The problem is that salt (and other minerals) is required to live. But we eat too much of everything (including salt).
It's not the salt that's killing us, it's the shitty diet, too-large portions, and lack of exercise. If we ate reasonable portions of well-prepared meals the salt wouldn't be a big deal. But no, instead we eat extra large portions of everything, way too much meat, starch, fat and salt, so all these food items get a bad rap because we can't simply moderate ourselves...
Since the answer is basically either A: "no good reason" or B: "I believe I have science on my side", this really isn't a good response to an article about how controversial the science is. Which science do you think you have? Why is it better than the other half of the science?
This is a generic reply to everybody jumping up to explain what the truth really is.
I agree that it's not a response that is constructive to the science at hand, but it's a fine response for an individual. Unless you want to obsess over having the perfect diet, you can have a diet that is 80% healthy with 20% of the focus if you just diversify your diet across many different sources. The only thing we really know about scientific knowledge is that it will continue to evolve.
Would "people ate less and suffered less heart diseases time ago?" qualify as C?
Of course this point has the same problem of lacking details. But recognizing "modern food" as a culprit is actually less overeaching than putting the blame on a single substance that has been used for centuries.
"Would "people ate less and suffered less heart diseases time ago?" qualify as C?"
No; that would fall under "no good reason". Are you sure people "ate less"? Given that we (think we) know that people of the past were also more active (although history is definitely on your side for that one), and how much more active people need to eat to sustain their activity, I would be completely unsurprised to learn that people in the past consumed more calories than the average American. You'd need to do quite a bit of science to nail this down.
Unless, of course, you've seen the relevant science, in which case it falls under B.
It's hard to escape from needing to have done science to really know what the problem is, and it's also hard to escape from the fact that all the science is really a great deal less clear than we've been led to believe by our government and public health organizations. It's clear we have problems; it's way less clear what the cause truly is. It also is reasonable to observe that you can "eat better" with less processed food, etc., and exercise is reasonably well established as helping, but why, exactly? We may speak in English of that as being one or two changes, but it's not; it's hundreds, thousands, perhaps even more changes, all at once. Which of them are relevant, and exactly how? Those questions are much less well answered. It also doesn't necessarily matter to you personally in the end. But it does mean that confident declarations about what is "really" the cause are poorly supported right now on all fronts.
I've been looking at this for many years too, and just about the only conclusions I've come to are A: less processed does seem better B: exercise does seem to be important but it's surprising how much debate about which types of exercise are good for what is still happening, again, despite what we've been led to believe and C: the consensus I was taught growing up in the 1980s is dead wrong in almost (but not quite) every detail, but that doesn't mean I know what is right.
There are still entire massive dimensions poorly explored by science; for instance, go look up the science on "intermittent fasting". One of the first things you ram into is that while there have been several studies on it, they all use the exact same schedule, which happens to be fairly unrealistic. No exploration of the space as a whole, just this one point, sampled over and over again. Does the schedule of your food intake matter? What's the best one? Science very nearly just shrugs at this question. Who knows what else we're missing?
Although not a perfect proxy, the USDA has tracked data for "food available for consumption" (an inventory based statistic) per capita per day since 1909. This makes it good for this question simply due to duration.
Charts with the data from 1909-2010 can be found here:
The kilocalorie availability per capita per day was pretty consistently in the 3100-3400 range until about 1976 or so. After 1976, the kilocalorie available per capita per day slowly creeps up until it reaches about 4000-4200 calories a day.
This metric is not perfect by any means, but I would say there's a high probability that this correlates to the United States consuming more food, for what it's worth.
It's honestly the one food metric with this particular dataset that stands out. The percentage of calories from sugars and sweeteners, sodium levels, and grain consumption seems consistent with the 1950s.
The only other data metric that stands out with to me (if this dataset can be inferred as a proxy of changes in the food industry) is a large rise in the percentage calories consisting of fat. Specifically, the "salad / cooking oils" rises from being 0.5% of calories available in 1909 to a whopping 15.1% of calories available in 2010.
Unless, of course, you've seen the relevant science, in which case it falls under B.
My point was that, even if not exactly science, basic facts are known. Yes, I'm sure people ate less in the past. I've seen the numbers and, to a certain extent, I've seen people changing their habits in my lifetime.
This is like a tide, while many studies are focusing in a few waves. That's what my point anyway.
I do see the connection between that and the ongoing discussion, but it's subtle and mostly caused by my careless use of terms. Let me fix it a little: the diet of our ancestors was mostly "slow" carbs and a modest amount of proteins, except if you have rich ancestors, that's it. Now there are cheap proteins and a lot of refined carbs that are the equivalent to a nuke for metabolism. So I should have said that heart diseases have raised while much has changed in diet but salt intake has probably decreased because of medical recomendations.
Yes - modern Western diet is much closer to what pharaohs with all their deceases have eaten, rather than what a typical person experienced, say, 100 years ago.
You mean millenia. There's evidence of people harvesting salt dating back as far as archaeology takes us. Salt mines dating over 8000 years ago. Ancient observers writing about the salt trade 2500 years ago. And so on.
The later seems tongue in cheek, isn't it? But the former is actually true. I guess cancer is now a bigger cause of mortality just because we live longer and so we have more time to get it, instead of dying earlier of another, now tractable, illness. I don't think raise in heart diseases can be explained just by that effect.
Salt is a problem for people with hypertension or related blood pressure conditions. And there's a strong correlation between cutting down salt and reducing your BP in those cases. Especially since it's safer than just increasing some BP medication doses.
Also, your exercise and diet suggestions effectively reduce salt in your body. Less food, less salt. More exercise and more water means salt gets removed from your body faster.
I'm not trying to say salt is universally bad, but I'm pretty sure no one should literally swallow spoonfuls of the stuff either.
On cannot eat too much starch. Try to eat only potatoes or rice prepared without any oil/butter for couple of weeks with perhaps few vegetables or fruits in addition with any amount of salt or herbs for taste. You learn that it is impossible to overeat as normal appetite controlling signals kicks in and limit the consumed amount. One does not gain weight on such diet and likely even loose some.
Similarly with sugar. Try to drink plain water with sugar (not tee/coffee or anything else that bring own taste). It is just impossible to drink too much of it. In fact for many people such plain water with sugar is a useful trick to limit appetite and loose weight.
So it is not the amount of what is eaten but rather something in food or food composition that makes people overweight.
As regarding exercising consider that doing high-intensity strength training for 15 minutes once per week is often enough to get into shape. So again, it is not the amount but rather the details of the exercise that are important.
> So it is not the amount of what is eaten but rather something in food or food composition that makes people overweight.
> As regarding exercising consider that doing high-intensity strength training for 15 minutes once per week is often enough to get into shape. So again, it is not the amount but rather the details of the exercise that are important.
You make some wild claims here. Do you have anything to back that up, or are you just hypothesizing?
For the starch just search for effects of starch diet. For sugar water, see en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Shangri-La_Diet. For high-intensity training, see www.bodybyscience.net - the blog there links quite a few medical studies about high intensity training. My personal experience or experience of my relatives confirms this.
Sugar water tastes horrible. I'd have to be literally starving before I'd choose sugar water over plain water. This doesn't mean that it's impossible to overconsume. It just means that no one wants to consume this.
I'd probably lose weight drinking sugar water because it would kill my appetite by inducing nausea.
The same applies to your starch comment. Yeah, it's hard to overconsume plain rice if you eat it with no sauce and no salt. Not because it's better for you, but because it's unpleasant. It'd also be hard to overconsume pure lard if that were all you could eat. It'd get old immediately and you'd eat enough to survive and not much more because it's so unpleasant.
With no negative impacts on health one can eat just rice or potatoes with salt or herbs as one please for months with no weight gain unless one is rather lean. That shows that there is food where body feedback loop works nicely preventing over-consumption without any conscious limits on the amount of food.
"No negative impacts on health" is a bold claim. If you eat nothing but rice (with salt[1] and herbs) for months, you'll end up with a number of vitamin deficiencies. You'll also end up critically deficient in certain amino acids eventually, because rice does not provide a complete protein profile. Weight is not the only factor in overall health.
I'll point out that Atkins makes similar claims for a fat-heavy diet. In essence, they claim that if you cut carbs entirely, you can eat as much as you want. In reality, people on Atkins tend to just eat less because the diet gets so monotonous.
[1] I misread initially and thought you said no salt. Sorry about the confusion there.
Rice is amino-deficient only for rats, it has all 8 essential for human amino-acids. But I should wrote "brown unpolished rice" as that contains much more minerals.
> Rice is a good source of protein and a staple food in many parts of the world, but it is not a complete protein: it does not contain all of the essential amino acids in sufficient amounts for good health, and should be combined with other sources of protein, such as nuts, seeds, beans, fish, or meat.
I wrote that too quickly. Brown rice has sufficient variety of protein so a person can survive on diet of rice and juices for many months, see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rice_diet
Every time you add another comment you modify the proposed diet....
But anyway, key points on the rice diet:
> patients were hospitalized for several weeks at the beginning of treatment.
This was a diet specifically created for people who were otherwise going to die. It was never promoted as a healthy diet for normal individuals.
> white rice, sugar, fruit, fruit juices, vitamins and iron
So not just rice. Not just rice and fruit juice. But also whole fruit plus vitamins and iron to account for the fact that just eating rice will kill you.
Also, not brown rice at all. You're just pulling in random stuff to try to support your wild claims.
> Kempner described his diet as "a monotonous and tasteless diet which would never become popular.... Kempner's only defense of its use was the fact that “it works,” and that the diet was preferable to the alternative of certain death"
Sounds like a great endorsement of the diet from its creator.
I do not propose a diet (and I should not diverged into the health - that was a mistake indeed). What is important is that with potato, rice and other starchy food without added oil one does not need to consciously limit the amount consumed while staying on normal weight despite apparently excessive calories.
So the comment that started this thread proposing that people consume too much is not true. It is just that people consume too much of wrong stuff. The solution is to limit bad items so normal body feedback loops work, not the amount of food.
This is not true. If you only eat potatoes, you will wind up deficient in B vitamins. It doesn't take much to make potatoes a good basis for a diet. This is why the Irish Potato Famine was a big deal: Large families with small farms were mostly growing potatoes to keep everyone fed. But, no, you cannot live on potatoes alone with just salt or herbs without ending up deficient.
All likely true but that's not what this is about. I think it is a concern that in many issues of public interest, some scientists are much too ready to adopt strongly polarized views and thereby operate with an aggressive agenda which precludes a cool appraisal of data which fails to reinforce their 'party line'.
So science is biased? Of course it is, any observer who pays attention for more than a few years knows it is.
When you're looking for a specific phenomenon, you're more likely to find supporting evidence. For example, if my hypothesis is that a crow can use a television remote, I'm going to stick a crow in a room with a television remote, and the crow will likely mash enough buttons that I can convince you it's true. And then of course there's statistics, and the famous saying which goes with it.
Maybe the real problem is that humans are biased, we're not really looking for the truth, we're looking for confirmation of beliefs we develop for whatever reason.
We've always been far better at beating the natural world into submission than observing it anyway...
It's not the salt that's killing us, it's the shitty diet, too-large portions, and lack of exercise. If we ate reasonable portions of well-prepared meals the salt wouldn't be a big deal. But no, instead we eat extra large portions of everything, way too much meat, starch, fat and salt, so all these food items get a bad rap because we can't simply moderate ourselves...