Salt Linked To Autoimmune Diseases 308
ananyo writes "The incidence of autoimmune diseases, such as multiple sclerosis and type 1 diabetes, has spiked in developed countries in recent decades. In three studies published today, researchers describe the molecular pathways that can lead to autoimmune disease and identify one possible culprit that has been right under our noses — and on our tables — the entire time: salt. Some forms of autoimmunity have been linked to overproduction of TH17 cells, a type of helper T cell that produces an inflammatory protein called interleukin-17. Now scientists have found sodium chloride turns on the production of these cells (abstract). They also showed that in a mouse model of multiple sclerosis, a high-salt diet accelerated the disease's progression (abstract)."
Everything good is bad for you (Score:5, Funny)
Salt, sugar, ethanol, nicotine, any food that isn't raw and tasteless--in an ideal healthy world, we would all eat a diet of cardboard and water and walk around flagellating ourselves all day.
Enjoyable = sinful = unhealthy
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Re:Everything good is bad for you (Score:5, Funny)
I take this sort of story with a pinch of salt to be honest.
Re:Everything good is bad for you (Score:4, Insightful)
Even water has an LD50 after all. Too much of it will leach away all of the electrolytes (including sodium chloride) from your body, and kill you.
Comment removed (Score:5, Insightful)
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Even Jesus didn't get out of here alive folks
I thought the whole point of his coming was that he did.
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So, Jesus was a zombie?
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Zombie Jesus day is right around the corner, btw.
Re:Everything good is bad for you (Score:4, Funny)
From Urban Dictionary:
Christianity
The belief that a cosmic Jewish Zombie who was his own father can make you live forever if you symbolically eat his flesh and telepathically tell him you accept him as your master, so he can remove an evil force from your soul that is present in humanity because a rib-woman was convinced by a talking snake to eat from a magical tree.
Yeah, christianity makes sense.
http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=christianity&page=2 [urbandictionary.com]
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If we figure out how to live to 120, I don't see why we couldn't figure out how to have strong bones at 85. In fact, I think we already know how to do that, there are many healthy, active 85 year olds. It's just that it takes exercise and eating in a way you may not want to, for your whole life.
Re:Everything good is bad for you (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Everything good is bad for you (Score:4, Insightful)
And at the end of the day what does all this denial get you? Even Jesus didn't get out of here alive folks but let us say, just for the sake of argument they had a new "lets all eat cardboard" diet that made you live to 120....anybody spent any time with someone over 85?
Speak for yourself, you young whippersnapper, because I think life is still grand. I've gone from seeing computers that filled rooms of tubes to ones that fit on a desk to ones you can carry in your hand, each more powerful than the last. Granted, you kids these days have some crazy ideas. And won't stay off my lawn. But if I could live to 120 and still have the quality of life I do now, I'd find something useful to do with all that extra time. If nothing else, books are being written faster than I can read them.
Eat meat and don't eat sugar or much bread. Walk every day. If the walking gets tough, take a bit of whiskey and walk anyway. I figure I have at least another good decade in me, although my eyes aren't what they used to be. Certainly, it is painful to lose friends and relatives over the years, and it is especially sad to see the children of friends who then became friends die of "old age". But life is still precious, and you kids have no idea how wonderful it is.
Plus, we old people are keeping some amazing secrets from you. Hurry up with that immortality serum and we might decide to share.
Re:Everything good is bad for you (Score:5, Insightful)
The human body is a badly designed, self-destructing patchwork of bits that are perpetually one bad jolt away from a breakdown, so it's not surprising that they've discovered yet again, that excessive quantities of things we need to live will also kill us.
Actually I draw the opposite conclusion from this. The human body is so amazingly flexible and adaptable, that it can survive on a huge variety of diets, and can compensate for poor diets so well that it can be difficult to realize the long-term effects that these poor diets are having, given the relatively benign short-term symptoms.
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The human body is a badly designed, self-destructing patchwork of bits that are perpetually one bad jolt away from a breakdown, so it's not surprising that they've discovered yet again, that excessive quantities of things we need to live will also kill us.
Actually I draw the opposite conclusion from this. The human body is so amazingly flexible and adaptable, that it can survive on a huge variety of diets, and can compensate for poor diets so well that it can be difficult to realize the long-term effects that these poor diets are having, given the relatively benign short-term symptoms.
Look at the history of mankind and what we ate in order to evolve to this point. As is pointed out in the documentary "in search of the perfect human diet" if you started at the goal line of a football field and if that was the "dawn of man", and walked all the way to the other goal line, the span of time that we have been eating grains and sugars in large quantities would take up the last 1/2". For 2.5 million years our ancestors were meat-eating primates. The time we have been eating grains (10-20k yea
Re:Everything good is bad for you (Score:5, Insightful)
Actually, different ancient populations ate differently.
Inuits (Eskimos) eat an extremely high protein, high fat diet. Not much farming in the far north.
Nordic populations (Finns and Swedes for example) eat a diet different from Spaniards, who eat a diet different from sub-Saharan Africans who eat a diet different from southern Asians.
It seems to me that there isn't a one-size-fits-all solution to diet. One needs to understand one's genetic ancestry, and then using that as a guide, figure out what's best for that person. What might be too much protein for a vegetarian south Asian farmer might not be enough for a Finn or an Inuit hunter. What might be too much fat or carbohydrate for one population might not be enough for another.
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I can vouch for this. I'm Scandinavian and nourish myself by wrapping bacon around my naked body and just let it seep in overnight.
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is a badly designed, self-destructing patchwork of bits that are perpetually one bad jolt away from a breakdown
Sounds like someone's bad software application.
Re:Everything good is bad for you (Score:5, Informative)
It turns out that there is no such thing as an "essential sugar" in the human diet. Not even amylose or amylopectin...
Re:Everything good is bad for you (Score:4, Informative)
You should read the article. No really. Because they mention exactly this. That it's not just a matter of eliminating salt, it is absolutely required, but that we tend to eat too much. Heck here's a copy / paste for you:
To stay healthy, the human body relies on a careful balance: too little immune function and we succumb to infection, too much activity and the immune system begins to attack healthy tissue, a condition known as autoimmunity. Some forms of autoimmunity have been linked to overproduction of TH17 cells, a type of helper T cell that produces an inflammatory protein called interleukin-17.
Sorry... there is no nutritional value in sugar... (Score:3)
I've been doing a lot of reading on dietary topics, and it is quite amazing how many opinions about our dietary needs are based on nothing but opinion or the opinions of other people. Even the scientific results can be mis-interpreted or looked at in so many ways that you can seemingly show whatever you want from these studies.
There's a ton of stuff out there, like the book "Good Calories Bad Calories" that covers it in depth, but watch this video by Dr Peter Attia. I think it sums it up pretty well. Th [vimeo.com]
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Better drink Brawndo It's got electrolytes.
I prefer Bright-o. Bright-o makes ol' bodies new...
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Major exception to your rule: sex. So long as you don't get an infection from it. I have yet to hear any study suggest that sex is bad for you.
Not so. Sex can exasperate existing conditions and lead to heart attack or stroke. What a way to go, though.
Re:Everything good is bad for you (Score:5, Funny)
It would be awful to die all alone like that though........
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A heart attack or a stroke isn't my idea of a good way to die
Why not? I mean, if you get a chic "Don't resuscitate" tattoo, not only you'll be handsomer but chances are you'll never get to know you died.
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I'm showing my nerdiness here, but that reminds me of the time when the crew of the Enterprise discovered an ancient space vessel. Bodies were found aboard, and Piccard observed that they had apparently died in their sleep, and Lt. Worf commented "what a terrible way to die!"
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I'm showing my nerdiness here, but that reminds me of the time when the crew of the Enterprise discovered an ancient space vessel. Bodies were found aboard, and Piccard observed that they had apparently died in their sleep, and Lt. Worf commented "what a terrible way to die!"
Well, are you a klingon who should die in a battle with fierce enemies or else be dishonored? If you are, I don't think calling yourself a nerd does any good to your standing reputation.
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Just because you got to spend almost a year saying goodbye doesn't mean it's a good way to die. My wife had a maternal uncle die of pancreatic cancer and a paternal aunt die of (non-smoking-related) lung cancer. Both spent their final weeks - not days, weeks - on home hospice, moaning in pain until the time for another dose of morphine came. Then they drifted into unconsciousness for an hour or two before it a
Re:Everything good is bad for you (Score:5, Funny)
I have yet to hear any study suggest that sex is bad for you.
You're not visiting the right churches.
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Salt, once you get past a small amount, isn't good. I hate most fast food because it tastes like nothing but salt. They load down everything with salt so you can't even taste the food. Maybe that's the point.
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The solution is to use other things that tasty salty, but which are not, to flavor your food.
I make and eat Thai food all the time. Thais use fish sauce in lots of their dishes, which is quite salty, as is soy sauce.
The idea of using salt in my freshly made bowl of Tom Kha Gai would give me a heart attack.
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Take a look at what's in soy sauce [dietfacts.com]...
However, some ingredients can be used as a replacement to salt and derivative to increase the taste of food, for instance lemon juice.
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The bottom line.... (Score:2)
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Multiple Sclerosis is a horrible disease that leaves you incapable of doing anything but sitting around waiting to die
You're doing it wrong. Double the amount of salt in your diet, throw in some other pleasurable and unhealthy things in your lifestyle and I guarantee you'll never linger in this world until you get bored.
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Re:The bottom line... (Score:4, Funny)
Sin and salt and ruthless efficiency!
Bollocks (Score:5, Insightful)
These finding are contradicted by the epidemiological evidence. The hazards of low salt are immediate and deadly. The hazards of high salt are hard to detect. The chances that there are other variables at work are high. Just because you have a pathway, it doesn't mean you've identified all the regulatory mechanisms.
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Even more so in places with low iodine, or iodine deficiency, [wikipedia.org] one of the reasons why it was added to table salt like Europe and Russia. My mother was born in east germany, and for the first 15 years of her life suffered through that, now she has all kinds of wonderful health problems like many people from that region.
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So please, stop the bullshit about fanciful and widespread health problems because there was no extra iodine added to salt. The problems are quite rare.
Really. Odd that before the 70's, this was a pandemic level problem wasn't it. Oh I guess you must have been born in the 90's for you "not to see it much of a problem..." I guess this is one of those issues that we've already solved for you. Carry on then.
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Pathway just indicates it's a contributing factor. To present it as the cause of a disease is like the ban DHMO campaign's bullet point that it is the leading cause of drowning.
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An issue I've seen with the use of mouse models in several places is that studies in mice (including this one) are based around a disease called EAE which can be readily induced in mice and which has many features similar to human multiple sclerosis. It's of course convenient experimentally to be able to induce what is normally a rare and unpredictable autoimmunity, but how well does that compare to human patients? Induction of EAE involves injecting mice with brain matter and pertussis toxin, in order to g
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Except for my blood pressure
Re:Bollocks (Score:4, Insightful)
http://www.medpagetoday.com/Cardiology/Hypertension/36248 [medpagetoday.com]
In 2011, for example, the Journal of the American Medical Association published a study by Stolarz-Skrzypek et al. that found only a weak correlation between salt and blood pressure
Eat well and die young (Score:5, Funny)
90 years of whole wheat is indistinguishable from death.
yes, we used to die from flu ... (Score:3, Interesting)
yes, people used to die from flu, tooth infections and because of exhaustion when they traveled from Paris to Vienna in autumn by coach, now people live to 80+ until the system shuts down from almost anything ... soon we'll hear oxygen is linked to autoimmune diseases, diabetes and lack of interest in MSM
it's called living, it is dangerous, and at the end, no matter what you do, you die
Sssshh! (Score:4, Funny)
Doctors agree that healthy dietary salt intake... (Score:4, Funny)
...is somewhere between 0 and 100kg per day. Now we just need to zero in on the exact number and we'll be all set.
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The problem with salt is that it can be too low or too high. And, despite what doctors might say, it's not that hard to run low.
Bottom line, is that it's how much you have in your brain and blood stream that ultimately matters more than your consumption does. If you're eating 2x the recommended amount, but sweating 3x as much as a normal person would, you will get sick eventually.
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I do agree. Electrolytes are vital to a healthy body, and all it takes to put you in the "too low" category is a 24-hour GI bug accompanied by a half-dozen bouts of screaming into the porcelain microphone.
And did you ever notice that sports drinks with electrolytes (like Gatorade) taste great when you're sweating and salt-deprived, and positively horrible when you're not?
Mother Nature needs to give us kidneys...oh, wait (Score:5, Insightful)
The problem with these guesses about salt is our kidneys are specifically designed for actively and precisely maintaining homeostasis of certain key ions (Na, Cl, K, Ca) in the bloodstream. If it weren't we would simply die within days or sooner. Moderate salt with good hydration is probably not harmful at all -- it is probably good for you as it helps the kidneys filter other bad stuff out. Low salt could easily be bad for you.
High salt plus low hydration might be bad. But where exactly is the line where moderate salt becomes high? Guessing based on what we eat is for witch doctors.
So I would like to see an actual study showing how adding/subtracting a little salt changes anything measurable at all about the long term serum average, otherwise I am inclined to believe that this guess is baloney. We are not walking petri dishes.
(There are specific diseases where controlling salts are very important, but that is a separate issue.)
Re:Mother Nature needs to give us kidneys...oh, wa (Score:4, Insightful)
Moderate salt intake is mandatory, if you're not consuming any you'll eventually run low and wind up dead or brain damaged. And, that's not as hard as people think, all it takes is a few days of unseasonable weather if you've been low balling your consumption to get seriously ill. As in wind up in the ICU of the local hospital with life threatening brain damage.
Yes, that's rather unlikely as most people consume so much salt that it would take weeks or more to run low, but it can and does happen.
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"The problem with these guesses about salt is our kidneys have specifically *EVOLVED TO* actively and precisely maintain homeostasis of certain key ions"
Fixed.
Haha (Score:2)
Don't believe everything you read. (Score:5, Funny)
Too much salt (Score:5, Insightful)
I had to give up salt completely some years ago and it took months before I regained my ability to taste unsalted food. Now, food without salt actually tastes much better that the over-salted crap served to us everywhere.
Yes, the body requires some sodium chloride but the amount is very small. What most people ingest is far, far beyond that. As with just about anything, too much will harm you.
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So, you're a zombie then? Because if you don't have salt in your diet, you're dead.
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Zombies get their salt from the human flesh tartare they consume. Humans taste salty. Just ask any dog that is trying to lick your face, or a coyote that is gnawing on your leg.
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There is far, far, far enough naturally occurring salt in food to supply all the salt that a body needs without having to add any. Perhaps, to be clearer for those who take things too literally, I needed to avoid all foods with any salt added to whatever naturally was there to start with.
Hmm (Score:5, Informative)
Taubes on Salt - http://www.nytimes.com/2012/06/03/opinion/sunday/we-only-think-we-know-the-truth-about-salt.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0 [nytimes.com]
Re:most salt is not real salt anyway (Score:5, Insightful)
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He's saying that natural salt doesn't have Bleach, Iodine, and non-binding agents.
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That iodine has done a LOT of good for public health.
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Keep in mind that, for example, up until recently they supposedly didn't know the lubricant they use on the machines that make aluminum soda cans can be conclusively, causally linked to obesity in lab rats...
Citation needed [wikipedia.org].
Re:most salt is not real salt anyway (Score:5, Informative)
You know, when you are asking for a Citation like a smart-ass, maybe you should first make sure there isn't one to be found by searching the very site you're posting on [slashdot.org].
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Bisphenol-A is not a lubricant, it's a compound present in the plastic liners used in aluminum cans.
THAT is not the citation he was looking for... (Score:2)
lubricant they use on the machines that make aluminum soda cans can be conclusively, causally linked to obesity in lab rats...
BPA is not a lubricant.
It is a "key monomer in production of epoxy resins and in the most common form of polycarbonate plastic."
Also, he was asking for causation, not correlation.
Finding in your urine more of the chemical that you ingest while drinking sugary drinks, does not prove that it's the chemical and not the sugar that's making you obese.
All it proves is that the said chemical has apparently leached into your sugary drink - perhaps from its packaging and perhaps from the cups you use.
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From the multiple sclerosis mouse paper's methods section:
Mice received normal chow and tap water ad libitum (control group) or sodium-rich chow containing 4% NaCl (SSNIFF) and tap water containing 1% NaCl ad libitum (high-salt group).
Hopefully, the normal chow and salty chow are pretty much identical except in how much NaCl SSNIFF added, though I don't know. Presumably the researchers would have thought of that.
The cell culture work, odds aren't bad that they tried multiple sources of NaCl to make sure it wasn't trace contaminants that were changing things.
At any rate, it's unlikely that the salt they used for thei
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Lets take a quick look at this, shall we?
If I drink the recommended amount of water 3 liters for a male in a temperate climate, by the Mayo clinic: http://www.mayoclinic.com/health/water/NU00283 [mayoclinic.com]
That means I would consume 30grams of NaCl...
and the recommended amount for an average male? 2.3g, per the Mayo clinic: http://www.mayoclinic.com/health/sodium/NU00284 [mayoclinic.com]
So right there I am consuming 13 times the recommended amount.
4% in my food?
Let's see, according to http://www.usda.gov/factbook/chapter1.htm [usda.gov] the avera
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Yeah, that might cause some problems, it is half the LD50 for an average male.
Indeed. Thanks to these studies, we know one of them is autoimmune diseases.
If your point was something along the lines of "This might not be specific to autoimmune diseases, they're practically killing the rats with salt, so it could cause any number of problems due to poor health," I'd remind you that the mouse models were merely bolstering the cell culture studies where they no doubt made sure they weren't killing the cells. They only did mice to show that what's true at the cellular level is true f
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my wife mostly buys unprocessed pink salt from the Himalayas. other times its natural sea salt.
is there an epidemic of autoimmune diseases in Tibet? These things seem to happen only in the USA and other "developed" nations
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Right, I'm sure you're speaking from your vast knowledge of the health of Tibetan people.
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Because those folks are dying of diseases we already cured here. Stop the noble savage BS already.
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Because the Tibetan people probably don't consume MASSIVE amounts of salt. Salt is the most commonly-used preserving agent. If we want to be an industrial society and not an agrarian society, we need food preservation (so industrial farms can manufacture at one time and preserve the food to be consumed for another time).
Actually, they DO consume MASSIVE amounts of salt. (Score:4, Informative)
Also, butter. They make tea from it. [wikipedia.org]
They tend to eat or drink on average more than 20 grams of salt per day. [georgeinstitute.org.cn]
They also tend to live 4900 meters above sea level. On average.
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Why is it that developed nations lead in X disease and Y disease? A lot of it has to do with the fact that we screen for and treat these diseases rather than letting them go by unnoticed as they do in most of the less-developed world. Prior to modern medicine, a lot of now easily curable or treatable illnesses were fatal. Just look through a history book and you can see that a decent amount of children died not long after birth. Because of this, you've got people who are predisp
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There's a somewhat strange term which can appear on food labels called "salt equivalent". It's derived by multiplying the mass of sodium by 2.5. In other words assuming that the only sodium containing compound present is NaCl. Possibly even in cases where there is zero NaCl. In such cases you can't actually tell how much "salt" is present...
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*If you are ingesting non-ionic sodium, you should video it for medical purposes (and youtube).
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Re:most salt is not real salt anyway (Score:5, Informative)
Been an engineer for a salt company for 20 years, the processing of salt is to take out the few impurities there are, we do not really add anything at all. There is no bleach, you do not clean 316SS that way when working with salt, salt kills bacteria as well as bleach could. You can easily get non iodine salt, the only additive is a inert agent to help it keep flowing in high moisture... (think of the rice in shakers, yeah its like that). "Natural" salt and Sea Salt, which we do make, is basically less clean, kinda nasty... but the crystal size and organization is different so it gives a different taste, quite nice on some things. But it is still nasty compared to good ole processed table salt, 99.9% pure and the last 0.1 is mostly encapsulated sand and our flow agent. Salt is CHEAP, we used to joke when crackpots (sorry valued customers) sent us complaints we were "cutting" the salt with something because it tasted less salty.... we looked it up, sand is much more expensive, not sure what we could cut it with that is cheaper! Oh and while we are at it, if anyone ever throws out salt due to a best buy date I will find them and smack them, we are forec to put those on, most of the US salt is at least 10k years old, it is not gonna bad anytime soon.
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most of the salt is over processed crap with lots of chemicals
It's called iodine [wikipedia.org].
I didn't know Jenny McCarthy had a Slashdot account...
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If you live nowhere close to a coast, most of your table salt is almost pure NaCl ... trace amounts of iodine are added to it, as it is next to impossible to get that iodine from "natural sources" (almost exclusively fresh seafood - which residents of, say, Kansas don't have).
I don't think that is what the GP is talking about, though, I think (s)he's just spouting nonsense. It would take fairly a fairly sophisticated set of tests to find anything other than NaCl in a typical store bought container of Morto
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another thing I love that I can't eat? they're just throwing more salt in my wound!
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Well, experts have been advising it. Everyone actually been eating that way? If they were, the entire fast-food industry would have collapsed.
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Oddly enough, many people do. You can blame everything on fast food. You can blame things on twenty-year-old advice eventually turning out to be incorrect, as it's slowly appearing.
Huh? If someone claims they are on a low fat and low sodium diet and also eats fast food regularly, they are full of shit.
But, if you wish to believe that trying to eat low fat and low sodium is what's making you fat; feel free to eat at McDonald's five times a week.
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Salt consumption declined at the start of the 20th century with the spread of refrigeration. Then through the 20th century it rose again as consumption of processed food grew.
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Citation please. If that's really true, then why do so many people see their blood pressure improve by taken blood pressure medication that causes the excretion of sodium?
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