There has been quite a bit of media coverage in the past week about Boston Market’s announcement that it has removed the salt shakers from its tables and replaced them with little cards hyping the company’s interest in reducing sodium. As highlighted in some articles , it was an interesting marketing ploy since it reaped the chain considerable publicity.

It also begs the question if Boston Market’s intention is to reject the notion that peoples tastes differ. One look at Boston Market’s nutritional information makes it clear that their products are brined. If you look at the ingredient listings right after the nutritional information, you will see that their chicken, turkey and beef products all contain up to 12-15% of brining solution (aka water and seasoning). Thus the seasoning levels are fixed at a particular level prior to getting to the client, as can be seen from the nutrition table.

It is unfortunate that Boston Market took this marketing tack at the very time that the preponderance of scientific evidence makes it clear that reducing salt in diets will increase the risk of morbidity and mortality . The fact that our public health institutions are in denial does not change the science.

But you can deny the facts only so long. When the scientific evidence becomes acknowledged, as it surely will be, in lightening speed the salt shakers will be back on the tables and the little cards pitched into the rotisserie.

There are many types of calendars in the world. The Julian calendar, the Gregorian calendar, the Lunar calendar and the Chinese calendar, etc. Some follow the sun and some follow the moon. More recently, there is the opportunist's calendar. This is the calendar where opportunists of every type pick a day to promote their own self-serving cause. The latest example (http://bit.ly/Sr4kEy) is the "More Herbs, Less Salt Day" set for August 29th - the same day that the Soviets exploded their first atomic bomb, Pizarro destroyed the Inca civilization and executed their last Emperor and the day that hurricane Katrina slammed into the Gulf coast and decimated New Orleans. Interesting day to choose!

The "More Herbs, Less Salt Day" is supposed to encourage people to reduce their salt and replace it with herbs . They seem to have ignored the fact that more peer-reviewed medical publications caution against population-wide salt reduction than support it. Furthermore, salt has never been shown to cause harm in the thousands of years we have been using it.

However, the case is not quite the same for herbs and spices. Herbs and spices have been implicated in several negative health conditions including cancer. For example chilli powder, which is laced with the deadly chemical, Sudan IV, (http://tinyurl.com/dxdexdc ); ginger, which can harbor carcinogenic aflatoxins (http://tinyurl.com/d2fd2pr ); basil, which contains estragole, a known carcinogen and teratogen (http://tinyurl.com/28mclj ); and black pepper, which contains N-nitrosopiperadine, a strong carcinogen (http://tinyurl.com/ccqsp5l ).

In other words, they are recommending four known carcinogens to replace salt!

Interesting advice for an interesting day.

In a perfect winter world, nothing would be simpler than plowing to remove all the snow and slush from the pavement. However, the reality is that winter conditions make it impossible to prevent snow pack or ice from developing on the pavement. This is where deicing materials are needed to restore safe pavement conditions. Deicers work by preventing ice from bonding to the pavement and help to remove any ice that has stuck to the pavement. And road salt is the most cost-effective material in the snowfighter's arsenal.

Abrasives don't melt snow and ice - they're inert and can't melt anything! So what can abrasives do? Well, they can increase traction, but in order to do so they must remain between the tire and the ice - impossibility in the presence of significant traffic. As a result, abrasives must be used in large quantities and applied frequently, making them far more expensive than salt in terms of material and manpower. Unfortunately, abrasives are poorly understood and often misused, resulting in wasted material and money, and reduced safety for the traveling public.

Abrasives are often used for the wrong reasons. It is nice to spread something that the public can see - it shows you're doing work and might stop complaints for a short period. But there is a growing list of negative environmental concerns with abrasives, including air pollution from the dusty fine particles. Abrasives can also pollute stream beds, ruining fish breeding. The costly post-season clean-up costs, problems with windshield damage claims and chipped auto paint make the use of abrasives a source of public irritation and criticism. It is a high price to have sand just to look at. These limitations in the application of abrasives are reflected in their rapidly declining pattern of use over the last two decades.

Abrasives can be a useful treatment in environmental conditions where conventional deicing chemicals don't work and they can be used to maintain safety at hills, curves and intersections on unpaved and low volume roads. But road salt remains the most widespread and practical deicer in use at any temperature above -6 F. Calcium chloride and magnesium chloride are used at lower temperatures and can also be added to road salt for rapid deicing and effective melting at a broader range of temperatures.

So if your agency is using a high percentage of abrasives, you should take the opportunity to review your practice and seek improvements in winter maintenance management. The public deserves nothing less.

See article (pdf 367.68 kB) ...

Once again, a respected medical journal has published a paper demonstrating that low salt diets cause more sickness and death than regular salt consumption. The most recent publication in the British medical journal, Heart, by Drs. DiNicolantonio, Di Pasquale, Taylor and Hackam was published online today (August 21, 2012). The details can be seen at http://heart.bmj.com/content/early/2012/08/21/heartjnl-2012-302337.abstract?papetoc . The medical researchers, from USA, Italy, UK and Canada, carried out a systematic review and meta-analysis of randomized trials with heart failure patients carried out up until April 2012. They concluded that low sodium diets significantly increases morbidity and mortality in patients with heart failure compared normal sodium diets.

This review follows on a recent Cochrane meta-analysis which demonstrated that sodium restriction did not reduce all-cause mortality or cardiovascular events.

Yet, North American guidelines for the management of heart failure consistently advise dietary sodium restriction for patients. The Guidelines for treatment of Heart Failure patients is hopelessly out of date. The letter I wrote to the American Heart Association two years ago asking them to reconsider their guidelines in light of new, peer-reviewed evidence, went completely unanswered. They, together with all our other public health institutions are in total denial of the evidence, and this latest publication confirms this once again. They have committed themselves so deeply to salt- reduction ideology, that no amount of new evidence will shake them from their pig-headed position. As a result, more people will die.

During the past three years there has been a great many medical publications cautioning against salt reduction in food. Peer-reviewed medical publications the world over have stated that salt reduction will result in higher rates of cardiovascular morbidity and mortality for Type I and Type II Diabetes patients. They have repeatedly shown that salt reduction down to the levels to the levels recommended in our dietary guidelines will result in greater all-cause cardiovascular mortality, losses in cognition, increase in unsteadiness and falls in the elderly and a host of other malignant conditions.

It is time our public institutions come clean and do what they are paid to do. They are in our employ to make recommendations based on the preponderance of scientific evidence – not to stake out an intractable position based on dogma and never veer from it, regardless of the consequence to consumers. They are not doing their jobs – even to the point of reading the published research. The position of our public health institutions was aptly described by Bill Watersson, author of the cartoon, Calvin and Hobbs, “It's not denial. I'm just selective about the reality I accept.”

The most recent review on blood pressure reduction by the world-renowned Cochrane Collaboration reveals that chocolate has a greater impact on reducing blood pressure than all the combined effects of salt reduction. Although the majority of Cochrane review articles on the subject have never supported population-wide salt reduction, a 2008 review (1) carried out by two of the world's most outspoken anti-salt advocates, stated that cutting the salt intake of normal people by half would result in a 2 millimeter drop in systolic blood pressure and a 1 mm drop in diastolic blood pressure. That review continues to be cited by salt-reduction activists.

Just today, however, the Cochrane Collaboration published a review (2) on the impact of chocolate on blood pressure and the results indicated a reduction of 2.8 mm in systolic blood pressure and a 2.2 mm drop in diastolic blood pressure demonstrating that chocolate is considerably more effective in reducing blood pressure than reducing salt intakes.

So if you are looking to reduce your blood pressure by a millimeter or so, you can forget about those tasteless, low salt cheeses, soups and snacks and try a bit of chocolate. You’ll have your cake – and eat it too!!

1) He FJ, MacGregor GA. Effect of longer-term modest salt reduction on blood pressure. Cochrane Database of Systematic Reviews 2004, Issue 3. Art. No.: CD004937. DOI: 10.1002/14651858.CD004937

2) Ried K, Sullivan TR, Fakler P, Frank OR, Stocks NP. Effect of cocoa on blood pressure. Cochrane Database of Systematic Reviews 2012, Issue 8. Art. No.: CD008893. DOI: 10.1002/14651858.CD008893.pub2.

The last blog I posted, Rule Britannia, http://www.saltinstitute.org/News-events-media/Salt-Sensibility/Health/Rule-Brittania was taken directly from a comment I made to a HealthCanal story (which was linked in the blog). When I checked the HealthCanal story a few days later, my comment had not been published, so I sent it in once more. Two days later, my comment still did not appear, however, multiple reactions from WASH (World Action on Salt and Health) and CASH (Consensus Action on Salt and Health) were published.

This serves as an excellent example of the cozy relationship between publishers and their ideological beliefs. It is an example of ‘the ends justifying the means.’ You can lie, cheat, obfuscate, hide evidence and stifle opinion as long as you believe that the cause you serve overrides all ethics. It is the sort of thing that leads to the great medical blunders we have seen, such as hormone replacement therapy. It is also a common characteristic of those who are possessed by both their cause and their sense of self-importance and is quite typical of those currently promoting the salt-reduction agenda.

It the end, just as in the beginning, the only thing that matters is the preponderance of scientific evidence. And that, they will never conceal permanently.

Once again, the British are off to show the rest of the world how things should be done. http://www.healthcanal.com/public-health-safety/31407-Researchers-win-funding-reduce-salt-intake-for-children-and-their-families-China.html What a wonderful development! Queen Mary’s MacGregor and He are off on a Wolfson-funded expedition to spread the gospel to China. Armed with a heavy dose of paternalistic zeal, they want little more than to teach the natives how life should be lived.

And, of course, we have centuries of history to back them up. Not satisfied with managing their own little isle, the indomitable Brits forcibly enlightened much of world for centuries. Their greatest triumph was India, where their particular manner of influence dominated one of the largest populations in the world. The gratitude of the nation was keenly demonstrated with the humble demise of the Raj.

Unable to learn from history, these tireless anti-salt zealots have now set their sights on even bigger game. It is one of life’s ironies that their broad vision of proselytization is attended by such a myoptic view of the actual medical evidence on salt and health.

Having botched their efforts in the cloudy and chaotic food culture of the UK – this indefatigable duo, pockets stuffed with herbs and tattered stethoscopes held high, will now attempt to demonstrate how life ought to be lived in the largest and one of the oldest cultures in the world.

Rule Brittania!

There was an interesting article in Food Navigator today entitled, "Salty smells will aid industry in sodium reduction efforts." http://bit.ly/Qx2SQM It is an interesting idea that should be easy enough to test. If salty aroma actually reduced the need for salt in foods, then the sales of low-salt foods should be higher in seaside or fishing communities then in the rest of the country. Is that actually the case?

There are very few researchers that have studied this, but the one study that stands out was by Lillian Gleibermann in 1973: "Blood pressure and dietary salt in human populations," Ecology of Food and Nutrition, 2:2, 143-156. She found the opposite results - that communities that lived in close proximity to the sea and its salty smells actually ate the most salt. Countries like Japan and Taiwan or island communities such as Raratonga or the Caribbean ranked highest in the results.

When it comes to salt, however, actual evidence never stopped the anti-salt gang from following a red herring.

Unlike silkworms (who can only eat mulberry leaves) or koala bears (who can only eat eucalyptus leaves), we humans are omnivores – we can eat whatever we like. Unfortunately, this lucky circumstance has a dark side to it, because some foods are unsafe to eat. Fortunately, we have known for very long times which are the natural foods that are risky, such as poisonous mushrooms or untreated cassava roots. This common sense knowledge notwithstanding, our growing dependence on others to supply our food has triggered a fear and distrust of all processed and restaurant foods.

Making matters worse is the horde of network “talking heads” and “consumer advocates” that manage to take bits and pieces of food- and health-related data and place them totally out of context in order to sensationalize them. The bearers of these morsels of ‘exclusive knowledge’ imply that consumers know nothing and need to be protected from all the dangers lurking in the food world. The sad truth is that these people are generally not experts in the field of food, nutrition or health at all. If they were, they would know that there is very little that is sensational in the field of food and health.

How many exotic fruits, teas and oils were supposed to cure cancer? Where are they now – except in the overpriced sections of high-end supermarkets of natural food stores? So, while these talking heads may not be expert in food and health, they are expert at getting the public’s attention – and using the occasion to profitably flog information that is little better than the proverbial snake oil.

It is a phenomenon that has played out most effectively in America. It is a wonder that anyone in the US can enjoy their food at all. People either end up not eating things that are delicious and healthy for them or they become defiant of the ‘urban knowledge’ that minimizes their enjoyment of food.

For instance, we have known for many years now that the urban legend asserting that all fats are bad for you, is wrong. Just like hormone replacement therapy, this knowledge was never based upon actual evidence, but on the opinions of physicians whose reputations far exceeded their technical competence and honesty. These people were all highly placed politically and exerted a great influence on our public health institutions. Just like the bogus advice on eggs and salt, their opinions have been proven totally wrong by the actual evidence. However, like stubborn warts, these opinions continue to survive, aided and abetted by our current crop of consumer advocates and public health bureaucrats, because they have supported the myth-information for so long, they can’t back out.

So we are left with the dilemma of how to resolve what food is good or bad for you. Most people have been blessed with a good deal of intelligence and common sense. Whether they have the confidence to use it is another question. I would highly recommend they do. At the very least, they should be skeptical of the gratuitous opinions that don’t quite add up to them.

A tiny exercise. We all know that we are living longer than we did years ago. So it is not news, but rather common sense, that diseases of old age are becoming more common. The increase in the rate of heart disease doesn’t mean that our food or our lifestyle is bad - it simply means that more people are living long enough to wear our parts out! We never enjoyed that privilege to the same extent before!

The real question to ask is what do we expect to be dying from as the population ages – head lice? Of course we will find higher rates of the diseases that reflect age. Does anyone actually think that they will manage to get out of life alive?

Eating is an integral part of life – it’s not just the act of ingesting nutrients. It should be a social and pleasurable experience – one that is not spoiled by hype and myth-information spread by fear mongers who have their own agendas.

There no doubt at all, your own common sense and judgment are the best tools to overcome the omnivore’s dilemma. Use them!