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"Eating less salt will not prevent heart attacks, strokes or early death," says a study that is almost certainly flawed but that I am not going to read anymore about because it tells me what I want to hear. Have the salt! I mean, you're gonna die eventually anyway.
No, the study isn't flawed. The largest reviews of American data show that salt was basically a proxy for calories, and eating more calories kills you. When you control for calories, there is benefit to reducing salt. In fact, all things being equal (especially calories), reducing salt might is mildly unhealthy.
Read "Sodium Intake and Mortality in the NHANES II Follow-up Study" in The American Journal of Medicine (2006) 119, 275.e7-275.e1 – once you hold calories steady, less salt is actually associated with an INCREASED risk of cardiovascular disease.
@Brand Huscarl@twitter This occurred to me after checking calorie counts at a popular lunch place here in Chicago a few years ago. Sodium was beyond the daily recs but so were the calories in each meal. I mean, each meal consisted of about 2-4 times the calories that a properly sized meal should.
Here's something of interest to no one:
My blood pressure is on the low side of normal (that's medical talk, stay with me here) so even though I don't much care for salt, I find myself having to pour a teaspoon's worth into the palm of hand and ingesting it in one go just to get it over with. Like a common beast.
@IBentMyWookie This is interesting. You are not a beast, but perhaps more like my 10 year old daughter who does the same thing (because she likes the taste of salt).
@IBentMyWookie Me too! Doc told me to do this especially before a night out since twice I fainted on the street after only a minimal amount of wine; he thought alcohol + big meal = lowering already-low blood pressure = faceplanting the sidewalk.
@IBentMyWookie This is a medical impossibility. Every drinker cares for salt.
@TerseNursePornstein True. I order Bloody Mary's mainly for the salt-rimmed glass.
@hockeymom When The Awl finally gets around to setting up that foreign exchange program I call dibs on you. I will bring larder from my country, the Eastern Seaboard, because I was raised properly, and for stomach lining, because lutefisk…look, no amount of salt could make that palatable.
@TerseNursePornstein Lutefisk will never not remind me of King of the Hill and Mary Tyler Moore, so I sort of love that it exists but refuse to accept that it's something which exists and which people put in their bodies.
@IBentMyWookie I have never tried Lutefisk, but I have been called Mary Tyler Moore/Laura Petrie on multiple occasions (but never while licking salt off the rim of a glass).
@hockeymom Lutefisk is purely nasty. I don't think about how it's made, I pour butter and/or white sauce over it, try not to chew it, and it's still nasty. There's no excuse for it, I don't care what my grandmother said.
@Annie K. Lutefisk is the least of it. For a true taste treat, I give you Surströmming: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Surstr%C3%B6mming
Blech.
@SeanP What is WRONG with those people?
Does this include bath salts? And the kind that come attached to delicious bacon-flavored bacon?
@BadUncle Oh god bath salts.
I mean, bath salts.
God turned me into a pillar of the stuff and I've never been healthier.