Our society -- and our government -- puts itself at a disadvantage when it substitutes political judgments for scientific evidence (on this see numerous past quotes in this blog). In the areas of human and ecological health, we can certainly apply human judgments and expend lots of taxpayer resources, but, ultimately, nature has its own way, whether in human physiology or the natural laws governing the ecology of Mother Earth.

That's not to say we always understand why our bodies do what they do or how nature will respond to our interventions. Sometimes there are unintended consequences. Sometimes they're serious. Often they're precipiated by the same kind of hubris as some judge has prompted American interventionism abroad: a confidence that our policies can overcome all the world's ills (or all our bodies' infirmities). And often the prescription is to take a step back, look at the problem at hand with the greatest humility we can muster and sort out fact from fiction about what we "know." Painful experience has taught us that worse than a policy grounded on ignorance is a policy grounded on error because we employ our powerful resources and worsen the inintended effect.

For that reason, the integrity of the process we employ to ascertain scientific truth in our public health and our environmental policies is of paramount importance.

And for that reason, we should give attention to the challenge announced in today's Washington Post , that Congressional leaders are probing the actions of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency which removed as chairman of a science advisory committee a scientist accused of having pre-judged the evidence and openly advocating one of the policy options before her advisory committee.

Congressmen John Dingell (D-MI) and Bart Stupak (D-MI) have defended the principle of scientific objectivity and bashed the Bush Administration for heeding a complaint by the American Chemistry Council that the panel chair's activist agenda undermined the public interest in an objective scientific inquiry. We should all embrace with enthusiasm the principle being articulated that science should be insulated from politics and the tyranny of conventional wisdom that so often cloaks its minions. So, we should read beyond the headlines and try to understand what's going on.

If the Congressional overseers are taken at their word, their dedication is to scientific truth and their complaint is the interference of "politics" in the process. Kudos. On the other hand, the industry advanced the same arguments in its complaint of prejudice -- the ACC sought elimination of an crusader from a position that would seem well-served to preserve the neutrality of scientific inquiry. So, strip away this veneer of rhetoric and look for other clues. Surely, the industry group didn't like the advocacy position of the now-deposed chair; that's a given. And, likewise, busy Congressmen don't have time to meddle into bureaucratic decisions they agree with, so Messers Dingell and Stupak are registering their views on the other side of the policy divide on this particular action. But what of the process? How can we create a process that elicits for the public good the best, most objective science to help us understand issues and fashion policy?

Beneath the veneer of the Congressional assault is a second justification that seems to illuminate the issue perfectly. The Congressmen, joined by the activist Environmental Working Group, complain bitterly that other panelists (presumably those taking the contrary viewpoint) have had their research funded by private industry. The implication is that the deposed chair didn't. Since scientific stature is constructed on the foundation of published research and that costs money, the chair must have derived her research support elsewhere, probably from the federal government which is the other large funder of research. So, if the thinking is to take the Wooodward & Bernstein approach of "follow the money" the agenda or policy bias of the funder becomes paramount. But we should accept the principle that every funding source has an objective and interests. The Congressmen apparently aren't bothered by the chair's source of funding, perhaps because it's the very funding source that they have provided as they authorize and appropriate. So it's really THEIR interest, perhaps, or the bureaucracy's, that's behind "public" money.

The better solution is transparency and, even more, the integrity of the process. We need standards such as those, in the medical science area, advocated by process-oriented watchdogs like the government's U.S. Preventive Services Task Force. Industry funding and government funding are both facts of life, both have inherent potential bias. The integrity of the process is assured by the quality of the science at the end of the pipeline. That's why we've always embraced the Data Quality Act as a means to overcome politicizing science.

On February 18, 2008 we reported that less than 20% of US adults with high blood pressure eat foods in line with the government guidelines for controlling hypertension (the DASH diet). Now, the of major dietary trends in US food consumption from 1972 - 2005 carried out by the Economic Research Service of the US Department of Agriculture indicates that this poor dietary pattern is reflected throughout the whole of the population.

The Dash diet, which was specifically designed as a dietary approach to reduce hypertension is, in essence, a well balanced diet. It is high in fruits and vegetables as well as low-fat dairy products and whole grains. The amounts of high fat foods (particularly those with saturated fats) and refined carbohydrates are limited.

This type of diet has long been consumed in the Mediterranean and to a lesser extent the Asian regions, with clearly positive health outcomes. Unfortunately, the latest USDA study indicates that the majority of Americans consume too few fruits, vegetables, low-fat dairy and whole grain products.

A large part of our dietary pattern is influenced by the messages we receive from those institutions we perceive to be authoritative. However, organizations such as the American Heart Association (AHA), the American Medical Association (AMA) and the National Heart Lung and Blood Institute (NHLBI) in their approach to the reduction or prevention of hypertension have all chosen to focus their attention on salt reduction far more than the promotion of a good, balanced diet. Even the most well-known food advocacy groups prefer to lay blame on one nutrient or food group rather than to promote the benefits of a balanced diet.

Until we come to a general understanding that it is far more beneficial to promote the benefits of a whole, well-balanced diet, rather than to isolate and malign single nutrients or foods out of context, results such as those from the USDA/ERS report should not come as a great surprise.

This month's issue of Physiological and Biochemical Zoology (you all do read that, dont' you?) carries an important story of enduring signficance about how curtailed dietary intake compromises the immune systems of deer mice. Researchers Lynn Martin et al of The Ohio State University report that cutting back just 30% of dietary intake "reduces secondary antibody responses in deer mice (Peromyscus maniculatus), functionally representing a cost of immune memory." Ohio State's been doing some good work in nutrition recently.

The results are another recurring reminder of this lesson long-taught and repeatedly-reminded: there are very real physiological costs in terms of unintended consequences in reducing "normal" dietary intakes. It's been more than 20 years, for example, since Dr. Mark Cook of the University of Wisconsin published results that curtailing salt intake in chickens impaired their immune system function . That's before most of the world woke up to the AIDS catastrophe.

Today's news services ran an interesting story regarding the recommended dietary intakes for water of 9 - 13 cups as highlighted in the Institute of Medicine's Dietary Reference Intakes for Water, Potassium, Sodium, Chloride, and Sulfate (2004) . CBS , NBC , ABC , the BBC, the Guardian , the Telegraph and Daily Mail , among others have all featured articles saying that there is not a single drop of evidence behind the myth of drinking eight glasses or more of water a day.

It turns out that the dietary recommendations from noted medical authorities as well as self-appointed health gurus to drink two or more liters of water per day are totally unsupported by any scientific evidence. Doctors Dan Negoianu and Stanley Goldfarb from the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia reviewed all the published clinical studies on the subject and concluded that no data exists for average healthy individuals regarding the amount of water they should consume on a daily basis.

Indeed, it is unclear where this recommendation came from," the University spokesman added.

Their research also debunked the myth that drinking water makes the skin more supple and made it easier to lose weight. "There is simply a lack of evidence in general," they reported in the Journal of the American Society of Nephrology .

Reuters reports that this was not the first time such a conclusion was made since Dr. Heinz Valtin of Dartmouth Medical School found the recommendations to drink that amount of water to be totally lacking in scientific merit.

Because we all have specific individual needs for water, Goldfarb recommended, "If you're thirsty, drink. If you're not thirsty, you needn't drink."

This most recent article highlights the specificity of an individual's metabolic need, a situation paralleled by salt intake. The human body has an ability to excrete 250 times the maximum recommended intake of salt - an amount of salt that is virtually impossible for anyone to consume. In other words, our salt consumption is not limited by our ability to excrete it, but rather by our innate senses - sensory perception and biological feedback mechanisms. Both of these mechanisms are specific for every individual, just as water is.

For this reason, it is the very same folly to apply a "one size fits all" set of policy recommendations to salt consumption as it is for water consumption. Salt consumption is self-limiting and regulated by nature's biology, not by shortsighted dietary recommendations.

A Swedish-led group of European researchers set off to document the relationship between dietary electrolytes (magnesium calcium, potassium and sodium) and stroke risk. The ended up documenting the lack of an association of sodium and risk of stroke, adding to the lengthening list of "health outcomes" studies which are remarkably consistent in their conclusion: reducing dietary salt won't improve health.

Published in the March 10 issue of the Archives of Internal Medicine , the researchers studied 26,556 older Swedes; all were smokers. Over the 13.6 years of the study, the group recorded 579 stroke events. The population had extemely high salt intakes; the average sodium intakes for the five quintiles of sodium ranged from 3,909 mg/day to 5,848 mg/day (the U.S., by comparison averages about 3,500 mg/day -- lower than the lowest 20% of the Swedes in the study).

The findings: stroke incidence was nearly identical in all five quintiles and not only was there no trend in the pattern, but of the 30 separate analyses performed, not a single subgroup had a significant relationship between sodium and stroke incidence. Add this study to the list.

A long plane ride today afforded the opportunity to read an Anthony Daniels review of Ibn Warraq's new book , Defending the West: A Critique of Edward Said's Orientalism. Daniels uses what Benjamin Franklin in the play 1776 said of Thomas Jefferson's writing skills: "a peculiar felicity of expression."

That expression, offered in the context of refuting Said's famous book, was offered as printed:

Some might say that Ibn Warraq has picked an easy target: Said's work would not have been worth refuting had it not been so phenomenally successful in creating what Auden called, with regard to Freud, "a whole climate of opinion."

Whatever you think about the Said/IWarraq contention, our attention was captured by the strong parallel of Said's conventional wisdom versus Warraq's critique to the Salt Institute's recurrent attempts to engage federal public health nutrition leaders in a discussion of the weakness of the scientific data offered in support of the contention that lowering dietary salt will improve health.

To paraphrase: if the federal anti-salt advocacy campaign hadn't been "so phenomenally successful" in creating a "climate of opinion" condemning salt, it would, in Warraq's appropriate words "would not have been worth refuting." Of the fifteen studies of health outcomes of salt-reduced diets , nearly every one has found no benefit and many have found additional risk.

We need a controlled trial to sort out the issues raised in these studies; all of them are merely observational. But the lack of any likelihood that a controlled trial would validate the notion of a health risk of current levels of dietary salt is trumped by the obvious fact that this unsubstantiated policy is already in place. So, even though the "hypothesis generating" studies would suggest the negative hypothesis, that lowering dietary salt would NOT improve health outcomes, the existence of the current policy based on the contrary assumption, though ostensibly "not worth refuting" is actually well worth examining.

Let's let the science guide our policy, not the momentum of obsolete assumptions. Secretary Leavitt, fund a health outcomes study of salt-reduced diets. Please.

NPR (National Public Radio) hit the nail on the head with this just-out story: "Doctors' 'Treat the Numbers' Approach Challenged ." As correspondent Richard Knox explains:

It can take scientists a decade or more to determine whether a drug actually works. In the meantime, doctors rely on other measures, like testing blood pressure and cholesterol levels, to determine whether a drug is having positive effects. But recent studies challenge the practice of prescribing medicine based on certain test results.

Doctors call it "treating the numbers" - trying to get a patient's test results to a certain target, which they assume will treat - or prevent - disease.

Knox quotes Dr. Steve Atlas of Mass General hospital: "It's a big deal because it reminds us of something that we often forget: the number isn't the outcome. And this raises concerns that just lowering the number doesn't get you where you want to be," (emphasis added)

This is, of course, exactly what our public health nutrition policy on salt is doing: treating the number. We need to look at outcomes (see numerous earlier posts to this blog).

Knox also quotes Dr. Ned Calonge on cholesterol-lowering drugs based on the recent diabetes trial disaster , saying:

"Now, what's open is - is lower better? And I think a lot of people believed it would be, and there are many of us that were saying, 'You're going to need to show me,' " he says.

Lately, studies have also challenged other cherished assumptions - like lowering blood sugar. For a long time, doctors have believed that getting diabetic patients' blood sugar as close to normal as possible would prevent heart attacks. A drug called Avandia lowers blood sugar very well.

It was approved in 1999 and was heralded as "one of the newer and greater drugs for the treatment of diabetes," says Dr. Cliff Rosen. Rosen is the chairman of a Food and Drug Administration advisory panel that concluded unanimously last year that patients taking Avandia actually had more heart attacks and strokes.

Rosen says the Avandia story is a caution against treating millions of patients on unproven assumptions.

It's the same story for salt -- but, so far, a largely-untold story. Still, just as public health policy cannot change human physiology, neither can news coverage. But it can slow down our quest for the truth and our ability to base policy on evidence rather than opinion. Please, someone tell HHS! Outcomes matter.

The New Zealand Bakery Association has blasted FSANZ, warning that its new requirement of iodized salt in bread "will be expensive, claiming there are not a lot of facilities to process iodised salt in the country." The bakers apparently duped foodnavigator.com writer Charlotte Eyre on that point and another: that "iodine is a nutrient commonly found in salt."

Noting that "half truths are the most insidious," the Salt Institute responded, defending the FSANZ decision and pointing out that:

1. Plain salt has 1/100th the amount of iodine of iodine-fortified salt; it may be detectable in a lab, but it's insignificant nutritionally.

2. Salt iodization is not expensive; it costs pennies per year per person.

3. New Zealand may not have "a lot of facilities to process iodised salt," but it's a small country, well-served by Salt Institute member companies Dominion Salt of New Zealand and Cheetham Salt of Australia whose few plants make virtually all the food salt in the country and which can easily accomplish the required iodization virtually with the flip of a switch.

Surely the bakers have better fights to fight.

USA Today published a story today echoing the CASH/WASH mantra that children eat too much salt. Our reply:

Kim Painter's article ignores two important points of science. First, salt reduction in children and adults may be related to blood pressure, but because salt reduction triggers other reactions , it has not been shown to lower the rate of heart attacks or cardiovascular mortality. That cherished assumption has been demolished by evidence over the past 13 years. Second, humans and other animal species eat salt in predictable amounts when they can get it; our salt intake is unchanged over the past century. Research published in the February issue of Experimental Physiology explains that the brain's neural system system provides multiple, redundant systems to make sure our salt appetite ensures we get enough salt. Salt is an essential nutrient. We die unless we eat salt.

Let's let the science guide this policy. The U.S. Preventive Services Task Force , the government's in-house advocate for evidence-based policy, has found evidence insufficient to advise the general population to reduce dietary salt. Ditto the Cochrane Collaboration , the global inventor of "evidence-based" decision-making in medical science.

For more information, check the Salt Institute website, http://www.saltinstitute.org/28.html. .

Dick Hanneman President, Salt Institute

Britain's Food Standards Agency asks: "Are we 'bad science' junkies?" Well, yes you are. The regulators, of course, aimed their barbed inquiry at what they perceive is an insufficiently alert public that can't separate fact from fiction with regard to the scientific basis for dietary recommendations. In their mind, salt is the exception; they aver: "There was good awareness of the risks associated with eating too much salt."

Well, no there isn't "good (public) awareness of the risks associated with eating too much salt." The public has followed FSA down the "bad science" pathway and been convinced that science supports general salt reduction. Wrong. Any fair-minded reading of the literature addressing the question "will reducing dietary salt improve health" shows scant evidence for a health benefit and far more data suggesting actual increased risks.

FSA conducted the survey for the launch of the first meeting of the independent General Advisory Committee on Science (GACS) which will open its proceedings with a panel debate to look at the question 'Should we trust what scientists say about food?'.

Our suggestion: let's query the data, not the scientists. Good science is empirical, not expert opinion. Evidence-based medicine considers expert opinion only a Class D level of evidence.

Significant impacts on U.S. transportation planning are forecast in a new report about to be released by the Transportation Research Board, an arm of the National Academies of Science. TRB Special Report 290: Potential Impacts of Climate Change on U.S. Transportation concedes that "Little consensus exists among transportation professionals that climate change is occurring or warrants action now." But the report identifies "plausible future scenarios" which represent "significant challenges for transportation professionals." The committee "finds compelling scientific evidence that climate change is occurring, and that it will trigger new, extreme weather events."Special Report 290 identifies "five climate changes of particular importance to transportation and estimatedsthe probability of their occurrence during the twenty-first century." Included, as #4, is "Increases in intense precipitation events. It is highly likely (greater than 90 percent probability of occurrence) that intense precipitation events will continue to become more frequent in widespread areas of the United States." Louisiana being America's largest salt-producing state, the salt industry will be particularly interested in the report's prediction of increased coastal flooding, particularly of the Gulf coast and drier conditions in the upper Midwest "resulting in lower water levels and reduced capactiy to ship agricultural and other bulk commodities." Among the adaptive operational responses, the first example identified is "Snow and ice control accounts for about 40 percent of annual highway operating budgets in the northern U.S. states" and "operational responses are likely to become more routine and proactive than today's approach of treating severe weather on an ad hoc emergency basis." Roadway designers are encouraged to recognize the likelihood of more freeze-thaw cycles. In this, of course, snowfighting professionals are already well advanced in their "adaptation." The committee speculates that there will be "benefits for safety and reduced interruptions if frozen precipitation shifts to rainfall."

Canadian discussions and studies are more advanced than in the U.S. and also predict impacts on use of road salt for winter maintenance. In "Climate Change and Ontarios's Winter Roads: Trends and Impacts on Ontario Winter Road Maintainence Ops" and "Climate Change Impacts and Adaptation: A Canadian Perspective," experts agreed that salt usage in southern and western Ontario would be unchanged by global warming, but that salt usage would increase in northern and eastern parts of the province.

The American Automobile Association last week released The AAA Crashes vs. Congestion Report arguing that societal costs from traffic fatalities and injuries is more than double the costs of congestion. Good reminder. We object only to the "versus" separating the twin concerns. We must insist on roads that are safe and congestion-free.

The study by Cambridge Systematics estimates that traffic crashes cost each American $1,051 for a total economic burden on the economy of $164.2 billion. Data from the Texas Transportation Institute put the tab for congestion at $67.6 billion or $430 per person. With Congress readying itself to tackle reauthorization of the federal surface transportation program next year and with the federal Highway Trust Fund approaching insolvency, these measures should be front-and-center in the public policy discussion.

For years, the anti-highway lobby has inveighed against "paving over America" and the highway lobby has foolishly cast the argument in terms of the deteriorating condition of the nation's roads and bridges. Too true. And when the I-35W bridge plunged into the Mississippi, the poignancy of the roadbuilders' lament was manifest. The thought of an aging and inadequate roadway infrastructure contributing to the 42,642 people killed last year on American roads is totally unacceptable. We know most of those deaths are avoidable and now we know the cost of under-funding highway improvments.

The quality of the policy debate, however, would be improved if we move beyond contesting the number of "structurally deficient" bridges or pothole-pocked or rutted roadway surfaces. Nor should we accept the notion that we need to starve investments in congestion relief to pay for safer roads. The two go hand in hand. Non-recurring congestion (the kind not caused by "rush hour") is associated with clearing traffic crashes and combatting weather conditions like snow & ice storms that contribute so much to those crashes. Simply applying salt as part of a professional winter operations program cuts 88.3% of the injury crashes and keeps the roads reliably available for our mobile society. In fact, in most states, the cost of failing to keep winter roads open through winter maintenance operations generally costs more for each day of failure than the annual cost of snowfighting (data by Global Insight, Inc.).

As Congress sets up the debate on highway spending, let's focus attention on the outcomes we can expect our roads to deliver. We shouldn't be building roads to create jobs (or re-elect politicos) nor should we endanger drivers' lives and our national economic competitiveness by short-sightedly opposing transportation improvements due to suspicion over the self-interested motivation of construction companies. Let's measure transportation outcomes -- the service we driver are paying for through our gas taxes -- and invest to reduce the tragic waste of more than 40,000 lives every year and reverse the corrosive erosion of reliable highway mobility caused by congestion.

And let's let the engineers and the Federal Highway Administration's Office of Operations help us define the choices rather than jury-rig our national highway priorities through Congressional earmarks.

It's not AAA versus AASHTO (the American Association of State Highway and Transportation Officials). Both AAA and AASHTO care deeply about BOTH safety and mobility. Let's not make this mountain tougher to scale than it already is.

ABC News' The Blotter noted the launch of BizCentral.org and the high-flying lobbying groups participating, including the Salt Institute. Enjoy . Justin Rood reported:

Blogging: It's not just for the little guy anymore.

Big business has officially moved into the blogosphere, a territory once claimed by radicals, grassroots organizers and armchair political philosophers.

Bizcentral.org is a new group blog authored by lobbyists for some of the biggest industries in America. The petroleum industry is represented, as well as nuclear power, chain drug stores, the American Trucking Association - even the Salt Institute, "the world's foremost source of authoritative information about salt (sodium chloride) and its more than 14,000 known uses."

Congressional earmarks for transportation projects are distorting spending priorities and delaying improvments to America's air and surface transportation infrastructure and those delays impose huge costs on national productivity and competitiveness, according to an analysis by Bruce Katz and Robert Puentes in the March issue of The Atlantic, aptly titled "Clogged arteries." Katz and Puentes equate the unfocused investment to thickly-spread peanut butter.

A better approach, they argue would be to allocate the $50 billion in annual surface transportation spending where the probems are. Cities are being shortchanged, they say.

The nation's 100 largest metropolitan regions generate 75 percent of its economic output. They also handle 75 percent of its foreign sea cargo, 79 percent of its air cargo, and 92 percent of its air-passenger traffic. Yet of the 6,373 earmarked projects that dominate the current federal transportation law, only half are targeted at these metro areas.

And infrastructure investment is critical to jobs creation, they explain:

In the past, strategic investments in the nation's connective tissue-to develop railroads in the 19th century and the highway system in the 20th-turbocharged growth and transformed the country. But more recently, America's transportation infrastructure has not kept pace with the growth and evolution of the economy. As earmarks have proliferated, the government's infrastructure investment has lost focus. A recent academic study shows that public investment in transportation in the 1970s generated a return approaching 20 percent, mostly in the form of higher productivity. Investments in the 1980s generated only a 5 percent return; in the 1990s, the return was just 1 percent.

Check out their interactive map estimating road-traffic congestion in 2010. The cost of congestion, including added freight cost and lost productivity for commuters, reached $78 billion in 2005. Half of that occurred in just 10 metro areas.

Business needs a stronger voice in the blogosphere and so the Salt Institute joined today with ten other associations - representing sectors as diverse as energy, transportation, telecomm, manufacturing, retail and consumer goods - to launch BizCentral.org , a community blog for business associations, the Salt Institute announced today.

The charter members of BizCentral.org may represent very different industries, but they support common pro-growth economic principles like free markets, free trade, and low taxes. But, while each of the industries has a unique story, the collective story of how business and industry satisfy basic consumer needs and what public policies can deliver sustainable economic security is a message that will interest and inform the influentials who we expect to participate in the blog discussion.