blockquote
John Tierney's Science column in this week's NY Times recounts "some of the scientific uncertainties about the benefits of reducing salt" and asks whether politicians should intrude in the controversy between scientists to try to engineer population-wide salt reduction.
Tierney points out:
In his extensive chronicle of this topic in 1998 for the journal Science , Gary Taubes called the debate over salt reduction “one of the longest running, most vitriolic and surreal disputes in all of medicine.” He noted that advocates of salt reduction had been accused of “Bing Crosby epidemiology” — accentuating the positive findings that suited their thesis and eliminating the negative ones.
Since then the vitriol and the epidemiological disputes have probably only gotten worse. You can see skepticism about salt’s risks (or at least about the strength of the evidence of those risks) from Michael Alderman , Norman Hollenberg and the Cochrane Collaboration . You can see arguments in favor of a salt-reduction policy from Stephen Havas and at the New York City health department’s Web site .
Tierney wraps up his commentary with these questions:
How do you feel about this nationwide campaign against salt? Is it backed by sufficient scientific evidence, and should it be conducted by New York City officials? And if it does go forward, do you think consumers won’t notice the difference? Will they and food companies compensate in other ways?