An update from the trenches: My challenge last week of some "facts" asserted by an anti-salt blogger in The Morning Cup prompted a further exhange that our readers might enjoy.

Host Bob Messenger was chastised for "taking up for salt and Mr. Hanneman's organization" and defending "a 'killing' ingredient like salt and an industry organization like the Salt Institute." Even if the medium is digital, it doesn't pay to quarrel with someone who buys his "ink" by the barrel. Messenger responded:

First of all, Joan, I don't even know Mr. Hanneman. Never met the guy. Never talked to him either. In fact, that email, as far as I can recollect, was the first time I've ever directly heard from him or his organization. So I have no agenda to "take up" for Mr. Hanneman or the Salt Institute. But it does tick me off that an ingredient so historically important to the flavor and taste of our food as salt is, can be so recklessly branded "a killing ingredient" by people who don't know what the heck they're talking about. Humankind has "salted" its foods for centuries, but, what, the people in this one little decade who are trying to 'demonize' salt are right and everyone else who ever used salt in the whole wide history of the world are wrong? People, please, focus. If you hate salt, fine, if you think it's killing you, fine, because there are plenty of decent salt alternatives to choose from. So use 'em, okay, and leave the rest of us alone ... I'm just saying, don't be surprised if in the future a few hundred arrogant activist looneys succeed at wiping salt from the nation's dietary agenda. It is their goal and I, for one, do not underestimate them.

The next day, Brenda Neall , editor of the South Africa Food Review, joined the discussion, telling the anti-salt complainant that she "is one seriously mislead, misinformed (and sour) lady, as you pointed out, Bob, in your response to her laughable diatribe against you and 'killing' salt, and clearly completely taken in by the activist looneys" and suggesting she read "a sane and measured article on the salt saga from the brilliant book, Panic Nation." She even posted Panic Nation article by Dr. Sandy Macnair on her website. It's worth reading. Macnair concludes:

Without adequate randomised trials to show that it is effective and establish its long-term safety, in particular to show reduced cardiovascular mortality, the imposition of a low-salt diet by government diktat appears particularly foolhardy and without any scientific basis.

We couldn't have said it better.

Returning to Panic Nation, Neall explains her endorsement:

Panic Nation, by the way, is a very valuable addition to every food industrialist's book shelf, and wonderful reference and defense against those who would point fingers at our profession and industry.

It's a compilation of expert essays, edited and vetted by eminent British medical scientists, Stanley Feldman and Vincent Marks, and demonstrates, most succinctly and soundly, how, when it comes to food, diet and lifestyle, the public is gullible victim of an incredible amount of mumbo-jumbo hogwash.

The book explains why and how we have become a society of 'miserablists', unhealthily obsessed with our health and looking on the dark side of life, instead of celebrating the fact that we live far longer, healthier lives than any of our ancestors. We live with a powerful cultural aversion to risk; the default setting for the human condition is a state of vulnerability and victimhood, and we need professional and governmental nannies to protect us from the challenges and problems of everyday life.

So, in our susceptibility and uncertainty, we believe the 'entrepreneurial scaremongers and professional panic merchants', and 'as though gripped by semi-religious conversion, we condemn this or that food as being "junk"; we pay over the odds for food termed "organic", although we know it possesses no extra power; we spend millions on magic potions, treatments and herbal medicines that have been demonstrated to be useless; we eat silly diets in the ill-founded belief that they will make us happier or live longer . . . Even though the gurus of this modern cult turn out, time and again, to be no more than witch doctors in modern dress, they still scare us to the point where we become irrational and accept their brew of pseudoscience and magic.

Though outspoken and given ready media access, anti-salt activists remain an angry minority opinion. Salt has accumulated many friends in its millennia of culinary service to mankind.

I write, snowbound at home, enjoying the fast-accumulating heaven-sent white powder that has converted our yard into a winter wonderland. And that's even before considering the market consequences for the salt industry!

To the north, however, heat is rising in Pennsylvania, over that state's handling of last week's snow emergency. Some may remember the instructive fate of Michael Bilandic. He had the big shoes to fill as mayor of Chicago following the first Richard Daley. Chicago is justly proud of its historic moniker as "The city that works." Snowfighting in Chicago is world class and citizens have high expectations. New mayor Bilandic misjudged in ordering belated response to his first winter's snowstorms and, as they say, the rest is history. Unforgiving citizens unceremoniously ousted him at the next election.

Enter PA Gov. Ed Rendell who as mayor of Philadelphia and through his first gubernatorial term recorded consistent success in keeping the commonwealth's roads safe and passable. Road users, perhaps, invented the phrase: what have you done for me lately? Last week's unsuccessful storm response left thousands of motorists stranded for up to 24 hours and has generated a political storm destined to be longer than the 50-mile backup on the highways.

As the Philadelphia Inquirer explained, though Gov. Rendell quickly put into practice the post-Katrina strategy of accepting blame and commissioning an independent inquiry, both the Republican Senate and Democratic House have been quick to schedule hearings into the manmade disaster emanating from the natural disaster. The newspaper thinks the agile Rendell will survive, but officials at the state's emergency response agency and PennDOT might not.

They say we never appreciate our health until it's gone or impaired. The same is doubtless true about highway safety and mobility. Each winter we get fresh reminders. Hopefully, those reminders need not be so painful.

Still, no plows on our roads in Arlington, VA -- and no cars have ventured out for a couple hours. But it IS beautiful!

The latest research from the Department of Economics at the University of Warwick , appears to indicate that there is a clear correlation between a country's overall happiness and its average blood pressure. In work soon to be published, the authors describe the results of 15,000 interviews with people from across Europe who were asked all about their levels of satisfaction with life, their mental health, and whether they had had problems of hypertension. According to their data, the countries were ranked from happiest to saddest as follows: Sweden, Denmark, UK, Netherlands, Ireland, France, Luxembourg, Spain, Greece, Italy, Belgium, Austria, Finland, Germany and Portugal.

So confident were the researchers that perceived (not measured) hypertension was a good indicator of actual blood-pressure problems, that they predict blood-pressure readings will one day replace or augment GDP as a measure of the success of a country. Gross Domestic Hypertension or GDH - sounds pretty good.

However, there are a few problems to be resolved with the GDH.

Were this data to be applied to the well-known Intersalt data, the three most sucessful economies on earth would be the Yanomamo and Xingu natives of Brazil followed, at a distance, by the natives of Papua New Guinea.

No doubt, there are a few bugs to be worked out, but I wouldn't be surprised if we were to soon see a new Interhappiness study.

The other problem is that the Warwick data is inconsistent with data on Ischemic Heart Disease in Europe published by WHO and highlighted in "The burden of disease attributable to nutrition in Europe " by Pomerleau et al., Public Health Nutrition, 6(5), 453-61, 2003. This paper describes the critical importance of fruit and vegetable consumption (DASH diet) to overall well-being.

Until we can be confident that correlating a perception (of happiness) with a perception (of hypertension) makes sense, it would be prudent to take heed of the Pomerleau conclusions.

Steven Milloy of Junkscience.com had an insightful op ed in the New York Post recently. He focused on allegations of pulmonary fibrosis among 9/11 responders, some of which turned out to be entirely bogus (i.e. the afflicted had a long history of smoking). But he raises a broader issue:

There are, in fact, no scientific or medical data to back up the proposition that 9/11 responders as a population have suffered any special health effects over the long term.

But facts and science matter little in the face of the larger health-scare industry, which seeks to medicalize life experiences into various "syndromes" and epidemics, usually associated with politically incorrect events and entities such as the military, chemicals, fast food and industry.

New York City's trans-fat ban, Agent Orange, Gulf War Syndrome, Multiple Chemical Sensitivity, obesity, childhood cancer caused by power lines, breast cancer on Long Island caused by pesticides, World Trade Center syndrome - you name the health scare - have all been promoted with utter disregard for science and facts by the health-scare mob, aided in large part by a complicit or gullible media.

We pay a high price for these scares - one that can go beyond strained nerves and the tens of billions of taxpayer and consumer dollars wasted annually.

Query: how many millions have we spent encouraging universal salt reduction in the absence of any link between salt intake and cardiovacular outcomes?

Because we get so close to winter storm watching and are closely engaged in snowfighting, the vast public concern for restoring safe winter streets sometimes surprises us. And others. Dr Elizabeth Whelan, president of the American Council on Science and Health (ACSH), New York City, used this week's edition of her HealthFactsAndFears.com to decry the furor over transfat (she feels the health concern is minimal) while noting: "the much more significant dangers of an ice storm seem to leave us unfazed." She explained:

Last week's ice storm was also an imminent threat to the life and health of New Yorkers, as should have been readily apparent. When I woke up Wednesday last week, I heard Meredith Vieira mention on the _Today_ show that she had taken an ugly fall and hit her head on ice while entering 30 Rockefeller Plaza. Apparently, two security guards went down with her. ...

Several times on the walk to work, I nearly fell. My staff had similar stories of near-accidents but arrived at the office intact. My twenty-nine year-old daughter was not so lucky. On Wednesday, the cab she was riding in slid into another vehicle. The next day, she slipped on a City street, had the full weight of her body fall on her arm, and fractured her shoulder. She was in terrible pain for the next twenty-four hours and, as write this, just received X-rays and an MRI.

As I left the City yesterday heading for meetings in New Jersey, a large truck came up to the right of the car I was in (a car service with a driver) and cut in front of us. Seconds later, what was probably hundreds of pounds of ice shards fell from the truck's roof and pelted the windshield of our vehicle. The seriousness of the impact only became apparent when the driver lifted the visor: the epicenter of the ice assault was on the glass right in front of his seat, which was now broken. ...

The City was negligent in not warning New Yorkers about the dangers posed by ice. The City schools should have been closed -- setting a standard for offices (many offices, including mine, close anytime there is a city-wide school closure). City officials should have advised the elderly in particular to stay off the sidewalks and streets.

We don't often disagree with Dr. Whelan, but we part company with her passivity in the face of winter weather. Here in Northern Virginia, Fairfax County schools were closed three days this past week because of inadequate snowfighting. We applaud Mayor Bloomberg for keeping New York's streets sufficiently passable to keep schools and businesses open. Failure in snowfighting exacts not only the human toll Dr. Whelan describes, but imposes an economic burden of vast proportion. Snowfighting is New York's greatest public works expense, yet an entiire winter's snowfighting expense is less than the lost wages, retail sales and foregone tax revenues if snowfighters fail to keep roads safe and passable.

So we find oursleves agreeing on her main point: "Why can't we make rational decisions about how to prioritize risks?" And we agree that responses to snow emergencies often fall short of perfection, but we would argue vigorously that we must rachet up our storm response, not rachet down concern for such relatively minor "threats" as transfat.

One role played by the Salt Institute is to try to correct the misstatements, inaccuracies and outright distortions put forward by some advocates of universal salt reduction. Debate can be a healthy way to get facts on the table, identify policy options and reach reasonable policies, but our opponents frequently try to "change the subject" by attributing all defense of salt to self-interested parties or engaging in scare tactics like overstating the amount of salt in our diets or extrapolating data to claim fantastic numbers of needless deaths that they attribute to this "high" salt intake.

An example of one exchange is Bob Messenger's The Morning Cup which today leads with an "action" photo of yours truly and the headline: "Salt Institute boss miffed; his industry's under fire!" He notes my objection to items posted on his site and adds:

I sympathize with Mr. Hanneman - he's in a nasty war trying to defend against the onslaught of anti-salt hysteria emanating from some government sources, the media and the wellness community, three very powerful adversaries. But the man is just doing his job, and what a tough, grinding job it must be these days. The truth is, and I've said this before, what's going on out there has little to do with facts as much as it has to do with an agenda-filled, fear-mongering, hysteria-driven consensus among activist-minded wellness nannies who've tagged salt with the curse of their criticisms. I have said to the industry, "Heads-up! Salt's under the gun and consumers are being bludgeoned with information, a lot of it misleading." But my bottom line, I guess, is I would tend to believe Mr. Hanneman's numbers over those of his industry's opponents.

And he concludes:

So, please ... count me among those who do not look at salt as the enemy, but as another wonderful ingredient that, like all ingredients, needs to be consumed in moderation. That said, Mr. Hanneman and the Salt Institute need to toughen up even more because the onslaught is hardly over. All one has to do is look at the UK to see what happens when idiot zealots get behind the wheel!

That's the word from the trenches in the salt wars.

A Cal-Berkeley journalism professor, writing in yesterday's New York Times Magazine, has crafted a devastating critique of political correctness in dietary guidance. Michael Pollan's "Unhappy Meals " argues that replacement of advice to select a politically-correct (though ever-changing) balance of nutrients in lieu of basing a healthy diet on food choices has led to "cognitive dissonance" among shoppers and a deterioration of food choices -- all in the name of good science. It may be the best analysis of nutrition policy since Gary Taubes, whom Pollan cites reverently.

He laments "the rise of nutritionism":

The first thing to understand about nutritionism -- I first encountered the terms in the work of an Australian sociologist of science names Gyorgy Scrinis -- is that it is not quite the same as nutrition. As the "ism" suggests, it is not a scientific subject but an ideology. Ideologies are ways of organizing large swaths of life and experience under a set of shared but unexamined assumptions. This quality makes an ideology particularly hard to see, at least while it's exerting its hold on your culture.

But the problem is not confined to the consumer: "... if nutritionism leads to a kind of false consciousness in the mind of the eater, the ideology can just as easily mislead the scientist," says Pollan crediting anti-agribusiness activist and New York University nutrition professor Marion Nestle with the insight that "The problem with nutrient-by-nutrient nutrition science is that it takes the nutrient out of the context of food, the food out of the context of the diet and the diet out of the context of lifestyle."

Why? Because what is the the "soul" of a particular food -- even if one head of broccoli is presumed identical to all others of its genus -- is unknown, perhaps unknowable. Looking where the light is brightest, scientists study nutrients, substances they can isolate and measure. The process of considering them in isolation, however, Pollan faults with producing dangerously misleading science. He offers this example: societies that eat a lot of meat have more coronary heart disease and cancers. Perhaps that's because their substitution of lots of fruits and vegetables leaves little room in their diet for meats rather than the nutritionism conclusion that there is something inherently unsafe about the meat itself. That, he posits, is why the Women's Health Initiative failed to discover a relationship between reducing fat intake and reducing heart disease and cancer. He also lambasts use of dietary recall as garbage-in, garbage-out data.

No one likes to admit that his or her best efforts at understanding and solving a problem have actually made the problem worse, but that's exactly what has happened in the case of nutritionism. Scientists operating with the best of intentions, using the best tools at their disposal, have taught us to look at food in a way that has diminished our pleasure in eating it while doing little or nothing to improve our health. Perhaps what we need now is a broader, less reductive view of what food is, one that is at once more ecological and cultural. (emphasis added)

Moving towards a prescriptive conclusion, Pollan continues:

Looking at eating through this ecological lens opens a whole new perspective on exactly what the Western diet is: a radical and rapid change not just in our foodstuffs over the course of the 20th century but also in our food relationships, all the way from the soil to the meal. the ideology of nutritionism it itself part of that change.

He identifies four large-scale changes: 1) moving from whole foods to refined, 2) simplification of the food chain through standardization of seeds and fertilizers, 3) shifting from eating leaves to seeds, and 4) the shift caused by agri-business industrialization which has displaced "traditional food cultures."

Moving "beyond nutritionism," Pollan observes that "To medicalize the diet problem is of course perfectly consistent with nutritionism." He misses a great opportunity to identify government-mandated nutrition labels on food as a prime culprit (with one exception -- stay tuned). His nine rules of better eating: 1) "Don't eat anything your great-great-grandmother wouldn't recognize as food" (moms are hopelessly contaminated), 2) "Avoid even those food products that come bearing health claims" (there, the exception!) -- here he notes disapprovingly that "The American Heart Association charges food makers for their endorsement", 3) "Especially avoid food products containing ingredietns that are a) unfamiliar, b) unpronounceable c) more htan five in number -- or that contain high-fructose corn syrup", 4) shop at farmers' markets, not supermarkets, 5) "Pay more, eat less," 6) "Eat mostly plants, especially leaves," 7) "Eat more like the French. Or the Japanese. Or the Italians. Or the Greeks. Confounding factors aside, people who eat according to the rules of a traditional food culture are generally healthier than we are. Any traditional diet will do....", 8) Cook and, if possible, plant a garden, and 9) "Eat like an omnivore" by adding new foods for a more varied diet.

Regular consumers of McDonald's Happy Meals won't find a lot of comfort, but, then, that's part of our problem in making nutrition policy: to allow nutritionism's ideologists to define as good science anything that takes an easy shot at popular whipping boys like fast food. We deserve better. We need to demand more rigorous and encompassing dietary guidelines. We need to eat what our grandmothers told us was healthy. They were right.

Pollan's article should be required reading for every member of the next Dietary Guidelines Advisory Committee.

Nothing in nutrition is more politically correct today than a preoccupying focus on the "obesity epidemic." Predictably, anti-salt zealots have chimed-in that one step towards eliminating overweight is to curtail salt consumption. Of course, salt is non-caloric, but few question lumping out-of-favor nutrients in the ukase to remove salt from the diet. The Salt Institute has just published the latest issue of its e-newsletter, Salt and Health, examining the question: "Is salt implicated in our obesity epidemic? " The article documents its conclusion that:

"... the evidence exhonerates salt and even assigns it a postive role in encouraging an increase in pursuit of healthy physical fitness. In the vast majority of cases, overweight and obesity result from energy input exceeding energy output."

Let's not take these scurrilous attacks lying down; exercise your opportunities to insist on sound science!

The global anti-obesity frenzy accelerates as politically-correct legislators from city councils (New York City and Chicago, for example) to the European Parliament weigh into the "consensus" that some foods are bad and governments should discourage (or even ban, e.g. trans fat) them.

Good nutrition is in danger of being converted from a worthy health objective to a food safety imperative like e coli or mad cow disease.

This rhetorical esacalation has an eerie similarity to the US-led multi-national effort to overthrow Saddam Hussein and erect stable self-government in Iraq. People understand that food choices influence good health; they understood that Saddam had butchered his people and thumbed his nose at UN resolutions condemning his actions. Unleashing massive efforts of public awareness has produced dietary changes, but the underlying problem of diet-related chronic disease continues, forcing consideration of a "surge" of government intervention into food processing decisions to "protect" the public from making wrong food choices. Whether improved food choices can be compared to peace and freedom in Iraq, the similarity is that failure of largely voluntary measures (food labeling or UN resolutions) is followed by more draconian interventions that invite the observation that policy-makers may have "bitten off more than they can chew" and risk not only failure, but undermine the credibility of their sponsors.

No one doubts the validity of the objectives of healthy diets or Mideast peace. The consensus breaks down in interpreting the intelligence (medical studies of health outcomes of dietary interventions or whether Saddam's government in fact trained, encouraged and exported terrorists to supplement his internal barbarities) and developing effective strategies (improving overall dietary quality versus "good food/bad food" demonization or the role of the US and its allies in preventing inter-factional blood-letting among Iraq's Kurds, Sunnis and Shiites).

In February, the European Parliament expects to vote on an anti-obesity measure that declares excess body weight a "chronic disease" and would call on the European Commission to push for rules to end the promotion of foods high in fat, salt and sugar to children. Whether you believe Saddam ever had weapons of mass destruction, you should be concerned about the "intelligence" linking non-caloric salt to obesity; there's no science behind this. And whether expanded food nanny interventionism will be more successful than "boots on the ground" along the Tigres and Euphrates should give strategists pause.

Increasing speed if you're on the wrong road won't get you where you want to go.

The (British) Salt Manufacturers' Association (SMA) has developed a questionnaire on its Salt Sense website, seeking individuals whose health has been affected by consuming either too much or too little salt. SMA wants to use this information in 's effort to persuade the UK Government to undertake much-needed research and risk assessments.

SMA has been concerned for some time that the dangers of dietary salt reduction have not been given due attention. Medical and nutrition experts from around the world have come forward over recent years to warn that older people, pregnant women and those who exercise, in particular, could be at risk from following blanket advice to reduce salt, SMA has called for balance.

Want to contribute your experience ?

Stephen Daniells , the Food Science Reporter for NutraIngredients.com, writing for AP-Food Technology.com echoes a theme often voiced in our blog: that a proper concern is with the science in studies of nutrtition and health, not whether they are funded by governments or private parties. Says Daniells:

It is important to have an independent watchdog for both industry and academia, but the statements of subtle bias, or insinuations of industry meddling merely serve to undermine scientific integrity, industrial sponsors, and consumer confidence.

He goes on with regard to a recent example:

After starting with 538 articles, the reviewers, from the Children's Hospital Boston and the Center for Science in the Public Interest (CSPI), whittled this down to 206 according to their specific inclusion/ exclusion criteria. Of these, only 111 declared financial sponsorship - 22 per cent were funded entirely by industry, 47 per cent had no industry funding, and 32 per cent had mixed funding.

They then calculated that the 22 per cent declaring an industry-only source of funding were four to eight times likely to report favourable conclusions for the sponsors than studies with no industry funding.

And this led to the researchers to imply: Bias! Industry meddling! Company heavyweights leaning on the little academic!

Let's just think about this for a moment.

First of all, the studies used in the review were all published in peer-review journals, meaning independent and anonymous reviewers had already passed their expert eyes over the studies.

Undoubtedly, the studies fitted in with other results - in vitro research, and in vivo animal studies, as well as other human studies. I have never seen an article published without supporting references - have you? Some of the studies were clinical interventions.

Everything looks ok, so far…

Next up is the role of industry in funding a study. As was stated in an insightful, balanced, and levelheaded editorial by Martijn Katan from the Vrije Universiteit in Amsterdam that accompanied the review, when industry plans to fund a study, it is natural that it would select a product with a potentially favourable nutritional profile.

Finally, some sense!

You'll want to read it all .

Stephen Daniells , the Food Science Reporter for NutraIngredients.com, writing for AP-Food Technology.com echoes a theme often voiced in our blog: that a proper concern is with the science in studies of nutrtiion and health, not whether they are funded by governments or private parties. Says Daniells:

It is important to have an independent watchdog for both industry and academia, but the statements of subtle bias, or insinuations of industry meddling merely serve to undermine scientific integrity, industrial sponsors, and consumer confidence.

He goes on with regard to a recent example:

After starting with 538 articles, the reviewers, from the Children's Hospital Boston and the Center for Science in the Public Interest (CSPI), whittled this down to 206 according to their specific inclusion/ exclusion criteria. Of these, only 111 declared financial sponsorship - 22 per cent were funded entirely by industry, 47 per cent had no industry funding, and 32 per cent had mixed funding.

They then calculated that the 22 per cent declaring an industry-only source of funding were four to eight times likely to report favourable conclusions for the sponsors than studies with no industry funding.

And this led to the researchers to imply: Bias! Industry meddling! Company heavyweights leaning on the little academic!

Let's just think about this for a moment.

First of all, the studies used in the review were all published in peer-review journals, meaning independent and anonymous reviewers had already passed their expert eyes over the studies.

Undoubtedly, the studies fitted in with other results - in vitro research, and in vivo animal studies, as well as other human studies. I have never seen an article published without supporting references - have you? Some of the studies were clinical interventions.

Everything looks ok, so far…

Next up is the role of industry in funding a study. As was stated in an insightful, balanced, and levelheaded editorial by Martijn Katan from the Vrije Universiteit in Amsterdam that accompanied the review, when industry plans to fund a study, it is natural that it would select a product with a potentially favourable nutritional profile.

Finally, some sense!

You'll want to read it all .

Salt figures prominently in two of the 15 medical greatest medical advances since 1840, according to the latest British Medical Journal , including the one judged most important: public sanitation . Chllorination is an important element in ensuring public sanitation. The other is oral rehydration therapy -- the administration of a solution of salt, sugar and water to combat diaherria.

A third salt-related development was highlighted as one of the major health advances -- the development of systematic rules for applying science known as "evidence-based medicine ." As BMJ points out: how can it be that clinicians give only lip service to basing treatment deciisons on hard science and why have they had such a hard time setting aside their informed professional opinions in favor of reliance on scientific evidence? That's the question we've been raising for the past decade with regard to the mounting scientific evidence that there is no health benefit for reducing dietary salt .

Finally, an omission, we believe, from an otherwise-excellent compilation: the fortification of dietary salt with potassium iodide or potassium iodate. Iodizing salt to combat Iodine Deficiency Disorders and the mentail impairment they impose on children born of iodine-deficient mothers and developing children receiving insufficient amounts of the vital trace mineral iodine was worthy of inclusion. That said, we''re not sure which of the 15 should have been jettisoned to make room.

According to the latest research at the University of Haifa , low birth weight babies born with low sodium (salt) in their blood serum are likely to consume large quantities of dietary sodium later in life. Taken together with other recent findings, this information confirms that very low serum sodium in pre-term and new born infants may be a significant contributing factor for long-term sodium intake.

The researchers reported that dietary sodium consumption in childhood (ages 8-15) was predicted by neonatal lowest serum sodium (NLS). The children with the most severe NLS serum sodium ate double the number of salty snacks and their dietary sodium intake was substantially higher than their peers. It was as if they were trying to make up for their previous history of salt deprivation. There was no relationship found between NLS and a preference for salt per se, but rather for the foods that contained salt.

This work provides a good deal of food for thought regarding our innate preference and requirements for salt and should give expectant mothers and parents of newborns pause to think before they severely limit their child's salt intake.

As with everything else in life, balance is the byword.

If you ever questioned the value of salt for deicing, take a moment to check out the video, Bumper cars on ice in Portland, OR .

Any driver who ever experienced the total lack of control on ice, as the poor folks in this video did, will never have to be convinced of the value of deicing!

Road salt is a life saver!!

On January 15, 2007, a 28-year-old mother of three died from water intoxication (hyponatremia) hours after competing in a Sacramento radio station contest to see which contestant could drink the most water without urinating. The winner of the contest reportedly won a new video game system - the Nintendo Wii. The contest organizers obviously thought it very clever to have a contest called "Hold Your Wee for a Wii."

They may have been clever in thinking up contest names, but were not quite as clever in knowing the consequences of excess consumption of anything - including water.

Water intoxication - also known as hyponatremia - is more commonly seen among athletes, usually extreme athletes, although it can happen to anyone who consumes too much water, causing a critical loss of sodium. Dick Hanneman made a point of blogging this issue back in September, 2006 .

The young Sacramento mother was simply trying to secure the Wii game console for her children.

Contestants were asked to sign a waiver before taking part in the competition, but the winner of the game said participants were never alerted to the dangers.

A listener - apparently a nurse - called the show and warned the deejays of the risks of the game, but to no avail.

Yesterday, the radio station fired the morning disc jockeys and seven other employees involved in setting up the contest

Hyponatremia is a disorder of fluid and electrolyte balance characterized by an excess of body water relative to body sodium content (specifically a serum sodium concentration less than 135 mEq/L). It is the most common electrolyte disorder encountered in clinical medicine and is associated with negative outcomes in many chronic diseases. Yet, most people don't understand the significance of drinking water to excess without taking supplementary electrolytes, such as salt.

Although most hyponatremia victims may appear to be asymptomatic, severe hyponatremia is a medical emergency that calls for immediate treatment. Complications can include seizures, coma, brain-stem herniation, respiratory arrest, permanent brain damage, and death.

Two years ago, a 21-year-old student died of water intoxication during a hazing incident at Chico State University. He had been forced to drink from a five-gallon jug of water that was repeatedly refilled. He soon collapsed and had a seizure. Fraternity members didn't initially call an ambulance. By the time they did, it was too late. He was pronounced dead a few hours later.

It difficult to understand why we mindlessly continue to amuse ourselves with challenges that subject our bodies to physiological extremes, but if we do so, everyone should know the risks and consequences.