Link Between Salt and High Blood Pressure 'Overstated' 291
An anonymous reader writes: Diagnosed with high blood pressure? If so, you were probably told to moderate or avoid the use salt in your food. Well, a new study (abstract found that salt is not associated with systolic blood pressure after controlling for other factors. The study found that BMI, age, and alcohol consumption all strongly influenced blood pressure, and concluded that maintaining a healthy body weight was the best way to counteract it. The publication of this research follows a CDC report from Tuesday decrying the amount of salt in children's diets — a report that lists high blood pressure as one of its main concerns. The debate on this issue is far from over, and it'll take years to sort out all the contradictory evidence.
I know what causes high blood pressure (Score:5, Funny)
My wife.
Re:I know what causes high blood pressure (Score:5, Funny)
I don't know about blood pressure, but she sure sets my heart a-racing ;) ;)
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The funniest thing is that you posted as AC.
Is that you, ghost of Henny Youngman?
Re:I know what causes high blood pressure (Score:5, Funny)
I seem to cause high blood pressure in my wife. Especially when I have my blood pressure taken and it is insanely low. I have the blood pressure of a marathon runner. Not the rest of the body, mind you. Just the blood pressure.
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Just wait until next week, when they announce that cigarettes are actually good for us!
CDC guilty of correlation == causation (Score:5, Insightful)
CDC: "A vast majority of scientific research confirms that as sodium is reduced, so is blood pressure."
Which does not mean that salt *causes* blood pressure to increase.
Eat shitty food, which happens to contain a lot of salt, and you will have high blood pressure.
Eat good food, and add a ton of salt to it, and you will have normal blood pressure.
Anyone who has taken the time to experiment with their diet can see the results themselves (like I have).
Re:CDC guilty of correlation == causation (Score:5, Funny)
OK folks, you heard it here first.
Slashdot. Ahead of everybody, all of the time.
Just ask us.
Re:CDC guilty of correlation == causation (Score:5, Informative)
But don't ask us on Ask Slashdot. There we will tell you to do your job yourself, that your company should hire someone who has a clue and/or that you don't even understand the question.
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The same can be said of cholesterol, statin drugs and heart disease but they're still a good idea.
No, they are not. Cholesterol has been labeled a boogeyman, along with saturated fats, but it's all based on erroneous or over-hyped information [mercola.com]. That has given us margarine (plastic for your body), high carbohydrate diets loaded with wheat gluten, and the result is massive obesity - and all the concomitant health issues.
You NEED a good amount of cholesterol for a healthy nervous system, and avoiding eggs and cholesterol containing foods in general is thought to be responsible for the increase in Alzheime [naturalnews.com]
Re:CDC guilty of correlation == causation (Score:4, Interesting)
[mercola.com]
According to recent [nytimes.com] information [wordpress.com] and studies [authoritynutrition.com] there seems to something to the Low Carb High Fat diet, not just for weight loss, but for much better serum cholesterol numbers and lower inflammation markers. But citing Joe Mercola probably isn't convincing anybody of the credibility of what you're saying. [quackwatch.com]
Re:CDC guilty of correlation == causation (Score:4, Informative)
Claims to be a doctor
Makes counterintuitive claims
has an 877 number on the site
Everything about that link screams "quack", as do your claims:
* Gluten isnt bad for you, unless you have a specific allergy or condition.
* That claim about margarine being plastic is dumb and based on the absurdly stupid notion that molecules that look similar are similar. By that logic, water is flammable (only one atom off of H2!), highly oxidizing (H2O2) and potentially highly acidic (H2SO4)
* Carbs dont lead to obesity; inactivity and a crappy diet do. Want proof, look at any highly-active runner-- they tend to eat a lot of carbs and still are pretty fit
* Noone knows what causes alzheimers other than "plaques in your brain".
* The sources listed in that naturalnews.com article are horrendous; none of them an actual scientific publication, one of them "goodworkswellness.com" and another a blog? Wow.
You're right about needing cholesterol, but generally the problem is people getting too much, not too little.
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Statin drugs do funny things to your brain.
There was even one guy who had amnesia whenever you took it.
Statins do have a 2% decreased risk of cardiac events for diabetics.
The link is less clear in non-diabetics.
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Wait. He got amnesia whenever I took a drug?
Citation needed. ;^)
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I forget...
[John]
Great news, everyone! (Score:3, Funny)
Now I can go back to ramen noodles for lunch!
Obviously. (Score:3)
Anyone losing the will to live yet? I could go on...
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I know, it's like nobody can make up their damn minds what's good for you, what's bad for you, how about, if we lived well on it 100, 150, 200 years ago it's prolly still damn fine today?
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Enjoy your 30 year life expectancy [wikipedia.org], I guess.
Re:Obviously. (Score:4, Insightful)
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Exact quote of the Grand Parent in case you forgot:
100 years ago, we didn't live well. How you rationalize and dismiss that isn't the question.
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That's not really the issue.
If, 150 years ago, the average life expectancy was 30-40 years, but the average human level of general health in those 30-40 years was better than the same in the first 30-40 years of modern humans's lives, then you could say that something we did back 150 years ago was better and we were healthier and living well on whatever we were doing.
In short: strain, work, lack of surgery and vaccines, poor understanding of disease, bad hygiene, the like, could take a toll; but, meanw
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Could it be because the wimps didn't procreate, or if they did, their offspring would likely not reach an age where they could procreate themselves?
Nowadays, with the advancements in medicine, you could live long enough to procreate and have offspring with genetically bad health and risks of various diseases, which 100+ years ago were being removed from the gene pool automatically.
TL;DR: people who a century ago would have died at young age now live enough to generate offspring with inherited bad genetic tr
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You're assigning a human judgement "bad" to the previous survivability of genetic traits. Do you understand what's wrong with that, or do I gotta type out a million paragraph digest?
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People consistently overlook the fact that lower life expectancy figures given for the past are almost entirely do to mass deaths by babies and children up to 12.
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LIfe expectancy at birth doesn't really apply to many slashdotters - not many of us are under one year of age.
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But yet it doesn't stop them from crying like one.... The baby whining here on slashdot overshadows 4chan.
Re:Obviously. (Score:5, Informative)
Apparently, you kan't read. The very link you posted explained that it was largely due to infant mortality and lack of sanitation. It wasn't from eating egg yolks and salt and it certainly wasn't from failing to substitute transfats for toxic butter.
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I always lash my venomous cows, so I can get toxic whipped cream.
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What bugs me is when I can taste the sugar in a hamburger bun. And you can't shake that off.
(Well, sure, you could "shake" the whole bun off, but you know what I mean. Someone was sure to point that out, so now you've been denied of your attempt at pedantry.)
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when I shake off I eject sugars and proteins too. you're not doing it correctly
Implications (Score:4, Funny)
Clearly, this indicates that the science behind anthropogenic global warming is flawed.
Comment removed (Score:5, Insightful)
Re: I can simply ignore all health and diet advice (Score:5, Insightful)
Cigarettes are undeniably bad. So are trans-fats, alcohol overconsumption, and too much stress.
The issue is that health publications yry to extend everything into being undeniably bad, on the scale of smoking, when in fact the food or habit may only be bad in certsin cases. One current theory on salt is that diabetics, the overweight, and blacks are higher risk groups for salt being linked to blood pressure, but for the large majority of people there is no association. Of course that's boring health advice, people like to hear something strong like "quit now and live longer," so health claims get wildly exaggerated.
Re: I can simply ignore all health and diet advice (Score:5, Funny)
cigarettes aren't necessarily bad, just don't smoke them.
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Clever!! I do wonder what good use they could be put too, though :-)
Broken in half (after removing the filter) and inserted in the nostrils, they're pretty effective at filtering out (or maybe masking) odors that would otherwise make you nauseous.
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One current theory on salt is that diabetics, the overweight, and blacks are higher risk groups for salt being linked to blood pressure, but for the large majority of people there is no association.
Right - genetics (and even epigenetics) play a large role. There are SNP's (single nucleotide polymorphisms) that can make a huge difference in some cases!
All of these broad-brush health advice "rules" are going to seem very quaint when we have massively-available cheap sequencing and you can go to a doc once a
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The existence of stressors is not necessarily bad. How you deal with stress is more important.
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http://www.psmag.com/navigation/health-and-behavior/truth-wont-admit-drinking-healthy-87891/
Even women who drink 6 drinks per day have lower overall mortality than teetotalers.
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Just about everything that is bad for you today is being negated a few years later. Can't find the link today, but at one point "research" showed that jeans were responsible for higher risk of cancer. So I will just continue to live my life and enjoy it to the fullest. If something kills me, at least I had a good time.
I remember that one...I was in middle school at the time. In response, I refused to wear denim for a couple years until I realized that it really didn't make any sense sometime in high school.
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Just about everything that is bad for you today is being negated a few years later. Can't find the link today, but at one point "research" showed that jeans were responsible for higher risk of cancer. So I will just continue to live my life and enjoy it to the fullest. If something kills me, at least I had a good time.
I think you might be alluding to the two theories about jeans and cancer.
One theory was that azo-dyes( commonly used in the pigments of cheap denim jean brands and leather products) might emit cancer causing aromatic amines. Basically this "research" led to a partial ban on the use of certain AZO-dyes and it's likely that we are safer as a result. You can now wear jeans w/o worrying about that problem at least.
The other theory was that wearing tight jeans (or other tight pants in general) seems to be corre
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Journalists are at fault, but they're not the only ones. See PHD Comics [phdcomics.com].
The research might have said "people who wear tight pants have a 1.2% greater risk of cancer given this study and these error parameters." After the study passed through the various layers of reporting, though, it turned int
Water Retention? (Score:2)
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You can imagine lots of things (and please, keep it to yourself). Whether or not you would be correct is another thing.
No, you're not correct in this instance. It's complicated
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Re:Water Retention? (Score:4, Interesting)
not true. Just avoid crap that comes in a box, can, or plastic bag and you are golden.
Fresh meat, veggies, fruits, and grains have zero added salt. It's the lazy people's pre packaged crap that has salt dumped in by the truckload.
Oh and good Whiskey... That has very little salt in it.
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I'd add frozen veggies into there too. They have all of the advantages of fresh with a lower risk of spoilage.
Canned veggies, though, should be your last resort. Only use those when no other veggies are available.
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Societies with very low salt intake have low blood pressure
correlation
Societies with high salt intake have high blood pressure
correlation
Lowering an individual's salt intake lowers blood pressure.
If you are referring to an actual intervention study, I'd love to see it. For 99% of people eating a standard American diet, lowering salt intake will inevitably involve cutting out a bunch of processed, pre-packaged crap from their diet. Most likely if there was a reduction in blood pressure it was because of the sugar or trans fat that was inadvertently cut out along with the salt.
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People living in countries with a high salt consumption—such as Japan—also tend to have high blood pressure and more strokes. But as a paper pointed out several years later in the American Journal of Hypertension, scientists had little luck finding such associations when they compared sodium intakes within populations, which suggested that genetics or other cultural factors might be the culprit.
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societies with *high industrialization* have higher blood pressure, salt doesn't matter.
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Or the lifestyle in the Amazon involves a great deal more exercise than the lifestyle in Japan.
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Societies where most people die before they get old have a lower incidence of age-related diseases.
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Hmm and if you fart, your blood pressure decreases? Because it is obvious that that compressed gas in bowels was getting your 'generally more pressurised'? There can be even a correlation between holding your fart in public getting your blood pressure higher ("Not now, not now, she will think I'm horrible").
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beans beans....
Theory versus tested facts (Score:2)
But it does help with water retention, right? And you would imagine that as the body retained more water it would become generally more pressurised?
As I understand it, that is a big part of the basis of the theory behind controlling sodium in heart patients. Osmotic gradient controlled through reduced sodium. Good sounding theory. However just because that sounds sensible doesn't mean it actually matters in medical outcomes. The human body is complicated and sometimes good sounding theories turn out to be completely incorrect. This appears to be one of those good sounding but false theories.
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You would think sometime in the last few centuries someone would of bothered to get a few people together, control their food intake, adjust salt intake, and see what happened. If we are studying water retention, and its effect it could be a short-term study of around a week.
No pun intended, but (Score:2)
Re:No pun intended, but (Score:4, Informative)
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Stress? (Score:5, Insightful)
I can tell you from personal experience having been a physical fitness health nut and also having gone through prolong periods of enormous stress that the two are undeniably linked. When you're under stress, you have fight or flight response. Several chemicals such as cortisol and adrenaline are produced in your body. When you're under chronic stress, you have this type of constant sense of this. It depletes resources in your body differently than when you're relaxed. It also causes you to store more body fat because when we were in the wild the environment stress response could be associated with food scarcity.
The time in my life when I was in the best shape of my life was when I was under the least amount of stress. I had low blood pressure, cholesterol, LDL/HDL, triglycerides, everything. My GP was cheering me on.
Get your stress under control and focus on having a healthy lifestyle and everything else will sort itself out. The problem in America is that we are a culture that pushes inordinate amounts of stress on our citizens. Where UK citizens would take a month long holiday every year because of the generous vacation time afforded by most European countries, the United States doesn't guarantee any paid vacation or sick time. And then we wonder why compared to other countries our citizens are significantly more tired, burnt out and less healthy.
Re:Stress? (Score:5, Insightful)
The problem is the only way to reduce stress is to tell the boss to stuff the job up his rear end, and go live on a homestead in the woods.
Although my stress went way down by simply no longer reading or listening to the news.
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It's worse than that (Score:2)
Even US worker bees that do have a fair amount of vacation time available to them rarely dare take even 5 days at a time off. Why? The not unfounded fear that some bean-counter or your PHB will start thinking, 'hey, maybe we don't need the guy on vacation AT ALL'. So even while on vacay, we sufferers of
But but... (Score:2)
those scientists were certain that salt was evil, bad, bad, harmful! Don't blow up my world view like this! Whenever the scientific community says something is so, it is so!
Eat real foods, mostly veg, not too much (Score:5, Insightful)
Way too many fad conclusions come and go in science, and especially with food. Eggs are bad, eggs are good, fat is bad, fat is good, carbs are good, carbs are bad, resveritol cures all, resveritol no better than placebo, Dr. Oz is a genius, Dr. Oz is a pocklining schill....
In the end it seems that if you wait about 10 years almost every headline on health gets contradicted, then thar contradiction gets at least qualified another 10 years after that.
Nothing so far has done better than simply trying to aim for eating plenty of real food with moderation on the highly processed stuff, and moderation on the calorie dense stuff.
The one thing about salt is that it does make stuff tasty, often the highly processed stuff, making it easy to overdo it. Avoiding salt sort of automatically helps one to cut out the heavily processed foods.
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Yes and no. Salt in this case is not the direct cause of High blood pressure but is an indirect factor. Salt can cause weight gain which directly affects BMI.
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>Salt can cause weight gain which directly affects BMI.
Do you have any data to support your claim? It's new to me and I have been paying attention.
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Actually you are correct. It's a miss understand by most people including myself. The salt itself only causes temporary bloating but it comes down to what contains salt. Most salty foods are usually packed with calories so as a rule of thumb diet clinics have often beaten salt on the head but the real problem is the food itself.
By the sounds of it the only real damage done by salt is kidney damage and that is if you eat too much of it.
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>By the sounds of it the only real damage done by salt is kidney damage and that is if you eat too much of it.
Actually too little salt will kill you. Too much salt (in the normal range of dietary input) has no detectable detrimental effect. A 10 ton block of salt on your head will kill you, providing you're in a suitable strong gravitational field.
Any claim I've seen of salt causing kidney damage has been thoroughly debunked.
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Salt does not cause weight gain.
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You are correct. It is a miss conception that I fell into.
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Dr. Oz has always been a shill hiding behind his credentials to tout scam artists by proxy.
The anti-salt propaganda has as much basis as the "wisdom" of drinking eight glasses of water a day. It became a thing everyone "knows" is true without questioning if there is any factual support. Nobody has ever demonstrated a mechanism for how salt intake causes heart disease. All you ever get is a lot of hand waving and vague statistics collected from people who already have advanced CV disease.
Short of drinking ex
Ding-Ding (Score:2)
Bingo. Processed foods are basically built out of salt and high levels of carbohydrates, which is just a fancy way of saying 'do you want a large order of diabetes with that'?
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This would be sort of a que sera sera thing except for the pervasive role of government today coupled with the speed of information. The impact of a fad-belief on a single population will normally be along a distribution curve, probably directly relateable to how much it contradicts 'current' or 'conventional' wisdom: ...with the end result being a distribution of results. If over time i
- some will believe it wholeheartedly and take it as gospel
- some will guardedly believe it
- some will reject it
They ran with a hypothesis (Score:4, Interesting)
This is not actually news though it's one more study on the pile. My wife is a physician and her instructors in med school pointed out that the relationship between salt and high blood pressure was based on correlations, not a causal chain. Basically it was a logical hypothesis that people started acting upon before it was ever established as fact. A lot of patients with high blood pressure problems (apparently - I'm not a doctor) have issues relating to osmotic gradients and other biological functions where salt is involved. So the theory went that by controlling sodium you could help control these problems. A good theory. But a good theory isn't a necessarily fact and it sounds like a lot of medical effort went into controlling sodium before anyone actually could test to see if it really mattered. Apparently the answer is turning out to be that it doesn't matter nearly as much as we thought.
Oblig XKCD [xkcd.com]
The Way It Works (Score:3)
Being in the midst of trying to control mine, here is a basic explanation provided by my Endocrinologists with some help from Wikipedia.
It all comes down to the Renin–angiotensin system. [wikipedia.org]
When the Kidneys think they don't have enough fluid volume to do their job, they send out signals that ultimately come back to themselves, causing them to retain salt and ditch potassium. Water, naturally, follows the salt and results in increased blood volume and subsequently, pressure. That's why many BP meds contains diuretics.
Too much salts mucks up all the complex feedback mechanisms.
Something that is apparently under diagnosed is a condition called Aldosteronism, where the adrenal glands make too much of a hormone called aldosterone, a primary messenger in this cycle. Aldosterone levels are not part of the standard blood workup done by your average family physician and diagnosing the condition requires a special, hours long process. It's is kind of a Zebra in diagnostic terms but is looking more and more like a horse.
So if you are afflicted with High BP and you're not having much luck controlling it, ask your doctor about aldosterone levels. High BP that is a result of this condition is more dangerous in the long term, but possibly curable by suppressing the aldosterone or removing one of the adrenal glands.
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Science at its best (Score:2)
The debate on this issue is far from over, and it'll take years to sort out all the contradictory evidence.
Once again, science is reduced to debate and belief. Medicine is rife with these sorts of "schools of thought"(*), it's almost as bad as economics. This is not the "more refined theory supplants approximate theory" that one finds in, for example, physics. It's "yeah, this looks good and makes sense, so we're 'gonna go with it" science.
This is what allows vested interests to decry science in favor of their own agenda. Who is the average person supposed to trust when scientists keep making and overturning bad
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Once again, science is reduced to debate and belief. Medicine is rife with these sorts of "schools of thought"(*), it's almost as bad as religion.
There. Fixed it for you..
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Stop confusing media reports, scientist, and Doctors.
The problem is reporting on science is horrid. So 'hey this study contradicts these other studies' becomes the head line, people start assuming it rendered the previous studies moot.
YOU're look show a sever lack of understand of how science works.
Are you saying when a guy claims to find a thing all medical treatments should just jump on board?
"dozens more are easy to find"
doubtful. More likely dozens of things that fit you bias because they take time to c
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Confusion, even at the CDC (Score:3)
The problem is that "high blood pressure" refers to two different things: 1. your blood pressure is above the normal range (120/70) at a given time and 2. you have chronic hypertension - your blood pressure is *always* above the normal range. Eating a bunch of salt can temporarily raise your blood pressure due to water retention but there's never been any evidence that this temporary effect has any long-term effects. Chronic hypertension is normally caused by poor health habits, particularly in regards to having excess weight. Eating salt has nothing to do with it.
I deal with this all the time because my wife the RN was always taught in school that eating too much salt leads to "high blood pressure". Well, yes, by definition "1" above. But that's a temporary condition and there's no evidence that it's bad for you. It took me 10 years to "unteach" her this little factoid, and I still have to deal with her telling the kids to not eat too much salt "because it's bad for you."
The only way to solve this long term is to use only the term "chronic hypertension" to refer to the chronic condition.
It's a small study (Score:2)
There was an increase in hypertension
there are many other study's that show there is a link.
Too much salt has other effects beside blood pressure, so to tie this to the CDC report seem disingenuous.
Mod JMS up (Score:3)
Bring me more of these... Salted. I work better with salt.
Did you know that in the 20th century they actually thought that salt was bad for you?
Listen to the animals I say. The lion will sit down with the lamb to share the salt lick.
Good enough for them, good enough for me.
Max Eilerson, Crusade, 1999
Old news, really (Score:2)
The link between salt and blood pressure is pretty clearly not the one your Dr. tells you, and this has been known for a really long time. Even the first study to show the "link" turns out to be bunk science:
http://www.stat.berkeley.edu/~... [berkeley.edu]
More recent meta studies have shown that about as many papers find a positive link as a negative link between blood pressure and salt - yes, eating more salt can lower your blood pressure (or, more likely, it's all just noise). Look it up on Pubmed if you want to read al
Personalized medicine... and nutrition (Score:4, Interesting)
Yeah, much of what we know is being overturned. Some of the disinformation was probably created by the food companies that wanted to make cheaper food. Back in the 70's we were told that fat was bad, and so all these processed foods got lots of extra sugar instead. Now we find out that sugar is bad and you need to consume more of the right fats. We're also starting to see that this "food pyramid" they taught us about should be basically inverted. The reason for the food pyramid is more to do with cost (grains are cheap) than nutrition.
Today, we know a hell of a lot about the impact of genetics, microbiotic flora, and many other things that affect individuals differently. For instance, many people have some mild sensitivities to various food proteins, although no always enough to notice more than some unexplained lethargy unpredictable times after eating certain foods. Of course, for some people, it's bad, like those with celiac disease.
Here's an interesting one: Apparently, about 10% of the population (US or world, I'm not sure) has a homozygous MTHFR C677T mutation. These people cannot convert folic acid (which is artificial anyway) or folinic acid (found in lots of vegetables) into methylfolate. As a result, these people suffer from massive B9 deficiencies (which indirectly causes others, like trouble absorbing B12). Moreover, it's not just that folic acid and folinic acid are not useful to them; they're functionally poison, interfering with the normal function of the methylation cycle. So these people need to take large quantities of methylfolate and cut out certain "healthy" vegetables. They also have to cut out "enriched" foods. We're starting to see a correlation between health problems increasing in these people and the mid-90's FDA mandate to enrich certain foods with Folic Acid. Lovely.
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Then you just conveniently forget about the last time someone provided you with evidence. You just got through making this exact same argument, and someone dumped a ton of evidence on you [slashdot.org]. This is evidence you could easily have found yourself, and yet you repeatedly use the burden of proof to ignore the facts you've already seen presented.
How many times do you expect someone else to present the evidence to you?
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That "point" you make, though, is essentially an argument from ignorance. "I haven't looked at the evidence, thus it's not true" is a good way to be wrong a lot.
Action sometimes before evidence (Score:5, Interesting)
This is one of the many examples of why I don't care about consensus opinion. Show us evidence, or go away.
Fair enough. Do you have sufficient expertise that you are able to interpret the evidence? Is the evidence clear? Is the evidence properly gathered and analyzed? Do we have enough evidence to draw firm conclusions or merely enough to nudge the direction of inquiry? Will the patient die before you can get conclusive evidence?
Fact is that the human body is complicated and sometimes a good sounding theory is the best we have to go on. A lot of diagnosis are basically well informed probabilistic guesses because we don't completely understand the underlying disease process. Sometimes you have to act before you can be certain of your case. For instance if you have a bacterial infection it can take days to culture the infectious organism and the patient can die before you get a definitive answer. So the doctor has to take an educated guess before he has the evidence. Sometimes a consensus opinion is the best we can do.
What people miss about consensus opinions is why they matter. What a consensus is NOT useful for is as evidence proving or disproving a theory about physical phenomena. A consensus IS useful for as evidence against the (political) argument that there are substantially conflicting opinions when there in fact are not. A consensus is useful for establishing standard of care [wikipedia.org]. A consensus is (sometimes) useful for protection against legal liability.
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Well stated. Maybe if I had taken more time to clarify my point, it would have helped my case. When someone says that 4 out of 5 dentists recommend Crest, I'm going to consider the source, and at least do a little homework before buy some. When my mother had spinal surgery a week ago to have four vertebrae fused, all the decisions were left up to me. Am I qualified?...hell no, but I was able to spend enough time researching the surgery (there were options), surgeon, hospital, etc. to help determine what
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I would mod you up. I don't see why they can't simply test the hypothesis by feeding some animals or people more salt. Easiest thing to test ever.
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Most things you eat don't cause increased blood pressure but can increase your weight which = higher BMI which according to this article is the main cause of high blood pressure.
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My physiology professor explained it to me years ago. There's two reasons. First, we're told to cut salt not because salt is bad, but because we eat shitty food filled with salt. Telling people to avoid salt is easier than telling them to avoid bad foods.
Yeah, that's what I did. Avoided salt and went for the carbs instead. Now I've both high blood pressure AND am type 2. Worked great. Protein, often high in salt, or carbs. Choose your poison.