Winter finally arrives -- big time! Though storms have crippled transportation in the Plains and Rockies, the first significant storm struck a broad swath from Texas through New England over the past few days. Texas Gov. Rick Perry's inaugural was postponed due to icy road and the Associated Press reports 41 storm-related deaths . We've had our wake-up call.(photo: Kelly Kerr/Tulsa World, via The Associated Press)

There's been a lot of chatter in the U.S. and the U.K. in recent weeks about food labels.

In the U.K., European Food Information Council (EUFIC) director general Josephine Wills presented her views to the CIAA on research on consumer response to nutrition information on food labels in Europe. She noted that although nutrition labeling has been a major instrument for consumer health and nutrition education, research shows consumers don't understand the information and likely misuse it in actual consumer purchasing decisions. The UK labeling debate divides consumer activists advocating a stoplight (red-yellow-green) "good food/bad food" label from the Food and Drink Federation (FDF) and many food manufacturers who advocate "Guideline Daily Amounts" (GDAs) for four key nutrients (calories, protein, carbohydrates and fats). Including salt is optional. FDF launched a 4m pound campaign last week to promote GDAs. The food industry effort has prompted two government agencies to proclaim a joint "independent" panel to provide an evidence-based resolution of the issues. For their side, perhaps the food companies can also agree on their own "independent" panel.

The same issues separate U.S. food manufacturers and "consumer" groups like the Center for Science in the Public Interest (CSPI). CSPI has agitated for many years for a "good food/bad food" stoplight label while the GMA/FPA and Food Marketing Institute announced last week its "Take a Peak" promotion campaign for the government's Food Guide Pyramid. The food manufacturers' campaign is the largest of a series of "private" label/education efforts which include commercial endorsement logos sold by the American Heart Association and grocers like Hanaford Brothers with their own "stars" labels. Predictably, CSPI objected to the new GMA/FPA-FMI promotion, having earlier sued FDA to require its preferred red-yellow-green stoplight. CSPI president Michael Jacbson complained to the Washington Post : "What's a consumer to do if one product has the Take a Peak logo and right next to it is a product that gets the American Heart Association logo for being a healthy food?"

Our suggestion: use evidence-based procedures to evaluate both the relationship of the claimed health benefits to quantities of nutrients ingested as well as objective measures of how consumers use food labels. There's a lot more heat than light on these issues at present.

The U.S. Department of Labor has just released the 2006 Metal & Nonmetal Fatal Accident Review . The positive news is that 2006 experienced the lowest number of fatalities on record- 18 mine employees and 7 contractors for a total of 25. The bad news is that all of these accidents were preventable. No surprise to anyone that more than half of all fatalities involved the maintenance crew. What was a surprise was the fact that fully 1/3 of fatalities involved mine workers that had between 10-15 years of experience.

The majority of fatal accidents have these common characteristics:

1) Failure to identify hazards, and 2) Failure to manage risks

The key root causes were: No Risk Assessment Conducted  No/Inadequate Policy or Procedures  Did not use Personal Protective Equipment  Lack of Pre-operation Checks  Equipment not Maintained  Training Inadequate  Failure to Conduct Examinations

Let's use this information to guide our way to making 2007 an even safer year!

The media is generating a mountain of coverage alleging bias based on the funding source for scientific studies, most particularly, recently, when that funding source is "industry." Presumably disinterested funding partners like the federal government, universities and even, in one recent case, the "consumer" interest group the Center for Science in the Public Interest (CSPI), get a free pass. That study , released earlier this week alleged that food industry funding biased conclusions of research studies on the healthfulness of fruit juice, milk and soft drinks. All the authors claimed they were free from bias -- including CSPI. CSPI is an advocacy group whose primary mantra is that the food industry is trying to poison its customers. Unbiased? Still, it's not an "industry" group (unless fear-mongering is an industry), so no one thinks to ask if having an author who is part and parcel of an advocacy group with a dog in this fight might somehow bias the study.

Worse, the matter of potential author bias entirely escaped media attention (or at least my monitoring of the coverage which focused on pointing with alarm to "industry money.")

Let's face it: every research project has a funding source and that funding source has a theory of what they hope science will confirm. Every funding agency has a "bias;" they want to confirm their hypothesis. That doesn't invalidate the study. The key thing is the quality of the science itself.

The ludicrous extreme of the current uncritical condemnation of industry-funded research and equally uncritical endorsement of studies funded by universities, "public interest" groups and governments is that the "white hat" scientists are credible while the "black hat" researchers employed or funded by industry find their motives examined more than the science they produce.

There's a name for the clear political agenda at play here: socialism. If socialism is government ownership of the means of production, then de-legitimizing privately-funded research is outright socialism. It is destroying the private production of science in favor of government-funded studies because only government can "protect" citizens from the rapacious, unconscionable private sector.

Medical research can be an expensive undertaking. None of the published studies at the heart of the salt and health debate have had salt industry funding support. Most are studies of government data. Most of the analysts are government-funded. Having the government gathering the data and then interpreting it weakens individual citizens. And when government goes that still-further step of denying independent scientists access to its own data, the problem moves from concern to alarm (a problem supposedly addressed by the Data Quality Act).

A good start to redress this disturbing imbalance and dangerous trend is to insist on more rigorous examination of the science itself -- study design and conformance with transparent, replicable analytic techniques. After all, if we play political games with the "evidence," it really doesn't change anything physiologically -- neither politicians nor bureaucrats can amend the laws of nature. If we head down the wrong road we don't just waste tax dollars, we "kill" people who would survive if we'd had an accurate read on the science.

The Transportation Research Board's Performance Measurement Committee's newest newsletter was published today, containing an article by Salt Institute president Dick Hanneman on the role of roadway friction measures to rate the effectiveness of winter maintenance efforts . "Friction measuring devices create accountability for outcomes for the first time," explained Hanneman. Hanneman serves as liaison between the TRB Performance Measurement Committee and TRB's Winter Maintenance Commitee.

The Salt Institute tries to correct the subtle distortions of our defense of the healthfulness of dietary salt. One common slander is that the Institute sued the federal government challenging the validity of the DASH-Sodium study. Regular readers will recall that the government claimed that the study proved that "every American" would be healthier if they reduced salt intake. While we strongly dispute this conclusion, we don't actually challenge the study; it seems of high quality -- only the interpretation of the findings. This is a small distinction with an important difference. Let me illustrate the way the case was put today by unbossed.com by repeating our response (also posted on unbossed.com):

As the president of the Salt Institute, which you mention as the plaintiff for the DQA test case, I feel I must correct an error incorporated into your blog. You repeat Chris Mooney's erroneous statement that the lawsuit challenges "a National Institutes of Health study on diet" that is "state-of-the-art scientific work."

Actually, we agree that the study is "state of the art" -- and vitally important. But our lawsuit did not challenge the study at all. The lawsuit challenged the fact that the government had not made the data available for independent experts to validate its "insider" interpretation of the data as required by the DQA. We asked, specifically, that the beginning blood pressure and the standard deviations of the subgroup analyses be disclosed; they have not been published and it is impossible to determine the accuracy of the conclusions being drawn without these statistics that could be provided in a millisecond from the data of the study's authors. The data are fine, but incompletely divulged and we asked only a tiny bit of information. As it is, published data by the authors have already confirmed that the agency has mischaracterized the findings. The government says the health of "all Americans" would be helped by cutting back on salt. Not only does this study not address that question at all (it is confined to blood pressure, not the net health effects of salt reduction) but in six of the eight reported subgroups -- representing the vast majority of Americans -- even blood pressure lowering is not statistically significant. This says nothing of the adverse impacts on glucose metabolism and the heart attack-stimulating production of the kidney hormone renin.

So, to set the record straight: we challenged the agency's application of its own DQA guidelines, not the study which seems to be first-rate (if not fully understood).

Dick HannemanPresidentSalt Institute

The half-truth allegation (we DID, after all, sue the government), if unchallenged, would have the effect of undermining the credibility of our argument; if people believe the DASH-Sodium study is a quality study, they would be less willing to listen to our complaint about the twisting of its findings. And if you're in the knowledge business as we are, your credibility is a huge factor in your effectiveness. Ignore the little things and you lose the ability to influence the big things. It's like the policing strategy adopted in New York City by "America's mayor," Rudy Giuliani. Mayor Giuliani started enforcing against breaking windows and painting grafitti on buildings and it helped unravel the hopelessness the public felt about obeying the law and led quickly to a dramatic fall in violent street crime. Same principle.

Sometimes we all get so busy that challenging the distortions pales in importance with the urgent priorities we all face, but responding not only preserves our credibility as salt industry advocates, but helps erode less-informed or even malicious distorters of the facts. Take time to become informed and speak out!

Highway maintenance operators are continually barraged with advertising claims on the benefits of various deicing compounds. The number of conflicting claims out in the marketplace make it difficult to arrive at a decision one can comfortably live with. One of the areas of greatest contention is the effect of various deicing chemicals on pavement concrete.

I recently took part in an excellent Snow and Ice Meeting at Villanova University organized by Greg Nichols of Bryn Mawr College. During the course of that meeting, one of the speakers, who represented a deicing technology company in Iowa, told the participants of the highly deleterious effects of sodium chloride on concrete. Of course, it was the job of this individual to sell his particular brand of product. But was what he said about the deleterious effects of sodium chloride on concrete correct?

Among its various roles, the Salt Institute carries a strong educational component. In serving that role, we have to make use of the most reliable, objective sources of information available. With reference to the latest research on the impact of various deicing chemicals on pavement concrete we turned to Iowa State University's Department of Geological and Atmospheric Sciences.

In a comprehensive paper authored by H. Lee, R. D. Cody, A. M. Cody, and P. G. Spry, entitled,

Effects of Various Deicing Chemicals on Pavement Concrete Deterioration

these researchers described their comprehensive investigations into the effects of different deicers on concrete deterioration. The materials they used were sodium chloride, calcium chloride, magnesium chloride, calcium magnesium acetate (CMA) with 5 different Ca/Mg ratios, Ca-acetate, and Mg-acetate. Each deicer produced characteristic effects on the concrete samples by physically and chemically altering the dolomite coarse aggregate, the dolomite coarse aggregate-paste interface, and the cement paste.

Their study conclusions revealed that magnesium in any form was the most damaging to the concrete. Magnesium chloride produced significant concrete crumbling and that calcium magnesium acetate (CMA) solutions were the most damaging of all solutions tested. Wet/dry and freeze/thaw cycling in CMA produced widespread and severe damage. Magnesium acetate produced similar damage.

Most significant of all, under the experimental conditions they employed, sodium chloride was the least deleterious material to concrete.

The January 2007 edition of the Salt Science Research Foundation Report contains a fascinating article on the ability of electrolysis water to kill pathogenic bacteria. Researchers found that the acidic water produced around the anode of a salt water electrolysis system has sterilizing properties which have since been put to use preventing hospital infections. A prototype piece of equipment has been put to use for the sterilization of endoscopes prior to their use in endoscopic procedures. In fact, researchers have optimized the process by first washing the equipment with the alkaline electrolysis water from the cathode side and immediately following this within a rinse from the anode side. What is really produced at the anode side is hypochlorite, but it appears to be much more active than the equivalent levels of hypochlorite produced by conventional means. Researchers are currently evaluating the long-term practicality of this system.

Jerry L. Poe, Director of Technical Services at North American Salt Co., (Compass Minerals), Overland Park, KS published an excellent article in the December issue of WaterTech online. Entitled, Salt - an Ally in the Iron Wars, the article describes the considerable problems encountered in water conditioning with high-iron waters.

Jerry goes on to provide advice on cleaning up iron-fouled resin beads through the use of reducing and chelating agents followed by salt regeneration. This article is just the sort of practical, down to earth information that water conditioner users need in order to keep their equipment in top operation condition.

Congratulations, Jerry. Well done!!

Salt tastings are all the rage, salt samplers are among the choicest holiday gifts, and chefs tell us each salt has a different flavor and has to be used to its best advantage in cooking. Sea salt tastes a lot better than mined salt, Rocco DeSpirito told the New York Times. "It's got a real saline, ocean character that comes across in the food."

Thanks to celebrity chefs, popular cookbook authors and gourmet catalogs, entire mythologies have developed about salts and their healthful virtues. Culinary gurus talk passionately of various salts and continually try to outdo each other for the most alluring, exotic and lavish offerings. And salt fads are born. Gourmet salts can now sell for more than 100 times the price of plain table salt. For most of us, following these food fads seem harmless fun. It never occurs to us it might not be.

Often taken as gospel are claims that sea salt is unrefined, more natural and more healthful than ordinary table salt because it comes from the sea and is high in minerals. Sea salt has been praised for tasting pure, fresh, bright, delicate, sweet, sharp, refined, balanced and well-rounded. Everyday table salt is condemned as tasting bitter, tinny, metallic, acrid, characterless, and chemical-like, because it's said to be cheap and highly refined.

In actuality, all edible salt sold is about 99% pure sodium chloride. The remaining 1% - negligible traces in a dish - are far too minute to make a difference nutritionally.

These observations at year-end on Junkfoodscience are by way of introduction to some further thoughts on the importance of iodine nutrition in the U.S. Pointing to the "astounding changes" identified in Food Technology magazine last month (the article was by Salt Institute technical director Morton Satin, although not identified in this article), the author continues:

While iodine levels are not yet low enough to declare a public health emergency (remember, RDAs are not minimum requirements and are set higher than most people need to prevent deficiencies to allow for a safety margin), they indicate a trend of serious concern to health professionals.

This summer, researchers at the Conway Institute of Biomolecular & Biomedical Research at the University College Dublin reported that the iodine intakes among Irish women of childbearing age were significantly below World Health Organization recommendations. They reported that a mere 3.3% of all salt sold in Ireland and UK was iodized. This past spring researchers reported in the Medical Journal of Australia that iodine deficiencies were re-emerging in Australia.

A week ago, the New York Times reported that about one-third of the world's population eating only locally produced foods is short on iodine, contributing to stunted growth among the children and "even a moderate deficiency lowers intelligence by 10 to 15 IQ points, shaving incalculable potential off a nation's development." Multiple international iodizing efforts are underway, just as the United States did in the 1920s. Meanwhile, we might be poised to having to relearn our own history lessons.

For articles like this, Junkfoodscience has been nominated for recognition as the Best New Medical Blog . If you agree, you might want to add your vote to recognize salt-sensitive medical reporting. We vote aye!

Two hundred years ago, Lewis & Clark traversed the North American continent (building a saltworks at Seaside, OR), and the U.S. government has been funding scientific research ever since. Federal dollars helped make Samuel Morse's electric telegraph a reality. After WW II, federal research spending spurted sharply and today totals about $140 billion a year ($80 billion, defense; $60 billion non-defense). Nearly $10 billion goes to basic research and the federal government picks up 60% of that, although private R&D, in total, is probably double the federally-funded share.

As has been discussed repeately in this blog, federal funding comes with strings attached. Agencies have their own policy agendas which their taxpayer-funded research advances.

An article by William N. Butos and Thomas J. McQuade, "Government and Science: A Dangerous Liaison ?" appeared in the most recent, Fall 2006, edition of The Independent Review finds, unsurprisingly, in our view, that:

Goverment funding is hardly neutral in its effects on the institutions of scientific research: it helps shape which projects are considered worthy, which departments a university will emphasize, and which professors will get promoted.

The easy acceptance of burgeoning federal research funding, Butos and McQuade argue, is undermining the independence of scientific research (and producing "politically correct" science, we'd add, to finish the thought).

All the more reason Congress should amend the Data Quality Act to ensure its judicial enforceability. Critics of the DQA like to have it both ways: they lambaste the Bush Adminstration for promoting "politicized" science and turn around and attack the same Administration for implementing the DQA whose attempt is to ensure that science used by the federal govenment be transparent enough to be replicable by independent outside scientists. The consistency seems mostly consistent hostility to the Bush Administration, not consistent concern for quality science.

When you get your Christmas presents wrapped and the kids off to bed, sometimes there's a great football game on TV. If you get beyond that, it's time to read a good book. You may want to consider astronomer Carl Sagan 's The Demon Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark . Amazon.com has this to say about the book:

Carl Sagan muses on the current state of scientific thought, which offers him marvelous opportunities to entertain us with his own childhood experiences, the newspaper morgues, UFO stories, and the assorted flotsam and jetsam of pseudoscience. Along the way he debunks alien abduction, faith-healing, and channeling; refutes the arguments that science destroys spirituality, and provides a "baloney detection kit" for thinking through political, social, religious, and other issues.

Chapter 12 is the "baloney detection" part and it brought a flood of recognition illuminating the current debate on salt and health. Consider Sagan's tools for testing arguments to uncover fallacy or fraud. They include encouraging substantive debate, dismissing arguments from authority and suggesting a healthy dose of humility and openness to new perspectives. He advises seeking evidence that can rule out hypotheses even while their validity is unproven and extols high quality controlled trials. Insightful and relevant, I hope you agree.

Sagan proceeds to identify common fallacies of logic and rhetoric. See if you recognize any patterns here in the salt and health debate. These include:

Ad hominem - attacking the arguer and not the argument.

Argument from "authority".

Argument from adverse consequences (putting pressure on the decision maker by pointing out dire consequences of an "unfavorable" decision).

Appeal to ignorance (absence of evidence is not evidence of absence).

Special pleading (typically referring to god's will).

Begging the question (assuming an answer in the way the question is phrased).

Observational selection (counting the hits and forgetting the misses).

Statistics of small numbers (such as drawing conclusions from inadequate sample sizes).

Misunderstanding the nature of statistics (President Eisenhower expressing astonishment and alarm on discovering that fully half of all Americans have below average intelligence!)

Inconsistency (e.g. military expenditures based on worst case scenarios but scientific projections on environmental dangers thriftily ignored because they are not "proved").

Non sequitur - "it does not follow" - the logic falls down.

Post hoc, ergo propter hoc - "it happened after so it was caused by" - confusion of cause and effect.

Meaningless question ("what happens when an irresistible force meets an immovable object?).

Excluded middle - considering only the two extremes in a range of possibilities (making the "other side" look worse than it really is).

Short-term v. long-term - a subset of excluded middle ("why pursue fundamental science when we have so huge a budget deficit?").

Slippery slope - a subset of excluded middle - unwarranted extrapolation of the effects (give an inch and they will take a mile).

Confusion of correlation and causation.

Straw man - caricaturing (or stereotyping) a position to make it easier to attack.

Suppressed evidence or half-truths.

Weasel words - for example, use of euphemisms for war such as "police action" to get around limitations on Presidential powers. "An important art of politicians is to find new names for institutions which under old names have become odious to the public"

This is rich; a mother lode.

It would take an all-day read of this blog to offer the myriad examples of these fallacies and rhetorical tricks. Those of us who have spoken to the issue have been subjected to many; and our appeals, for example, for a controlled trial of health outcomes of dietary sodium in preference for valuing "argument from authority," is but the most glaring example.

Thanks to Michael Paine of The Planetary Society Australian Volunteers for the good advice I'm passing along.

As we move into holiday mode, substituting our normal focus on salt for visions of sugarplums, some "highly encouraging" news from this week's journal Hypertension . Drs. Kwok Leung Ong and colleagues in Hong Kong, studying the massive US federal NHANES database, report that 75.7% of Americans with hypertension know that fact (up from 68.7% four years earlier) and 36.8% have it controlled (compared with 29.2% in the earlier study).

Good news indeed. And it's siginficantly grounded in the biggest federal database. As the authors note: "The NHANES database has been valuable for the study of the trends in the health status of a population because of its large sample size, complex sampling design, good quality control, and comprehensive content."

The authors found four reasons for the improvement: 1) obesity isn't increasing (missed that in the MSM, I'll bet!), 2) "better publicity and education," 3) better use of treatment guidelines for medications (as opposed to development on new meds themselves) and 4) "an increase in the use of antihypertensive medications."

No mention of salt, by the way. An ealier NHANES analysis found that those on lower salt diets don't benefit anyway. They had 37% higher cardiovascular mortality than those on normal salt. That's some pretty good news too! Merry Christmas.

Blizzards have closed the Denver airport and roads for a hundred miles and paralyzed the high plains economy, but I'll be heading home soon on dry roads for an evening's TV date as my beloved Green Bay Packers host the neighboring Minnesota Vikings this evening. (It's been a long season for faithful Packers fans, but that's another story).

Just up the road from us here in Northern Virginia, fans of the Baltimore Ravens are getting excited for the prospects of their team in the NFL's post-season (just a dream for the 2006 Packers, I'm afraid). Yesterday's Baltimore Sun carried the headline: "Ravens' success has city thinking salt and purple" It seems the city's salt this year is blue (from the use of Prussian Blue as an anti-caking agent, the paper didn't mention) and they're taking a look at trying to adjust the hue to honor the purple-and-black Ravens. The city has already changed the lighting on city buildings to purple. The paper explains that "winter in Baltimore may resemble a huge, grape-flavored snowball."

Keep praying for snow in Baltimore, even if purple's not your favorite team's color. And tonight I'm hoping there's no cause to consider a "purple" celebration after the game as my green-and-gold champions tough it out with an outfit that used to inspire "shock and awe" as the "Purple People Eaters" -- the Vikings.

"DOT banishes sand from snowy highways" read the December 15 headline in the Connecticut Post Online . "Instead of seeing the brown ick of sand polluting the landscape," Connecticut drivers will soon see clear, black roads when it snows, explained journalist Rob Varnon. The CT DOT has replaced sand-salt mixes with straight salt -- the solution used in most states and the strong trend among professional snowfighters. Varnon continued:

Sand has traditionally been used to create traction on winter roads, but studies by the U.S. Department of Transportation and several universities during the last decade have called its effectiveness into question....The state DOT said it plans to use plows, salt and liquid calcium chloride to clear roads and also treat some surfaces before storms. ...Municipalities do not have to follow suit, but Connecticut requires towns and cities to clean up sand when it is placed on the roads because of the impact the material has on water supplies....The DEP discussed the DOT's winter plan, he said, and applauds the decision to quit using sand. Massachusetts, Vermont and New York have quit using sand because it is detrimental to the environment, he said.

Not only will switching to salt reduce the environmental burden, a DOT spokesperson said, but the public demands winter mobility only possible by using salt. "People are less and less patient. The DOT catches a lot of political heat if the roads aren't clear 24 hours after a storm," he explained.

Yes, we know. Good move, Connecticut!