After millions of pounds sterling have been invested in a comprehensive anti-salt media campaign to convince British consumers to reject salt, the government's Food Standards Agency, which has led the charge, reported this week on Consumer Attitudes to Food Standards . Bottom line: the money's been wasted!
Britons remain unconvinced on salt despite the media barrage disparaging salt. Unpromped, 3,513 respondents were asked "Are there any issues related to food that you have concerns about?" Only 4% identified "salt content" as a concern, fourth among concerns and only 1% higher than in 2005. Less than half (46%) have been convinced that there are any issues with food (Chart 30).
British consumers, however, well know the politically-correct answer. Prompted by the massive PR campaign to answer "yea" or "nay" about whether they are "concerned" about "the amount of salt in food," more than half (54%) agree, ahead of fat (46%)(Chart 35). Thus, FSA may feel it is getting the taxpayers' money's worth -- except that respondents don't seem to be internalizing the message, just regurgitating what's expected. And the reason is also clear: most rely on TV news and somewhat fewer on newspapers for their information; missing entirely is any mention of reliance on health care providers as information sources (Charts 37 and 41).
FSA may find trouble brewing in one other finding. While one-third of respondents continue to feel the information the agency provides is "independent/unbiased" there was a sharp 29% increase in consumers who agreed that the agency was promoting official government policy (Chart 49).
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.
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?
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.
