What I do sometimes care about, however, is the fact that my diet is always well under [...]]]> I don’t really have issues with using salt. When I make all my own food, I generally eat 1,500-2,000 mg per day, which isn’t a lot…but I don’t care. Which is why I’ve always ignored sodium-free salt.

What I do sometimes care about, however, is the fact that my diet is always well under the FDA recommendation for potassium. I eat a lot of vegetables and some fruit, and I almost never hit it. I’m not sure what they are expecting you to eat, exactly, but apparently, not what I’m eating.

Also, when one is losing a lot of water from dieting, heat or exertion, it’s easy to not feel your best from electrolyte issues. Gatorade is either loaded with sugar or contains fake sweeteners, and is generally a pretty jive plastic food anyway.

Magnesium and calcium are easy to supplement, but potassium only comes in 99mg pills. The RDA is around 4.7g, so that’s a lot of pills – generally the whole bottle! Also, when I’ve taken potassium on an empty stomach, I’ve gotten a horrible stomach ache, so I will never do that again.

So, an old answer is to swap out some of your sea salt for salt substitute.

With 610mg of potassium per 1/4 teaspoon, it’s the best option in potassium supplementation.

The thing is that there’s no connection between blood pressure and salt. It’s never been proven. [...]]]> Salt, like many other foods, has been demonized by what we believe to be current science. It’s one of those things that “everybody knows”, so they accept that something they like is something they should eat less of.

The thing is that there’s no connection between blood pressure and salt. It’s never been proven. Gary Taubes has an article about it that you can read on line called “The (Political) Science of Salt.”

You really should read it, so I’m not going to reprint, summarize and quote too much of it here. It’s so much worse than I thought. It’s worse than the cholesterol “studies.”¹ The so-called science behind the blood pressure/salt relationship is even more lacking.

Through the early 1980s, the scientific discord over salt reduction was buried beneath the public attention given to the benefits of avoiding salt. The NHBPEP had decreed since its inception in 1972 that salt was an unnecessary evil, a conclusion reached as well by a host of medical organizations, not to mention the National Academy of Sciences and the Surgeon General. By 1978, the Center for Science in the Public Interest, a consumer advocacy group, was describing salt as “the deadly white powder you already snort” and lobbying Congress to require food labeling on high-salt foods. In 1981, the FDA launched a series of “sodium initiatives” aimed at reducing the nation’s salt intake.

Not until after these campaigns were well under way, however, did researchers set out to do studies that might be powerful enough to resolve the underlying controversy. The first was the Scottish Heart Health Study, launched in 1984 by epidemiologist Hugh Tunstall-Pedoe and colleagues at the Ninewells Hospital and Medical School in Dundee, Scotland. The researchers used questionnaires, physical exams, and 24-hour urine samples to establish the risk factors for cardiovascular disease in 7300 Scottish men. This was an order of magnitude larger than any intrapopulation study ever done with 24-hour urine samples. The BMJ published the results in 1988: Potassium, which is in fruits and vegetables, seemed to have a beneficial effect on blood pressure. Sodium had no effect.

With this result, the Scottish study vanished from the debate.

Like the saturated fat demonization and the pushing of low-fat, high-carb, low-calorie diets, the established elements desperately want it to be true. They just *know* that salt is bad for you, but they can’t prove it. Like the other two, they keep running studies to try, yet again, to prove it.

Settled science does not need more studies to prove it’s hypotheses.

The demonization of salt is something I’ve mostly been ignoring because I don’t eat that much processed food. Most of the processed stuff I eat is in restaurants, and even then, I’m always trying to get that as close to simply prepared meat, green veg and fruit, since that’s what I actually eat at home. I don’t even eat salad dressing in restaurants any more, so pulling salt out of things doesn’t affect me that much.

Unfortunately, the FDA, having solved all other problems, wants to meddle with food even more.

But proponents of mandatory salt reduction say lowering salt to more reasonable levels could reduce high blood pressure, improve health in other ways, and save 100,000 lives a year in the U.S.

If you read Taubes paper above, you know that claim has no basis in reality. None whatsoever. Worse than that:

• your tax money is being spent over and over to try to prove this
• pulling salt out of foods, like pulling out fat, will cause manufacturers to add something else to make the item palatable
• what they choose to add might be something we have NOT been eating for thousands of years
• what they choose to add might cause other deficiencies or imbalances and would constitute a vast, uncontrolled science experiment performed on the American public
• what business is it of theirs anyway?
• I don’t have high blood pressure, and you probably don’t either!

It’s only a matter of time before these jokers try to ban something Paleo/Primal types actually eat. Even if you eat little salt, you want to stay on top of this particular stupid idea.

¹You’d expect that cholesterol levels of people who have just had a heart would indicate excess cholesterol is the cause. They don’t. To sum it up: That study shows that the mean LDL on heart attack hospital admissions was 104.9, mean HDL was 39.7. You were expecting those two to add up to something over 200? Wrong. Triglyceride is another story, but you never hear about that, partially because excess sugar definitely causes it to go up. Whoops! No more Snackwells for you, fattie! You can find many books that explain how statins are worthless (because the cholesterol numbers predict nothing). My favorite is Dr. Malcolm Kendrick’s The Great Cholesterol Con.