
    - graeme 8y ago
      Makes sense. Just wanted to clarify in order to distinguish from a case like global warming, where there really is expert agreement.
      - pfarnsworth 8y ago
        There was expert agreement on both high salt and high fat diets for decades.
kdtop 8y ago
I was taught that salt (sodium) unmasks hypertension, but doesn't cause hypertension. In other words, sodium is the tool that the body's regulatory systems use when trying to raise blood pressure. So a healthy younger person can probably not worry about sodium intake. But for an older person with congestive heart failure, a bag of potato chips might end them up in the hospital.

88 points by petethomas 8y ago

As someone who loves salt, I will gladly add this to my collection in the game of Cherry Pick Evidence For Your Preferred Nutrition. You'd think that science would make things here a little more conclusive by now...

rgrieselhuber 8y ago
One of the little talked-about but very prevalent problems in research is the endless number of lobbyists behind “scientific” findings and the products they promote.
- matte_black 8y ago
  Why isn’t research more decentralized?
  - coaxial 8y ago
    Because most people can't understand research or how it's done, so there is not enough pressure to change anything. I found the books by Ben Goldacre to be enlightening. He has a ted talk as well I believe.
  - marcosdumay 8y ago
    Who would do that decentralized research? Why would they do that? The real question is why do governments watch private interests take over public research institutions and not only do nothing to preserve the lack of bias, but even go out of their way to help the process? (And yes, the answer is not secret.)
    - skookumchuck 8y ago
      Do you really think government research absent private bias is free from bias? How government money gets spent is a very political process, and naturally that puts a lot of pressure on research organizations to produce the politically correct result.
  - yorwba 8y ago
    Those lobbyists and the scientists they fund are decentralized. Decentralization isn't guaranteed to improve anything, usually it only adds overhead. Decentralized consensus works in Bitcoin (a minority can never fool the majority) because verifying work is much easier than doing the work. Decentralized consensus doesn't work very well in research, because verifying work is even harder. If you repeat someone's experiment and get different results, maybe you just didn't do it correctly? So you need multiple replication attempts before you can be sure to have falsified it, and in that time someone else has already published the next bogus study.
smrq 8y ago
I have arguments with my girlfriend about this. She says she's concerned for my well-being because I am skeptical of most dietary recommendations. I have to convince her that detox shakes are a scam perpetrated by snake-oil salesmen trying to make a buck off people who don't know any better. I'm not sure how to defend the latter without conceding to the former.
tim333 8y ago
>You'd think that science would make things here a little more conclusive by now... One of the troubles is human bodies are quite complex and able to thrive on a wide variety of diets so any simple looking at the correlation of factor A and result B is likely to be shaky due to all the other stuff that happens. One example I found amusing is the correlation between alcohol intake and health. My recollection is the UK government did some study to do health recommendations on how much to drink but found the healthiest drank something like 4 pints a day so thought we can't say that and recommended max 2 pints or some such but the thing is cause and effect are basically the wrong way around - people drink till they feel ill and the healthy can drink more. There's a lot like that. My rule of thumb is to ignore the 'science' stuff unless they can quantify how many years the bad habit takes off your life. Salt was never like that. The big ones are smoking - 10 years or so, obesity - of the order of 10, air pollution - of the order of 2 years.

joshgel 8y ago

There is just such a lack of good, well-done dietary research that it's almost impossible to know what advice is true, what advice is probably true and what advice is just made up. Obviously these studies are extremely difficult to do well, and hence why they haven't been done. But the cost to society is much, much greater than the cost of these studies.

coaxial 8y ago
I remember reading that it's because they're impossible to do: the only option would be to lock people up in a room and only feed them exactly the same food on a schedule for months.
- enturn 8y ago
  There were some interesting observations about salt with people who did a 135-day simulation of life on the Mir space station. https://www.nytimes.com/2017/05/08/health/salt-health-effects.html https://www.nytimes.com/2017/05/08/health/salt-health-effect...
- stevenwoo 8y ago
  There is also the confounding factor of gut microbiome (people who had more fiber continuously IIRC having a more diverse/probably better for health, microbiome) influencing results of diet or vice versa.
- cimmanom 8y ago
  Haven't they done nutrition studies in the military and in prisons because of the level of control over food intake?
  - coaxial 8y ago
    Maybe, but how biased is the population? People in the army do a lot more physical exercise than most, people in jail have a different way of living than the rest of the population because of their circumstances.

jgrowl 8y ago

I'm on a ketogenic diet and I measure out a full tablespoon of salt for my daily consumption. I usually get somewhere between 7-8 grams of sodium a day. My mind was blown when I saw the McMaster study on sodium that found that for normal diets, 5 grams daily showed no increased mortality of all causes. I think it was too much below 3g or much above 7g is where things start to get dangerous. I had to do some trial and error to find the right amount of salt for me and I'm still tweaking it here and there.

DanBC 8y ago
But they're talking about all source sodium, not just added sodium. How much sodium is in the rest of your food? EDIT: one tablespoon is 18 gm of salt. That's over 6 gm of sodium. EDIT2: Also, the study you're talking about says this: > We noted that most of the world’s population (about 95%) studied consumes more than 3 g/day of sodium, regardless of hypertension status and only 22% consume 6 g/day or more of sodium—the threshold above which we note an increase in mortality and cardiovascular disease risk.
- jgrowl 8y ago
  I don't really eat any prepackaged foods besides macadamia/coconut milk. Mainly broccoli, spinach, celery, eggs, chicken, turkey, tuna and a ton of coconut/olive oil. A tablespoon of salt is 7080 mg of sodium. There haven't been any studies looking at ideal sodium intake for people on keto as far as I know, though it is generally accepted that there is a higher need since the liver gets efficient at excreting sodium. I wouldn't necessarily recommend others take as much sodium as I do, only that personally I seem to feel better around that level. I have heard from some people that take as much as 11g a day on keto. I would definitely not exceed 5g much if I was on doing a standard diet though.

nxc18 8y ago

Very interesting. I'm affected by high blood pressure so I monitor it pretty closely. If I need to get my blood pressure down, there are three levers that consistently work: ° reducing sodium - note: I really like salty things, so it's very easy for me to push 6-7k mg or more, especially when I was in college eating cafeteria and frozen food constantly. Also, drowning things in hot sauce, to which I am mildly addicted. ° exercising. ° cutting out alcohol and certain other vices. Everyone's different, so if you're worried about it, talk to your doctor and consider starting a monitoring program. I like home monitoring; IME knowing exactly the impact of my choices on my blood pressure helps me make good choices. It's good to hear the guidance might become a little more sane - it is extremely difficult to eat a normal (by any American standard at least) diet and be less than a few thousand mg.

Swizec 8y ago
> 6-7k mg Why not say grams? A thousand miligrams is a gram. I've always "suffered" from low blood pressure. Never quite to the point of fainting when I stand up too quick, but it's been close a few times. Exercise for me means I have to go out of my way to supplement sodium or I start getting muscle cramps. So I wonder, what does high pressure feel like? How do you know when it's too high? Or is it just something you notice on a device and know to fix because doctors say so?
- greglindahl 8y ago
  Most people find out from having it measured at a doctor's checkup, but, if it gets high enough it feels like someone's squeezing your brain. The lack of symptoms for most people is why the US has things like free blood pressure checkups, and automated machines in the waiting areas of pharmacies.
- smhost 8y ago
  It feels like there's too much blood in my head/face.
- dharness 8y ago
  Most food packaging measures sodium in mg, so I feel using those units is easier to reason about for most people.

Barrin92 8y ago

>I found an advocate for rationality in Richard Sloan, a professor of behavioural medicine at Columbia University. He said that when it comes to hypertension and other health problems, Americans put too much faith in the power of personal agency. Isn't that the truth. Another example came to mind immediately which is the treatment of alcoholism. AA is really big in the United States but has abysmal recovery rates, whereas preliminary studies with muscle relaxants have shown great promise. Yet in public discourse diseases are treated like one's 'personal demons', a 'challenge that has to be overcome' and so on. It almost seems like a personal growth lifestyle change rather than an objective medical assessment with programs like AA suggesting opening oneself up to 'higher powers' in their official guidelines. There really needs to be a big culture shift that moves health debate from a sort of Puritanism to objective medical evaluation that keeps the personal angle out. Especially when it comes to drug abuse and dietary related illnesses. Obesity is a big issue as well.

eanzenberg 8y ago
What are you talking about? There's plenty of stories out there of obese people who lost weight on their own and got their life back into shape (myself included). This ivory tower elitism is nonsense. They are worried that if enough people took actions into their own hands they'd be out of business.
- dpark 8y ago
  The percentage of people who manage to successfully lose and keep off a significant amount of weight is tiny. No one disputes that some people manage it. The concern is that depending exclusively on willpower clearly doesn’t work for most people.
- throwawayjava 8y ago
  Who is "they" and what does Columbia have to gain from keeping people fat?
- asveikau 8y ago
  I think a lot of people could "will" to fix some of these problems in an ideal world, but other factors beyond their control prevent them. I "beat" obesity in the last year. My BMI was low 30s and it's now low 20s. Knock on wood, after some time I don't seem to be regaining it like a lot of people do (as suggested by my sibling post). Without getting into too many personal details, the biggest thing to cause that was a radical re-shift of my work habits. A vast majority of people do not have the luxury of chosing when and how they work. I do not fault them for not replicating what I did. I struggled with it myself for a long time, before my recent success, until I was able to make these latest changes. In general I think things which lead to judging other people for their circumstances is a bad idea. There are probably people who could will it away. Is it their fault that they don't? Honestly, probably not usually.

BadassFractal 8y ago

Stan Efferding, who not only holds world records in power lifting but who also trains Hafþór of Game of Thrones fame, is big into recommending at least 6g of sodium a day for people who are pretty active and exercise regularly: https://youtu.be/BeOc7TRo9Os?t=16m49s https://youtu.be/BeOc7TRo9Os?t=16m49s Admittedly, some of the practices that work for genetic outliers of the caliber of Stan Efferding and Dan Green (or people who train as hard) don't apply to the rest of us regular mortals.

3131s 8y ago
Dan Green and Stan Efferding both take steroids though (or at least Stan did at one time), and they weigh a ton. Not sure anything that applies to them would apply to most anyone else. It's probably best not to glean health tips from powerlifters in general...
- BadassFractal 8y ago
  It'd be pretty shocking to find someone performing at that level who doesn't increase their testosterone levels (and much, much more) artificially. I'm pretty sure Stan is still on HRT these days. It's sort of a loophole in the system these days for how to obtain it legally. It's not nearly as powerful as cycling it, but it's better than nothing. I always find the whole "but they take steroids" argument strange. It's actually funny you should mention taking health advice from powerlifters, bodybuilders and strongmen. Stan Efferding has an entire video on the subject, where he makes it clear that if you want to look or perform like him or some of his peers, you will most likely not be healthy: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yxHZrF4AFRg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yxHZrF4AFRg . The part that struck me the most was that some of these guys need CPAP to sleep once they get into the 300-400lbs weight category, just because a human body isn't supposed to weigh that much.

carapace 8y ago

Eat freshly picked organic vegetables, a lot. Some fruit. No dairy. No grains. Meat once a week or so. Within a month or so you will positively glow with health.

ac29 8y ago
Is this hypothetical diet, where does the protein come from? Soy? Nuts?
- carapace 8y ago
  Meat. Once a week or so, two or three steaks. I forgot to mention eggs. I should add that, in this very non-hypothetical diet, you eat a lot of veggies. Five or six giant salads a day. Eat a whole cucumber like a banana. Once your microbiome adjusts it will tear though that stuff surprisingly well. You'll be dropping the deuce five times a day. (And they won't stink. That's a side-effect.) You have so much energy you can run up mountains and you're always giggling because you feel so good. As your cells start to clean out the molecular junk in your system you'll age in reverse for a while.
  - raarts 8y ago
    > meat, once a week or so, two or three stakes. You say people should eat two or three steaks on one day or even in one meal?? > six giant salads a day Seems a lot? > drop the deuce five times a day Five times a day??? > age in reverse for a while Please back all this up with science, because it sounds like snake oil to me.
    - carapace 8y ago
      >> meat, once a week or so, two or three steaks. > You say people should eat two or three steaks on one day or even in one meal?? No, although for some folks that wouldn't be a problem in the least. :-) More like, fast Friday afternoon until Saturday morning. Have steak and eggs for breakfast, with potatoes if you like[1], Then a (bun-less) hamburger for lunch. Salads for dinner. Repeat Sunday. But that's just an example. Also, it doesn't have to be beef. Eat a whole chicken over the weekend. I forgot to mention grubs and bugs, fantastic sources of protein if you can handle eating them. (I personally can't, but I just read about how cockroach farming is taking off in China. It's brilliant, apparently the company doing it is on track to consume all of China's kitchen scrap waste by 2020 or something crazy like that. The bugs grow in huge buildings surrounded by moats filled with carp to eat escapees. So wonderful and so gross!) >> six giant salads a day > Seems a lot? Yes, it does. See below. >> drop the deuce five times a day > Five times a day??? Four or five, yep. Tidy human-size rabbit turds that barely stink. What's going on is you're biasing your microbiome to the organisms that feed on plants[2] rather than milk or bread. The bulk of most plant matter that you're eating is water. The rest is largely fiber and "nutrients" which is a huge catch-all term in this context. In your gut the microbiome rapidly consumes the plant matter in a kind of internal "farm" and your cells actually eat the microbes. It's gross, but feces isn't "waste", it's a microbial culture, about 80% of it in fact. In a normal scenario feces is deposited on the ground and rapidly invaded by micro-rhizome which then begins to integrate the internal ecosystem of the "nuggets" with the ecosystem in the soil. Digestion isn't consumption. You take what you need, incubate the rest, and pass it along, having added your own contribution. From the microbes' POV none of us are at the apex. With a large steady flow of nutrients and no milk or bread to gum up the works your system uses way less energy to pick and choose the molecules it needs. It's also much easier to dispose of waste molecules. Under a "normal" diet your cells literally get jammed up with too many of the wrong molecules. In severe cases there's nowhere to put them and you get e.g. cholesterol building up in the blood vessels. Take away the bad inputs and provide for the existing crap to leave easily, and that's what causes you to ... >> age in reverse for a while > Please back all this up with science, because it sounds like snake oil to me. All of this stuff has science behind it. But I'm afraid you're gonna have to do your own homework. I'm busy. It's your health. It might sound cold, but uh, "evolution in action". What I'm talking up here is a paradigm shift. The new paradigm is no less scientific and rigorous than the old one, it's just different. Here's a decent introduction, with science: "The Soil Will Save Us" : "How Scientists, Farmers, and Foodies Are Healing the Soil to Save the Planet" http://www.kristinohlson.com/books/soil-will-save-us http://www.kristinohlson.com/books/soil-will-save-us Start with that and follow th references. The science is happening. As for my specific claim about aging in reverse, yes, I admit that's anecdotal. However, I maintain that the best way to check the veracity of that claim is to try it yourself. Get your biological markers recorded, try the diet for N months, and keep track of your "biological age" throughout. This is a study I'd love to perform on a large scale. Let me emphasize the importance of freshly picked food! This requirement almost demands that your kitchen is within walking distance of a garden. Food has a half-life. An organically grown vegetable in the supermarket is only marginally better than one plucked fresh from the garden and eaten immediately. You simply haven't tasted e.g. corn or carrots otherwise. [1] If the tummy likes, not the tongue. [2] vegetables, fruits, nuts, etc. But not grain. Grains are emergency food, eating them as a staple feeds the "wrong" gut microbes.

noetic_techy 8y ago

Recommend people read the book The Salt Fix, by Dr. James DiNicolantonio. Just like cholesterol and Ancel Keyes, opinions of just a handful of people, in particular Dr. Walter Kempner, changed public health policy against salt with very little evidence to back it all up. Now you are starting to see all this terrible advice unravel.

chrisbennet 8y ago

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/its-time-to-end-the-war-on-salt/ https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/its-time-to-end-t... Scientific America (2011) ”This week a meta-analysis of seven studies involving a total of 6,250 subjects in the American Journal of Hypertension found no strong evidence that cutting salt intake reduces the risk for heart attacks, strokes or death in people with normal or high blood pressure. In May European researchers publishing in the Journal of the American Medical Association reported that the less sodium that study subjects excreted in their urine—an excellent measure of prior consumption—the greater their risk was of dying from heart disease. These findings call into question the common wisdom that excess salt is bad for you, but the evidence linking salt to heart disease has always been tenuous.”

pfarnsworth 8y ago

High salt diets == Hypertension and High fat == heart disease are two "scientific truths" that have been propagated for decades and have turned up as bad science. I've heard the argument of "all the scientists believe this, so you must be wrong" so many times with these and it turned out I was right. I believe the same will go for other incidents of bad science that most people believe these days.

graeme 8y ago
Did anyone familir with the literature say "all the scientists believe this"?
- reitanqild 8y ago
  We've all heard it in school and through major newspaper and TV shows since we entered school. It doesn't matter what the best experts says as long as those picked up by mainstream media and textbook authors consistently agree on the wrong thing.
  - graeme 8y ago
    Makes sense. Just wanted to clarify in order to distinguish from a case like global warming, where there really is expert agreement.
    - pfarnsworth 8y ago
      There was expert agreement on both high salt and high fat diets for decades.

kdtop 8y ago

I was taught that salt (sodium) unmasks hypertension, but doesn't cause hypertension. In other words, sodium is the tool that the body's regulatory systems use when trying to raise blood pressure. So a healthy younger person can probably not worry about sodium intake. But for an older person with congestive heart failure, a bag of potato chips might end them up in the hospital.