Are you reading this, Nurse Bloomberg?

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.

I absolutely agree that the government should not be telling anyone how much salt to eat, or how much to put in customers’ food, though I appreciate content labels.

As readers know, I’ve been engaged in my own personal war on salt for the past few months, and I have in fact reduced my blood pressure from ridiculously high to merely high levels in so doing. I did it primarily with the intent of BP reduction, though obviously I hoped that it would also decrease my heart attack risk. There are other reasons to reduce blood pressure than to mitigate coronary issues — it’s hard on other organs (such as liver and kidney function). I don’t have any other symptoms of problems caused by high blood pressure, but I’d like to prevent them from occurring. I do seem to have hit a plateau, though, in terms of how low salt reduction is going to get it, and while I’ll be doing other things, I may also not focus as much on the salt as I have been (because it really is a pain in the ass to have to prepare all your own food from scratch, and avoid all cheeses but fresh mozarella, and other things). The results that lower salt intake actually correlations with higher heart attack risk is disconcerting (this, as with cholesterol, makes me wonder if I treating a symptom rather than of a cause?) But I won’t go back to a diet of jerky, either. There is no doubt that I am salt sensitive, and as the article notes (and as is true in many things) every person is different.

Which is why the government shouldn’t be involved, other than perhaps to provide advice (something at which they’ve been notoriously awful for the past decades when it comes to nutrition, partly due to lobbying by the agriculture-industrial complex).

[Update a couple minutes later]

I’m definitely not going to cut back on the garlic and onions. And speaking of treating symptoms:

News reports of this negative trial failed to recognize that the cholesterol-lowering effects of garlic are not the same for all people and that any trial containing a large percentage of healthy men could miss an effect that might be found if the people studied were patients with diabetes or heart disease.

In addition, while there is so much focus on the connection between cholesterol and heart disease, the benefits of garlic in preventing heart disease are probably due to factors other than changes in cholesterol.

In particular, clinical experiments have shown that regular consumption of garlic decreased calcium deposits and the size of arterial plaque in coronary arteries, prevented unhealthy blood clotting and improved the circulation of the subjects who were studied.

I think people worry way too much about cholesterol, and that for many people, taking statins to reduce it might be engaging in a cure worse than the disease.