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Is salt bad for us? In just the past few months researchers have published seemingly contradictory studies showing that excess sodium in the diet leads to heart disease, reduces your blood pressure, or has no effect at all. We called Scientific American advisory board member Marion Nestle, a professor of nutrition, food studies, and public health at New York University and the author of Food Politics, to help parse the latest thinking regarding salt and heart health.
[An edited transcript of the interview follows.]
I understand this area is controversial.
Hugely.
Could you take us through some of the controversy?
If you talk to any kidney specialist or anybody working on hypertension they will tell you that the first thing they do is try to lower the amount of salt their patients are eating because it helps with blood pressure control. But if you do a clinical trial where you try to put large amounts of people on a low-salt diet, you just don't see much difference between the people who say they eat a lot of salt and the people who say they don't eat a lot of salt. In clinical trials the relationship doesn't show up.
Why not?
Two reasons: One that it's impossible to put a population of people on a low-salt diet. Roughly 80 percent of the salt in the American food supply is in foods before people eat them—either in processed food or in restaurant food. Because so much salt is added to the food supply and because so many people eat out, it's impossible to find a population of people who are eating a low-salt diet. They basically don't exist.
In the one comparative epidemiological study they did some years ago—the Intersalt study—they managed to find two populations of people in remote areas of the jungle someplace who weren't eating a lot of processed foods and who weren't eating in restaurants. They were on a low-salt diet, and they never developed hypertension.
So in that trial did they put one group on a high-salt diet and put one on a low-salt diet?
No, no, no. It wasn't a comparative trial. They just looked at the amount of salt that populations were eating and the amount of hypertension that they had. Only in these two populations were there very low rates of hypertension. With everybody else, the salt intake was so high that they couldn't see any difference between high and higher.
So except for people living in the jungle somewhere, there aren't any populations on Earth that are eating a low amount of salt?
Not anymore. Maybe we used to be, but not anymore. We have a global food supply, so it's impossible to do a really careful study.
What's the other issue?
Not everybody responds to a low-salt diet. There's a proportion of people in the population who are sensitive to salt—if you lower their intake of salt, then their blood pressure goes down. There's another (probably larger) percentage of the population who doesn't respond. They are people who can eat as much salt as they want and still their blood pressure is low.
So you have this curious anomaly where whenever you do a clinical trial you get these complicated, difficult-to-interpret results that don't show much of an effect. But everybody who works with patients who have hypertension think they do better [on a low-salt diet]. And every committee, body and group that has ever in my lifetime considered whether salt has anything to do with hypertension says, "yes," and has recommended salt reduction as a public health measure. That's the curious situation that we are in.
There's one other wrinkle and has to do with people's taste for salt. Campbell's soup, for example, just announced yesterday that [they] can't sell low-sodium soups and so they're adding salt back. And part of the reason they can't sell it is that if you're on a high-salt diet, food that isn't salty tastes terrible to you. And if you're on a low-salt diet it takes three to six weeks to get accustomed to being on a low-salt diet, and then everything you eat tastes salty. And so the more salt in the food supply the more salt people need to bring the flavor you associate with salt. That complicates things, too.
So from a public health standpoint, if you want to deal with the percentage of the population that seems to be extremely responsive to a low-salt diet, what you want to do is get the sodium level in the food supply as low as you can. And that makes the people who sell salty food go nuts. And it makes the people who like salty foods go nuts. They think the food tastes bland. And so there are different stakeholders in this system who have very different views, and that accounts for the level of passion, I think, in a situation where the science is murky.
Couldn't you just make the case that people should eat fewer processed foods?
Well what about restaurants? I'm a food professional. I eat out professionally.
Well chefs need to make their food taste good—otherwise people won't go to their restaurant.
No, they need to make the food taste good by their standard. And chefs, because they're dealing with a great deal of salt in their food, tend to raise the sodium level. It just goes up and up and up and up. As they get more used to a certain level of salt taste, it no longer tastes salty to them and they have to raise it. So the pressure is to raise the salt in the food supply. And reducing it is very difficult.
So you advocate regulation to limit the amount of salt in restaurants?
Yeah, I do. Certainly for processed food. I think everybody would be healthier if they ate less salt. You can always add salt if you don't think it's salty enough, whereas I can't take it away if it's presented to me. And that's the dilemma. And the ferocity of the arguments gets into the whole question of personal responsibility and "nanny state" and all of these other enormous debates that really don't get at the public health question. And the public health question is hard to resolve because the science is really difficult to do.
Couldn't you imagine a study where you look at sodium levels in urine, which is a direct measure of salt intake, and correlate that with hypertension?
Yeah they've done that, and they don't see any difference in hypertension rates. The reason is that the baseline [level of salt intake] is so high that it doesn't make any difference. To suggest that people get down to 1,500 milligrams a day—the recommended level—would be really really hard, and that level may be too high. And it's unclear that that's the right level because you can't do a really decent dose response, and because people vary so much.
Will there ever be a good study?
I don't know!
Is it possible that this represents the limits of science? It's black hole event horizons and salt intake?
It may be. It very well may be. Or the science that we have is completely adequate and we already have the answer. I was once at a sodium meeting at which there were a bunch of statisticians. And I left with the statisticians and they said that "anyone who thinks that salt has anything to do with hypertension is delusional." And that was on the basis on the clinical trials that show so little. And yet every single committee that has dealt with this question says, "We really need to lower the sodium in the food supply." Now either every single committee that has ever dealt with this issue is delusional, which I find hard to believe—I mean they can't all be making this up—[or] there must be a clinical or rational basis for the unanimity of these decisions.
But that's the thing—these committees should be able to point to the evidence that supports their recommendations. But they seem to rely so much on anecdote and individual experience.
Or on some clinical trials that everybody argues about. Everybody argues about every clinical trial no matter what the conclusion. So I find the whole thing completely fascinating. I don't think anybody can underestimate the difficulty of doing nutritional research. Because people aren't eating just sodium. They're eating sodium in food. And it may be that high-sodium diets are a marker for some other things in the food supply or it may be that the physiological differences are so profound that you just don't get clean results. That human variation is so great. I don't know the answer to that. I just know it works for me. That's anecdotal. With an "n" of one.
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36 Comments
Add CommentBut what about the effects of eating unhealthy as we age or on other disease processes we have genetic predispositions to? Should we not consider salt to be just one more unhealthy food that we should avoid or cut back on?
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisSalt, like all things, has a balance that we each need to find. We cut down on salt and feel better. Less heavy feeling and our joints don't hurt anywhere as much. You can't really taste the food if there's too much salt..
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisAs a dieter, I know that too many calories absolutely definitely lead to dangerous obesity. Yet most low calorie foods don't taste very good without salt. So one is much less likely to stick to a low calorie diet which is also low sodium, the food becomes mostly unpalatable.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisIt's better to go low calorie, which has proven benefits and is do-able, than low calorie and low salt.
There should be no public health money wasted on sodium restriction. It should all go to advertising the benefits of reduced calories.
Besides the high variability in sodium sensitivity among individuals, a further issue playing a role on the final outcome of sodium levels on blood pressure is the potassium intake. Potassium will balance partly the effects of sodium. Therefore, for the same person, having the same sodium intake, the proportion of potassium-rich vegetables in the total diet may determine the final physiological effects of sodium. An interesting paper pointing in this direction:
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to this"Sodium and Potassium Intake and Mortality Among US Adults: Prospective Data From the Third National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey". Yang et al 2011. Archives of Internal Medicine 171 (13) 1183-1191
Perhaps, as a compromise, one could just eat less rather than relying on low calorie but high salt food.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisThis would reduce calories and salt at the same time.
Simon.
Prof. Nestle neglected to mention that the "two populations of people in remote areas of the jungle someplace," actually the Yanomamo and Xingu, who eat 500 mg sodium or less per day, also have the lowest life expectancy on earth. It is because they have chronically elevated renin/aldosterone levels brought on by low salt intakes. So, they die young with low blood pressure - that's considered a good thing? That's what Professor Nestle would have all Americans do?
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisIf anyone took the trouble to read the Dietary Recommended Intakes (DRIs) for Electrolytes they would immediately see that the evidence demonstrates that once we get anywhere below 3,300 mg sodium per day, our renin/aldosterone levels start to rise dramatically. The deliberate disregard of this information by the authors of the DRIs and the subsequent Dietary Guidelines is at the center of our misunderstanding of the salt and health issue.
I do not know of another health issue where consumers have been so mistreated by the public health agencies, consumer advocacy groups and academic talking heads as the salt and health debate. It has been regarded as a polemic, rather than as an issue of science and health. The salt reduction advocates believe that their positions and the institutions they belong to gives them the privilege to pass off their opinions as an ersatz replacement for evidence. Unfortunately, the media has not been doing their job of demanding actual evidence in lieu of opinion. What has happened to healthy cynicism?
Until a large clinical trial is carried out, the issue will remain potentially hazardous if people like Prof. Nestle and the current administration get their way and salt is either regulated or reduced through political pressure. The US population has never consumed a level as low as 2,300 mg sodium per day. Nor has any other large population in the world (with the exception of some low longevity rainforest people). If this comes to pass, the entire US population will end up being the lab rats in the largest clinical trial ever run, without their knowledge of consent. (How do the advocates sworn to protect consumer rights feel about that?) The DASH sodium trial amply demonstrated that low sodium trials can indeed be carried out whenever anyone has the will to. The reason that all the sodium reduction advocates don’t want a large clinical trial on the impact of low-sodium diets on health outcomes is simply because they are afraid of the results.
We have got to start using, rather than abusing, science.
One of the biggest problems I see in all this is that the trials try to identify general cause and effect. And they are constantly being published in all these health magazines as the latest authoritive word for everyone to follow. The truth is... everyone is different.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisMy wife read how bad cholesterol was and took everything out of my diet that had choleserol in it. No more eggs, no more shrimp, no more of a lot of the foods I enjoyed. Several years later, I had health problems and the doctors found that my cholesterol and triglycerids were very low (both under 100). I had to get a stent put into my heart to clear a blockage caused by my "good" cholesterol being to low. Turns out that my family always had cholesterol that was lower than average. The doctor speculated that my wife may have induced my heart problem while trying to do the "healthy" thing.
I prefer to go to my doctor and have him run tests to see what it is that I need to control first. Changing your diet based on some test or generality can be a dangerous thing to do.
That said, I got used to a low sodium diet and I do not care for salty food. I just wish that the food industry would allow us to "season to taste" rather than forcing us to eat what they like. There will always be people who are sensitive to salt and they should not have to take a risk with their health just to be able to eat out occasionally.
I would agree with BillR that it would be nice if everyone had a choice. However, the food companies that make our processed foods answer to their shareholders and are required to be profitable. That is why Campbell's has just announced it is going to add more salt back to its soups - because their low-sodium soups were a disaster.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisBillR, bear in mind that almost as many people show a rise in blood pressure with low salt foods as people who show a drop in blood pressure, while most of us show no impact. (Something else Prof. Nestle forgot to mention, if she was aware of it.)
Although people have the choice to add back as much salt as they want, people also have a choice to avoid convenience foods and make all their foods from scratch.
As long as we expect to consume convenience foods from manufacturers, we have to accept their requirement to be profitable. Campbell's is an excellent example. After making a monumental effort in product formulation and advertising for low-salt products, their efforts failed. At least they tried - the public just didn't go along with it.
As I said, everyone should find out what affects them personally and not just change your diet or lifestyle on hear-say.... I do see a small correlation between eating salty food and my blood pressure but it is not something I would try to convince other people to control unless they also "did the experiment". And as long as my blood pressure does not go out of control, I do not worry about it. However, it IS a matter of taste for me. I personally do not care for salty foods and prefer to buy unsalted nuts or popcorn that I can season to my taste. I do add some salt but not in the high quantities that pre-salted foods normally come with.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisBut I do hate going to a restaurant and have to ask that they leave out the salt (which they often ignore) so I can add it myself. And my wife would not appreciate me telling her we cannot go out to eat on occasion because of the salt. She, by the way is very sensitive to the amount of salt as it does raise her bloodpressure rather quickly.
I wish more research was done on what affects the individual so that we can go to a nutritionalist to have our specific needs mapped out for us so we can keep ourselves balanced (if we so choose).
His last statement makes a key point:
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to this“That human variation is so great. I don't know the answer to that. I just know it works for me. That's anecdotal. With an "n" of one.”
Salt is an approved additive to food and according to the above it cannot be proved to cause us harm even when consumed in abundance.
Sodium laced foods are everywhere. Lowering the sodium in one brand of soup won’t help us reduce the amount of salt in our diets. And considering studies show we won’t like the taste anyway and we’ll either add our own salt or turn to alternative brands the FDA’s attempt to regulate salt is useless and fiscally irresponsible.
The FDA needs to stop expanding its regulatory net and focus where it matters. The FDA needs to leave salt, dietary supplements, energy drinks, movie theatre popcorn alone and focus it’s resources on the 2011 Food Safety and Modernization Act and keep tainted foods and risky drugs off our plates and out of our systems.
Terryfrma (great name btw!) that's interesting information about the Yanomamo and Xingu. Do you have a reference or source for that? At first reading it's a bit hard to accept that their lower life expectancy can be linked to sodium levels. It's not that I think it's false, but rather that I find it hard to believe that such a conclusion can be made in light of many confounding influences.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisWell, the Yanomamo are very prone to lethal violence, that could be partly responsible for the low longevity. Also, I don't think they're big on hygiene and modern medicine. I don't know about the Xingu.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisOn the other hand, the nations with the highest life expectancy use quite a lot of salt traditionally, from what I know about their traditional foods: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Life_Expectancy_by_Country
I know that Japan, Iceland, and Switzerland used to be heavy consumers of salt through their pickled and preserved foods. Switzerland for one example has long winters, and they relied to a large extent on cheeses, sauerkraut, hams, and sausages - all of which needed lots of salting to stay good, before the time of refrigeration. Interestingly, this might have been balanced by the very high potassium of potatoes. My father told me that they would buy fresh potatoes by the half ton during the autumn harvest, and they would stay edible until the spring.
My father has had Meniere's disease - salt affects his inner ear and throws off his balance, making him violently ill - for years, and therefore can only have 1/10 the amount of salt, per day, as a regular person. Why not use these people as a study population??
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisI've tried very hard to reduce salt, but it's extremely difficult, and I eat pretty healthily. You can't eat anything in a can. Low-sodium soup is a joke, because it's only low by the standards of regular soup, but it's still a sodium bomb. You can't eat out at all, even at places you thought may have been healthy, like Noodles, Inc. One Chipotle burrito can surpass your daily limit. For that matter you can't eat any pasta sauce unless you make it yourself with sodium-free tomatoes. You can't even eat bread unless you make it yourself--bagels and bread are sodium bombs. You can't eat cereal, because things like Chex that you thought was just corn is packed with sodium. The stuff has just become pervasive.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisWhat about animal studies? Are rats and chimpanzee's all on high sodium diets too?
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisThe sodium appetite in all animals is a well established phenomenon. In fact, it is used to control the consumption of cattle feed in feed lots. Feed lot animal feed is relatively expensive and the cattle love it, so salt is added to control the amount consumed. The more salt that is added, the less feed is consumed. The less salt added, the more feed will be consumed.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisThis begs a question regarding obesity. Will lower salt foods encourage greater consumption and exacerbate the obesity crisis?
The references on the Yanomamo can be easily found on the web. I used it as to counter the opinion (not evidence) that they are better off because of low salt consumption. The may have lower blood pressure, but the also have chronically high renin-aldosterone due to low salt. So if you are only looking at blood pressure you might think they are better off, but when you look at overall health outcomes, they are worse off.
That goes for everyone else. You can reduce blood pressure with exercise or by eating a Mediterranean-type diet and there will be no negative consequences. But if salt reduction is the chief strategy chosen to reduce blood pressure, there is the negative consequence of elevated renin aldosterone levels. Since these renin aldosterone levels are almost never checked by your doctor, they end up being the trojan horse of salt reduction.
As a scientist, if you're arguing against the statisticians, who generally don't have a dog in any race, you better have a damn good reason. And if you end your argument with "n of 1", you've lost.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisFrankly, we could probably eat less salt and be healthier. But balanced against caloric intake, like I've seen in many of the comments here, eat the salt. Metabolic disease is real and undeniable. Hypertension at more than 1 g Na/day... not so much.
But the taste for salt is relative. As the nutrition professor comments in the article.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisIf you make your food from scratch and don't add salt, you get used to it. It tastes fine, because you aren't eating any processed food that is salty.
If you add salt, everything starts to seem like it needs salt.
I eat a very lowfat vegan diet, made from scratch. For a while I did get into the habit of salting it a lot. I used to use fats to add flavor to food, and no salt, and I switched to no high-fat food, and a lot of salt.
But recently I decided to stop salting food. It seems to have some bad health effects. Although my blood pressure is fine, salt apparently increases blood pressure slowly and partly irreversibly over decades, and I don't want that to happen. And salt can cause osteoporosis.
And it's a pain to carry around a salt shaker and have to apply it to every little piece of food you eat. If you have the salt habit, a piece of food that you didn't diligently salt, tastes bad.
I suggest getting into spices. Like peppers, paprika, dried herbs. They can add lots of flavor, and some of them are good for you too.
There *is* a group of people who eat a low-salt diet: the people who've quit eating processed food, who make their food from scratch and don't salt it.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisThey could recruit a bunch of such people, follow them over a decade, getting some of them to salt their food and some of them not to. And see what happens in terms of blood pressure and heart health.
It would have to be people who follow a no-processed-food diet long term.
No, standard rat chow and chimpanzee's natural diets are low in salt.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisI looked into experiments with rats a bit. Dahl studied salt-caused hypertension in rats. He found that a very salty diet, something like the human equivalent of 50 gm/day, caused hypertension quickly in rats. I don't know if the rats' kidneys could eliminate that much salt.
But a major point confusing the issue is that the process of salt-caused hypertension has two components. There's a short-term effect of raising blood pressure. And a long-term effect, which may be irreversible, of a high-salt diet slowly raising blood pressure over decades.
So when people say low-salt diets don't necessarily help hypertension, that is likely because the damage of decades of eating a high-salt diet can't be immediately undone.
Actually excellent studies were done on sodium in Finland a couple of decades ago and had long-term medical records to back up the improvements[there are statistical research advantages to single payer medical care]. They developed what is called PanSalt or CardioSalt which has potassium added to balance out the sodium and legislatively required all processed foods and baked goods to use PanSalt. They cut their stroke and heart attack rate drastically from what had been the worst in the world. In more recent years the requirements of so-called free trade have introduced more high sodium foods into their supermarkets but their rates are still not as bad as when all their foods had extreme levels of sodium.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisLow calorie foods also tend to be high in potassium so one can add some sodium as long as K:Na is 3 or greater in the total diet. One can only do this in a practical sense by avoiding processed foods. It helps to use a diet planner like Kathleen's Diet Planner software as it does the math for you.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisLow salt recipes can be very tasty. Try just about anything at this website ---
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thishttp://www.megaheart.com/kit_recipes_index.html
It strikes me that the prison population may be a good study group for nutrition. They are a captive audience. They are cheap. They can opt in for extra privileges. And there are alot of them. It seems you should be able to do very exhaustive testing. Is there a reason this hasn't been done?
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to this(Reply to comment 18)
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisAnother vote for spices and herbs, which add strong flavour without fat, sugar or salt.
Concerning the salt levels people are used to, I think a slow, imperceptible decrease would work well. It's the sudden shock of the absence that makes us reject low-salt foods.
"PRIMORDIAL instincts that drive animals to seek out salt may be governed by the same mechanism that drives drug addicts to hunt down their fix." Salt or Cocaine...http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg21128215.300-salt-or-cocaine-a-fix-is-a-basic-instinct.html
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisVery interesting about Campbells soup giving up on the their low sodium option - maybe people are reading food labels for sodium and realizing even Campbells "low sodium" version was STILL too high!
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisNot only was the Campbell's "heart healthy" tomato soup too high in sodium, it was also packed with high fructose corn syrup. :P It had a K:Na of 1.7 which is why I still have a few cans of this in my pantry for snowed-in days. Not ideal but better than most other canned soups. My soup cups hold about the contents of the small can diluted so that would be 25gms of sugar[about the same as a caffeine-free Coke]. Corn syrup is the third ingredient after water and tomato paste. The fourth ingredient is wheat flour which many people avoid for various reasons. So this is a not very good soup but still it is "certified" by the American Heart Association?????
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisI have a recipe for Portuguese tomato soup that contains a little garlic simmered in olive oil, add some chopped onion, simmer a little longer, then add coarsely chopped (Roma) tomatoes. Simmer a little longer. Add enough water to cover completely and simmer an hour. If you like herbs, sprinkle on some thyme or marjoram. I use an immersible blender to puree it. Voila, a soup high in potassium, almost no sodium. No extra calories from flour, corn syrup. Delicious!! It can be frozen in small containers for later microwaving or heating. With a good slice of sunflowerseed bread it is lunch and better than anything Campbell's makes. If one adds slices of hard boiled egg it is also high protein.
Why western people eat more salt? Simple answer is in ancient and middle age they want to preserved meat for winter so they kept this meat in salt so meat remained fresh to eat in winter.That habit still lingering in psyche of western people.This is well known fact that habit never die.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisYes, we are animals of habit, and -(bar the legendary elephantine salt addicts somewhere in Africa) - we are the only animals to have invented 'pickling' practically all our food, with the result that we have our poor taste buds in a pickle! Pickled tongue (our own!) is on the daily menu for the rest of our natural life!
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisThe good Professor did not mention 'the elephant in the room': the physiologically proven addictive drug effect of salt in processed food.
Once our salt intake is out of balance (with our potassium intake, which is pitifully low anyway, because most of us don't eat enough raw vegetables), our body -like any other addict's body, tries to cope as as best as can, trying to dilute this extra salinity by way of the salivation ('salt lick') reflex setting in.
Hence the 'mouth-watering', 'moreish' effect of fast food!
To break this unhealthy habit, we have to enter a proper desalination program, by cutting down on our 'salt-lick' food. We can either go cold turkey, by cutting our sausages & hard cheeses altogether, or, as in the Yanchep Diet (youthevity.com) gradually replace cheese and butter with lemon, garlic, or gingery avocado etc.
After a few weeks, a natural, plant-based, herb-spiced menu will taste like never before,once we have regained the hi- fi quality of our taste buds!
The way to control your sodium intake is to cook your own food from raw ingredients. Raw fruit and vegetables, by the way, are a good source of potassium. It's the junk food diet, high in sodium and low in potassium, that send your blood pressure through the cieling.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisConcerning terryfrma's comments on the Yanomamo, I had thought their low life expectancy was linked to unceasing internicine warfare and a stonking intake of dangerous recreational alkaloids!
There was a study done by the US Military about 20years ago that indicated that the human body will only take in the amount of salt it requires and the rest is discarded.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisI am inclined to consider that there are too many theoretical scientists who think? they know everything, and forget that each human body is different in many ways, so no survey's can be 100% accurate.
I take exception to the author's statement, "Because so much salt is added to the food supply and because so many people eat out, it's impossible to find a population of people who are eating a low-salt diet. They basically don't exist."
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisPerhaps they should look harder. There are many individuals in the U.S. who do not eat processed or restaurant food as their primary food source. This invalidates this study immediately, in that a proper cross section of population was not used, or that multiple comparative studies were not conducted.
This is the issue with singular publications being proffered as conclusive. The general population read one paper or article and take it as gospel. This is misinformation.
What does Exodus88 mean by "the rest [of the salt] is discarded"? He cannot mean that it simply isn't absorbed from the gut. Were that the case, then we could all drink seawater and thrive. It *is* eliminated, of couse, but via the kidneys, and that causes physiological stress. We are evolved as savannah omnivores, ex forest frugivores, with a highish-potassium, lowish-sodium diet. Note that salt-licks are traditionally valued resources. Not potash-licks.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisLots of us cook at home, eat out only rarely and don't buy processed food. Even if we're only 5% of the population, surely a few thousand of us could be gathered for a test? Ms. Nestle says it's impossible, but has anyone studied the overall health of people who self-identify as non-processed-food eaters? We are out here... You can find us at farm stands, co-ops and the outer ring of the supermarket.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisWow! It sounds like cutting out cholesterol was a bad move! Have you ever considered a low GL diet? It's really healthy and not one of those "fad" diets. :)
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to this