The news media's been reporting a paper in The Lancet this past week that purports to "prove" that salt produces chronic disease mortality, killing 8.5 million persons around the world. As the headline writers penned, that would be a serious condition, indeed, if it were true. But a closer look shows the authors engaged in the same statistical sleight-of-hand that was on display at the FDA hearing a couple weeks ago.
No matter how you quantify the enormous costs associated with chronic disease and, in this case, heart disease, the key to assessing the veracity of the numbers associated with salt is the linkage. Simply put, there is none. It's manufactured -- it exists only as the product of a mathematical model that assumed that lower salt diets WILL lower population blood pressure AND that lowering BP in this way WILL produce the lower incidence of CV death. GIGO's the term for it; garbage in, garbage out.
In fact, the authors cite one of two studies of salt reduction in Finland. The study they don't report is the health outcomes of Finand over the year it reduced its citzens' salt intake. Absent any control, the numbers show improvement, but compared with other countries over the years, Finland lagged behind those countries that did NOT reduce salt .
That The Lancet would choose to publish this reflects the policy preference on the author, not a substantive contribution to public health nutrition policy.
