Thus reads the headline of this week's NY Times article that captures, perfectly, the ongoing controversy over salt reduction. After composing this post, in a hotel room in Peoria, IL, I realized that Mort had been working on the same thought. So here's my take (read Mort's below ). Interestingly, in January, I forecast we'd already read the "best blog of the year " that just happened to be on this same subject. Now, I guess, we've read the "best MSM story of the year" on salt and health.

We couldn't summarize the issues any better than NYT Science editor John Tierney:

Suppose you wanted to test the effects of halving the amount of salt in people’s diets. If you were an academic researcher, you’d have to persuade your institutional review board that you had considered the risks and obtained informed consent from the participants.

You might, for instance, take note of a recent clinical trial in which heart patients put on a restricted-sodium diet fared worse than those on a normal diet. In light of new research suggesting that eating salt improves mood and combats depression, you might be alert for psychological effects of the new diet. You might worry that people would react to less-salty food by eating more of it, a trend you could monitor by comparing them with a control group.

But if you are the mayor of New York, no such constraints apply. You can simply announce, as Michael Bloomberg did, that the city is starting a “nationwide initiative” to pressure the food industry and restaurant chains to cut salt intake by half over the next decade. Why bother with consent forms when you can automatically enroll everyone in the experiment?

And why bother with a control group when you already know the experiment’s outcome? The city’s health commissioner, Thomas R. Frieden , has enumerated the results. If the food industry follows the city’s wishes, the health department’s Web site announces, “that action will lower health care costs and prevent 150,000 premature deaths every year.”

But that prediction is based on an estimate based on extrapolations based on assumptions that have yet to be demonstrated despite a half-century of efforts. No one knows how people would react to less-salty food, much less what would happen to their health.

Dr. Frieden has justified the new policy by pointing to the “compelling evidence” for the link between salt and blood pressure . It’s true that lowering salt has been shown to lower blood pressure on average, but that doesn’t mean it has been demonstrated to improve your health, for a couple of reasons.

First, a reduced-salt diet doesn’t lower everyone’s blood pressure. Some individuals’ blood pressure can actually rise in response to less salt, and most people aren’t affected much either way. The more notable drop in blood pressure tends to occur in some — but by no means all — people with hypertension , a condition that affects more than a quarter of American adults.

Second, even though lower blood pressure correlates with less heart disease, scientists haven’t demonstrated that eating less salt leads to better health and longer life. The results from observational studies have too often been inconclusive and contradictory. After reviewing the literature for the Cochrane Collaboration in 2003, researchers from Copenhagen University concluded that “there is little evidence for long-term benefit from reducing salt intake.”

A similar conclusion was reached in 2006 by Norman K. Hollenberg of Harvard Medical School. While it might make sense for some individuals to change their diets, he wrote, “the available evidence shows that the influence of salt intake is too inconsistent and generally too small to mandate policy decisions at the community level.”

Tierney continued, explaining how the recent randomized trial of health outcomes of low-salt diets for congestive heart failure patients documented the unexpected conclusion that:

Those on a low-sodium diet were more likely to be rehospitalized and to die, results that prompted the researchers to ask, “Is sodium an old enemy or a new friend?”

Tierney's point is that the new anti-salt campaign of NYC health commissioner Thomas Frieden is sailing into the wind of emerging research and the gale of scientific controversy. Will Frieden trim his sails, tack into the wind ... or capsize?

Well, it's about time!

The two articles in yesterday's New York Times science section, "Hold the Salt? " and "Public Policy That Makes Test Subjects of Us All " by John Tierney finally brought the goods home!

Taking the trouble to do a comprehensive review of all the evidence available, Tierney writes how the New York City Health Commissioner, Thomas R. Frieden's salt reduction initiative is based more on political expediency than scientific merit.

We applaud this journalist who took the time and trouble to do the research showing that the alarmists' predictions that current salt consumption patterns result in 150,000 premature deaths per year is not based on scientific data but merely a trumped up estimate based on extrapolations based on assumptions that have never, to this day, been proven. Up until now most journalists who never did their homework, misinformed their readers by always assuming it was a fact. Tierney set the record straight and quite rightly says, "No one knows how people would react to less-salty food, much less what would happen to their health."

The article goes on to say that the population's response to reduced salt intakes is heterogeneous and makes the valid point that some individual's blood pressure actually rises as a result of lower salt intake. Tierney goes on to quote the recent Cochrane Collaboration meta-review that concluded that there was little evidence for any long-term benefits of salt reduction. He also referred to two very recent studies that have shown that congestive heart failure patients who are put on low sodium diet (the gold standard in most medical practice) were much more likely to die or be rehospitalized than those placed on regular salt diets. Tierney also made reference to the recent University of Iowa study in rats demonstrating that salt was an essential component to dispel depression and enjoy normally pleasurable activities.

The author ended by stating what we have long believed at the Salt Institute. Policies that end up arbitrarily placing people on a restricted salt regime will effectively put consumers into one of the largest clinical trials ever carried out, without their knowledge or consent.