The news media's drawn some heat for its campaign to compare Barack Obama to John F. Kennedy. But maybe they were onto something. This week, President Obama made a decision rooted in a set of shared experience he has with JFK that no elected President in the intervening years can claim. We don't yet know how President Obama will deal with his first "Cuban Missile Crisis" challenge. But we know now: Obama knows snow!

Sure, you can quibble that Jerry Ford knew snow; but he was our only non-elected President. And purists might claim Richard Nixon lived in snowy New York City for a few years in the mid-1960s, but he had a car-and-driver then.

No, Boston and Chicago know snow and so do their sons.

Vice President Joe Biden warned that our enemies would test President Obama early to determine his toughness and determination. The enemy struck this past week as Mother Nature unloaded a full inch and a half of snow on the District of Columbia. Would the President stand tall or wimp out? We didn't have long to wait.

Deriding "snow wimps ," the President told reporters his daughters had a snow day at their new school, something that he said never would have happened back in Chicago. NBC Nightly News showed Obama saying, "My children's school was canceled today, because of, what? ... Some ice? As my children pointed out, in Chicago, school is never canceled. In fact, my seven-year-old pointed out that you'd go outside for recess. You wouldn't even stay indoors."

The Washington Post reported that that the President's

remarks might have captured Washington's attention as much as anything Obama has said since taking office a week ago. With those offhand comments, the president homed in on the one thing that riles Washingtonians every winter. His words reflected a common sentiment among recent arrivals from up North or out West: The denizens of Washington are weather wimps. Life around the Capital Beltway grinds to a halt for climatic events that would barely register in, say, Chicago....

In one sense, the president's gripe was understandable. In Chicago, where his daughters previously attended school, the public schools haven't closed for weather since a 1999 ice storm.

Secretary of Education Arne Duncan said it would take "a hurricane, an avalanche or a tidal wave" to close schools in Chicago, where until recently he was the schools chief. In Washington, the threshold for closure is somewhat lower.

As for Obama, he kept at it. "I'm saying that when it comes to the weather, folks in Washington don't seem to be able to handle things." ....

At Malia and Sasha's former school, snow days are the stuff of myth.

"I've been here six years, and we haven't closed them yet," not through drifting feet-thick snows, not through freezing winds off Lake Michigan that bring the chill down to 40 below, said David Magill, headmaster of University of Chicago Laboratory Schools.

"There are kids playing in the snow outside my window right now," he said. "They're building a fort."

Chicago obsesses about keeping streets clear. A mayor was voted out of office in 1979 over a blizzard that shuttered the city for days. Snowfall averages 38 inches a year in Chicago, 15 inches in Washington.

So, now we know. And enemies know. No wimps need apply.

Perhaps political advisor David Axelrod will be whispering in the President's ear about lowering expectations, but for now, the President's leadership -- certainly in the eyes of the salt industry -- is unassailable. No Michael Bilandic, he.

Okay, it's still early, but Junk Food Science has raised the bar in its report this week on "Who decides what you can eat? Sating on salt ." Read it all. Twice.

Noting that New York City has announced a campaign to reduce dietary salt in the Big Apple, nurse-blogger Sandy Szwarc laments that the "significance of this initiative may have been lost on media" and capsulizes why people should care:

It deserves to be out in the open, though, because the best science for nearly half a century — including the government’s own findings on examinations reflecting 99 million Americans; more than 17,000 studies published since 1966; and even a recent Cochrane systematic review of the clinical trial evidence — fails to support the hypotheses that salt reductions offer health benefits for the general public. Cochrane’s reviewers specifically concluded that such interventions are inappropriate for population prevention programs.

It’s not just that the salt reductions being proposed will be costly programs that won’t be of much help to people, but that they could hurt people. Even more troubling, the public health messages in this new campaign appear to be most targeting minorities, fat people, the elderly and poor.

Szwarc sums the NYC campaign quoting from the New York Times : “Dr. Frieden says a quiet, mass reduction in sodium levels — stealth health, they like to call it around the department — might be more effective.” She then continues to skillfully excoriate the city health department's scientific summary: "None of these claims can be scientifically supported," she declares.

She then explains how heart disease rates are improving, how population blood pressure has been unchanged over the past 20 years and how salt usage, also, has not increased over the past 20 years. Then she turns to health outcomes, summarizing the findings by a team at the Albert Einstein Medical College who studied the biggest and best federal government database, the National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey (NHANES):

The lowest sodium intakes — the 1500 mg/day that the New York health department says everyone should be eating — were associated with an 80% higher risk of cardiovascular disease compared with those consuming the highest salt diets. The lowest salt intakes were also associated with a 24% higher risk of all-cause mortality. Clearly, low-salt diets are not associated with lower risks for the general population. Conversely, the Albert Einstein researchers were unable to show that even the highest salt intakes were associated with increased risks for developing cardiovascular disease or high blood pressure or for premature death.(emphasis in original)

She explores the "unintended risks" of low-salt diets, the many scientists who question universal salt reduction and queries: "What is it all about?" answering:

As the New York City-led nationwide low-salt initiative is clearly not founded on a true health crisis, on the medical evidence, or on proven health interventions for the primary prevention of high blood pressure or heart disease, what might it really be about?

As the New York Times pointed out today, the target is going after packaged foods and chain restaurant meals. Reducing salt to levels unpalatable to their consumers appears to primarily be about getting people to eat less of foods these public officials don’t think people should eat or others should sell.

Szwarc rarely deals with salt. She's been a consistent and effective proponent of evidence-based health decisions on a broad range of nutrition issues. Her insights earned Junk Food Science "silver medal" runner-up recognition for the best medical/health issues blog for 2008. This could vault her to "gold" in 2009!

President George W. Bush's first director of his White House Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs (OIRA), Harvard professor John Graham, exercised an activist role in promoting better science in federal decision-making. President Obama's OIRA choice, another Harvard professor, Cas Sunstein, could do the same.

Graham directed the Harvard Center for Risk Analysis. Sunstein has been on the faculty of the Harvard Law School and directs its Program of Risk Regulation. He taught earlier at the University of Chicago and is the author of a recent book, Nudge.

A devout liberal who writes for New Republic regularly, he also advocates some positions (judicial minimalism and support of such Bush nominees as now-Chief Justice John Roberts, among them) that have worried left-leaning environmentalists like Chris Mooney, author of the anti-Bush diatribe The Republican War on Science. Mooney admits he's impressed with Sunstein's intellect. "I'm interested to hear whether any environmentalists are going to be rattled by this choice. Sunstein is an ingenious scholar, and continues the whole "best and brightest" motif of the Obama administration...Important question: Will he roll back the Bush administration's overuse of the Data Quality Act?"

Good question. Our concern was that, after Graham’s departure, the Bush Administration failed to push the Data Quality Act far enough. But Sunstein is a believer in behavioral economics and its contention that the theoretical assumptions of law and economics should be modified by new empirical findings about how people actually behave. This might lead to the kind of confident assumption that government policy manifestos to change Americans’ diets will trump human physiology. Stay tuned.

Last year, areas like northern Iowa, northern Illinois and southern Wisconsin were hard hit by winter. They were buried in record snowfall. This Spring they were flat out of salt and the DOTs in those states increased their bids by 100,000 tons, 421,000 tons and 351,000 tons respectively. And the media was filled with nearly-daily stories of the salt industry's frantic efforts to meet this dramatic increased demand.

Well, it looks like they were right to worry. The area is well ahead of last year's record snowfall. Dubuque, IA , for example, near the conjoining of the three states, reports snowfall fully 33% more than last winter.

Champaign-Urbana, IL has been buffeted with 21 storms so far this year; their usual winter is 23-30 storms total. And south of Chicago, Tinley Park, IL has responded to 24 snow events, one more than their usual full-season total.

Perhaps you saw the headlines like "salt reduction benefits go beyond blood pressure." We did, so we read the study by Kacie Dickinson et al, "Effects of a low-salt diet on flow-mediated dilation in humans ." The study of 29 overweight and obese Australians in this month's American Journal of Clinical Nutrition is being portrayed as yet another reason to reduce dietary salt.

Not so fast. We recognize that there are many changes that occur when dietary salt is reduced, some well understood (e.g. renin, aldosterone, insulin resistance, blood pressure), others less so. So it may be that this study adds to our understanding.

Keep in mind one key finding: "There was no correlation between change in FMD (flow-mediated dilation) and change in 24-h sodium excretion or change in blood pressure. No significant changes in augmentation index or pulse wave velocity were observed."

As we push for risk factors of risk factors, let's not lose sight of the other competing mechanisms that are activated by lowering dietary sodium and reaffirm our commitment to examining the sum total, the net outcome of all these interventions in terms of cardiovascular health.

Forecast for New York City: flurries. While many New Yorkers may worry more about whether salt is being used to keep their streets safe, city health commissioner Thomas Frieden is concocting a plan to put less of it in their diets.

Today's New York Times carries a story by Kim Severson, "Throwing the book at salt " which describes Frieden's effort to reduce salt in packaged foods and restaurant meals with an aim to reduce salt intake by 25% over the next five years. He's talked to the food industry (mentioned) and the Salt Institute (unmentioned) and warns: "If there's not progress in a few years, we'll have to consider other options, like legislation."

Severson continues to point out the campaign will be "difficult for Dr. Frieden, both practically and politically."

It's actually more difficult than Frieden and his cardiovascular advisor Sonia Angell imagine. Severson quotes Angell presuming that salt intake is a matter of taste: "We've creatd a whole society of people accustomed to food that is really, really salty. We have to undo that." The plan is for "stealth" reductions in the salt content of processed foods "based on one in the United Kingdom (where) targets for sodium reduction will be set for certain food categories."

All this in blithe ignorance of the evidence. Well, not really ignorance, self-deception. Last week, the Salt Institute met with Dr.Frieden and his senior staff and laid out the problems he's facing, none of them "political" but all "practical" since the campaign is based on pseudo-science. The Institute confirmed its representation in a letter, as usual, posted on its website . The letter warns that Frieden's disregard of the science amounts to "using the citizesn of New York as a grand experiment of this generally-believed but as-yet untested hypothesis."

The Institute told Frieden that sodium-reduced diets raise the blood pressure in a significant number of people and will increase in most people insulin resistance, sympathetic nervous system activity and activate productin of renin and aldosterone, well-demonstrated to increase their risk of teh very cardiovascular events your program is intended to reduce." Bottom line: "Salt reduction may actually increase the risk of a significant portion of those New Yorkers who adopt your recommendations since teh lower sodium intake stimulates these known physiologic factors for heart attacks, congestive heart failure and metabolic syndrome."

The Institute lamented the predictable but "unintended consequences" since the medical literature is discovering more and more adverse impacts of salt reduction. "Since it is your mandate to improve the public health of the citizens of New York, we remind you that it si these physiological facts, not political policies that will ultimately determine health outcomes," the Institute warned.

Frieden's campaign also ignores strong evidence that the UK model has been a total waste of money and has achieved no sodium reduction and that medical evidence shows that humans' salt appetite is "hard-wired" in the brain, not a behavioral choice. Unmentioned in the letter was a new study released just yesterday showing that the "human brain makes snap decision on fat content" -- the headline on a new study in NeuroImage .

Perhaps it's ironic that Iberian poet George Santayana brought the world the observation that "those who cannot learn from history are doomed to repeat it." The January 27 issue of The New York Times carries a story by Elaine Sciolino of a group of young Portuguese entrepreneurs who are repeating history, reconstructing a hand-harvested solar saltworks in the Algarve region south of Lisbon.

Despite the global economic gloom, they hope their timing couldn't be better in that the last few years have seen a resurgence in popularity of assorted sea salts commanding premium markeplace prices. Then again, with recession reflected in many households' economic choices, it could be that the story might more likely parallel the 1992 book by Francis Fukuyama,The End of History and the Last Man. Fukuyama was wrong about American global hegemony. Will the history of the Portugese salinas end with a rebirth of artisinal salt or repeat itself in Darwin's natural selection?

Corporations throughout the U.S. are squeezing costs and cutting jobs in response to the national economic distress and "softening markets worldwide." Morton Salt parent Rohm and Haas announced its second round of cuts -- 900 jobs will be affected in hopes of dropping $90 million to the company's bottom line. All units of the company are impacted -- except Morton Salt. Like all U.S. road salt producers, business is humming at Morton Salt.

NHLBI scientists and their taxpayer-funded university researchers released a follow-up study for the important Trials of Hypertension Prevention trial . The authors claimed "a higher soidum to potassium excretion ratio is associated with increased risk of subsequent CVD (cardiovascular disease)." Headline writers fell in line.

A summary analysis of the article published in the January 12 Archives of Internal Medicine would have been more accurate had it stated: There was no statistically significant relationship between sodium excretion and cardiovascular risk and even the reported non-significant association evaporated when the researchers adjusted for known confounding factors. A "p-value" (calculating the likelihood that the reported association was accurate) is usually considered valid when it is 0.05 or less, meaning a 95% chance that the result is accurate. The sodium:blood pressure "p-value" for men was 0.49 and for women 0.98. This means that there was only a 51% chance of a valid relationship between sodium among men and a miniscule 2% chance in women. Hardly the conclusion drawn by the authors or the headline writers.

With the Dietary Guidelines for Americans up for review, we can hope the process deals more with data than headlines. But don't hold your breath.

Set your Tivo or plan to be home two weeks from tonight when the Discovery Channel debuts its new "Salt" episode in its popular "How Stuff Works" series. The show promises to "delve into the science of salt, the prehistoric, life-sustaining mineral that has 14,000 known uses from seasoning food to so much more." We can hardly wait!

Actually, you DON'T have to wait. Discovery Channel's website has already provided an introduction to its hour-long video, entitled "How Salt Works." Authors Tracy Wilson and Shanna Freeman range widely from the chemical properties of salt, the various production technologies, to salt in history and its myriad uses including the medical controversy over whether it would be advantageous for everyone to reduce dietary salt.

The show will debut Thursday, January 29 at 8 pm EST and be shown again four hours later, midnight that same night. And doubtless repeatedly in the coming weeks.

That's two new "Salt" shows in two months, the other being on The History Channel. Get out that microwave popcorn and have an enjoyable hour.

President-elect Barack Obama likes salt ... on caramel, at least. So reports the NY Times in a December 31 story "How Caramel Developed a Taste For Salt ." Food technologists readily understand how salt makes sweet sweeter by masking bitterness, but the traditional Breton confection of heavily-salted butter caramels has now "made its successful run from rarefied Parisian pastry shops to American big-box stores in a decade -- a relatively short period, according to people who study food trends."

Obama becomes the first US president since Ronald Reagan to profess preference for adding salt to foods. Reagan famously observed that "only a raccoon could eat a (hard-boiled) egg without salt." George H.W. Bush missed the point entirely bad-mouthing broccoli when all he'd have needed to do was add some salt to mask its bitterness. Go figure.

If the Reagan Oval Office offered visitors jelly bellies, perhaps President Obama will be offering salt-sprinkled caramels.

Every time it snows in Seattle or Portand, transplanted Easterners awake aghast at the lack of effective winter maintenance and appalled at the toll in crushed cars and avoidable injuries. So it was last week when Mother Nature tried to award Seattle with an unaccustomed White Christmas. Seattle Times blogger Lynne Varner , an admitted refuge from the East Coast, spoke for what we know were thousands in the "silent majority" who would like to see high winter operations levels of service in their communitiies:

I believe in reducing waste, recyling and reusing anything with an iota of life left in it, but I'll risk my environmentalist credentials to support the use of salt.

Not the savory grains harvested off the shores of exotic locales like France and Hawaii, resplendent in their shades of blush, cream, gray or charcoal. I'm talking about their tougher, more common cousin, the salt used to de-ice sidewalks and roadways. Our region is underneath a blanket of white and a policy of salt and snow plows could be our way out. But a Seattle Times story pulls the curtain back on a disappointing landscape of city officials who, during this huge snowstorm, are refusing to okay the use of salt because it can be harmful to the environment, particularly to Puget Sound.

Give me a break. Few things aren't harmful to the environment if used incorrectly. But salt can be used safely. Full disclosure:

I grew up on the East Coast where sprinkling salt on roads and sidewalks was as ubiquitous as wearing snow boots and down jackets. East Coasters aren't a bunch of philistines, we just understood the importance of keeping the economy going by moving goods and humans even in the face of Mother Nature's fury.

Salt works, but I don't want to give the impression it is pretty. In snow belt regions, long winters and profligate use of salt meant getting unremoveable moisture stains on leather shoes and boots. A common sight on cars over a few years old was rust stains and bare spots where the salt had eaten into the glossy finish. We proudly called such cars rust buckets. Many people bought old jalopies for use in the winter, sparing nicer cars the indignities of salt rust or fender benders.

One more reason to salt? The chance that icy sidewalks could turn a holiday visit into a long bout of litigation because someone fell on someone else's property. I don't mean to sound like a commercial for the Salt Institute but that grainy spice has its place outside the kitchen.

And don't forget to read the comments by citizens tired of being the "silent" majority.

The Wisconsin Transportation Information Center (TIC), the Wisconsin Local Technology Assistance Program (LTAP) center's Winter 2009 Crossroads newsletter contains a timely review of how salt-strapped Wisconsin cities and counties are coping with expected short supplies of salt this winter. The story starts on page 4.

Bottom line: agencies are assigning a new priority to careful use of salt -- what we've been preaching as Sensible Salting for fully 40 years now. And they're considering alternative deicers. Studies like the NCHRP Report 577 have found salt the best for most storm conditions, but it's a responsible exercise for agencies to look at options. The story also reports, and laments, that some agencies are turning back the clock and expanding their planned use of salt/sand mixes.

A sidebar story beginning on page 7 asks: "Why not sand/salt mix?" and answers:

In fact, the assumption that sand-to-salt ratios of 50/50, 60/40, 70/30 or 75/25 are effective treatments is misguided. TIC agrees instead with research that shows mixing salt and sand (beyond the 2-5 percent salt needed to freeze proof sand stock piles) does not improve the effectiveness of either material.

Weigh the facts

Sand and salt work at cross-purposes. Sand improves traction when it is on top of ice or snow pack. In a salt/sand mix, as the salt begins to melt the snow pack, the sand sinks and mixes with the snow pack. Once the sand is gone from the surface, it does nothing to improve trac tion. Sand mixed with salt also reduces the melting effectiveness of the salt.

There are other costs of using a salt/sand mix to consider. It usually increases the overall application rate, so actual reduction in salt use and cost savings may be less than expected.

For example, in a change from applying salt at an application rate of 300 lbs per lane mile to a 75/25 sand/salt mix applied at 800 lbs per lane mile, the salt component of the mixture is 200 lbs per lane mile for a 33 percent reduction. Assuming a salt price of $60 per ton and a sand price of $4 per ton in this scenario, material costs go down only $1.80 per lane mile. Adjust the equation to a sand/salt ratio of 70/30 and the savings are $0.68 per lane mile. And mixing two-thirds sand with one-third salt saves nothing in material costs over straight salt.

If the route is 10 centerline miles (20 lane miles) or more, it may take an additional trip to the yard to refill the sand/salt mix. The labor and equipment costs for this trip wipe out the nominal savings on materials. Add to that the resource outlay for sand cleanup in the spring and the cost of the mixture is higher

The key point we all need to keep in mind is the life-saving, jobs-preserving mission of snowfighters. We cannot sacrifice public safety at the alter of professed fiscal concerns. If next summer's roadway rights-of-way grow a bit shaggier through less frequent mowing, that price is far more acceptable than one school bus skidding into a ditch this winter.

Today's Janesville Gazette carried the "good news" that "Weather-related emergencies handled 'without a hitch'." The local Wisconsin DOT dispatcher efficiently closed the major Chicago-Madison-Minneapolis/St. Paul Interstate highway when a semi jack-knifed. One crash, no lives lost. We are thankful for the life-saving response. The paper glowingly recorded the dispatcher averring that "The handling of Tuesday's closure was an encouraging practice run for future emergencies."

We hope not.

No one wants to risk life and limb in winter snow conditions, but closing a major transportation artery admits that Mother Nature won that round in the annual war against winter. There are certainly times when blizzard conditions can make a roadway impassible and unsafe; but road closures should be the last resort in preserving winter safety and mobilty.

Studies done at Marquette University in nearby Milwaukee show conclusively that timely application of salt and snow plowing are the most cost-effective defense against winter weather. They reduce traffic crashes by 85% and injuries even more -- 88.3%.

Moreover, closing a road is more than an inconvenience. Moving freight reliably is a major asset for the economy -- it means jobs and ensures the local economy can compete against regions -- and countries -- not so weather -challenged. That's why the Wisconsin Department of Local Affairs and Development produced a film, "Wisconsin Works in Winter," to use in its economic development efforts to convince industries to locate in the Badger State. Manufacturers need to get their workers to the plant, bring in raw materials and ship out finished goods, all on a reliable timetable, a timetable upset when winter maintenance efforts fail. Work done at Iowa State University documented that shippers value not only timely deliveries, but the costs of shipping delays, particularly "non-recurrent" delays they cannot anticipate.

So, hurray for WI DOT for its life-saving communications program, but rather than heralding a hopeful future pattern for winter storm response, we hope Wisconsin snowfighters do as they've done before: conduct a thoughtful post-storm debriefing to find out why their crews were unable to quell Mother Nature and keep cars and trucks moving safely on the road. Otherwise, when winter's snows close Wisconsin roadways, they may find the jobs have moved to Texas by Springtime.

During his radio broadcast on December 6, 2008, President-elect Barack Obama promised to create the largest public works construction program since the inception of the interstate highway system more than a half century ago. This ambitious program will be a pivotal part of the economic recovery program he hopes to fashion with Congress immediately after being sworn in on Jan. 20, 2009.

Mr. Obama went on to say he would invest record amounts of money in the vast infrastructure program, which would include highways, bridges, sewer systems, mass transit, electrical grids, and work on schools, dams and other public utilities. The green-oriented jobs generated would result in the creation of greater energy efficiencies while minimizing negative environmental impacts.

It is critical that an investment of this magnitude truly reflects the imperatives of twenty-first century requirements and beyond. Infrastructure programs must be performance-based to ensure that they are meeting our functional needs of minimizing net congestion while maximizing long-term asset preservation, rather than pandering to parochial political interests. Investments in higher quality engineering will also lessen long-term maintenance requirements and associated costs.

Green highways will not only require more eco-friendly and recycled asphalts, but will also have to incorporate an engineering design that efficiently manages runoff including heavy metals, inorganic salts, aromatic hydrocarbons, and suspended solids that accumulate on the road surface as a result of regular highway operation and maintenance activities, such as deicing and herbicide applications. This might include porous pavement shoulders linked to bioretention swales that will reduce pollutants from surface runoff as well as agronomically-adapted or environmentally insensitive buffer areas. The same thinking must go into building and upgrading our bridge system.

While economic recovery is the prime motivation behind this ambitious program to renew our nation's aging infrastructure, we must ensure that the investment of taxpayer dollars provides us with the practical means to improve our daily mobility and commercial efficiency while preserving the environment for generations to come.