Category Archives: Science And Society

Media Criticism, Political Commentary, Science And Society

Time To End The War On Salt

6 Comments

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.

Political Commentary, Science And Society

The Thermodynamic Theory Of Weight Loss

14 Comments

…loses again:

“This study shows that conventional wisdom — to eat everything in moderation, eat fewer calories and avoid fatty foods — isn’t the best approach,” Dr. Dariush Mozaffarian, a cardiologist and epidemiologist at the Harvard School of Public Health and lead author of the study, said in an interview. “What you eat makes quite a difference. Just counting calories won’t matter much unless you look at the kinds of calories you’re eating.”

Dr. Frank B. Hu, a nutrition expert at the Harvard School of Public Health and a co-author of the new analysis, said: “In the past, too much emphasis has been put on single factors in the diet. But looking for a magic bullet hasn’t solved the problem of obesity.”

Also untrue, Dr. Mozaffarian said, is the food industry’s claim that there’s no such thing as a bad food.

“There are good foods and bad foods, and the advice should be to eat the good foods more and the bad foods less,” he said. “The notion that it’s O.K. to eat everything in moderation is just an excuse to eat whatever you want.”

I didn’t intend to, and I certainly never counted a single calorie, but I’ve lost about fifteen pounds over the last few months by almost completely cutting out grains and root vegetables (going mainly paleolithic), in the interest of trying to reduce my blood pressure.

Modern nutritionists (and the FDA) have primitive, unscientific beliefs (like the idiotic war on fat and saturated fat “You are what you eat”). They’re like the doctors that still prescribe leeches for ailments. And unfortunately, too many in the medical profession think they know what they’re talking about.

Political Commentary, Science And Society

The Demand For Concealed Weapons In Michigan

54 Comments

…is being driven by women:

Most women would not have thought to carry a gun even five years ago, said Andrea Durhal. When she became a National Rifle Association certified instructor eight years ago, her classes were mostly men. Recently, women have started to fill her classes.

It took a few years for women to get over a fear of guns and take responsibility for their protection, she said.

“We’re being victimized; we’re being raped. The crimes are getting higher and the police departments are less and less,” she said. “People are realizing now that they need to be their own security.”

There’s a very interesting graphic there. The highest percentages of women getting permits is Wayne County (Detroit) and Barry County (Grand Rapids). I would have thought that Genessee (Flint) and Oakland (Pontiac) Counties would be equally high, but they’re slightly less. I wonder why?