Whoooooooooops!

It turns out that if you eat as little salt as recommended by "the experts," you could actually be increasing your risk of heart disease and other ailments.

[T]his eat-less-salt argument has been surprisingly controversial — and difficult to defend. Not because the food industry opposes it, but because the actual evidence to support it has always been so weak.

..."You can say without any shadow of a doubt," as I was told [back in 1998 while spending the better part of a year researching the state of the salt science] by Drummond Rennie, an editor for The Journal of the American Medical Association, that the authorities pushing the eat-less-salt message had "made a commitment to salt education that goes way beyond the scientific facts."

While, back then, the evidence merely failed to demonstrate that salt was harmful, the evidence from studies published over the past two years actually suggests that restricting how much salt we eat can increase our likelihood of dying prematurely. Put simply, the possibility has been raised that if we were to eat as little salt as the U.S.D.A. and the C.D.C. recommend, we'd be harming rather than helping ourselves.

...One could still argue that all these people should reduce their salt intake to prevent hypertension, except for the fact that four of these studies — involving Type 1 diabetics, Type 2 diabetics, healthy Europeans and patients with chronic heart failure — reported that the people eating salt at the lower limit of normal were more likely to have heart disease than those eating smack in the middle of the normal range. Effectively what the 1972 paper would have predicted.

...When several agencies, including the Department of Agriculture and the Food and Drug Administration, held a hearing last November to discuss how to go about getting Americans to eat less salt (as opposed to whether or not we should eat less salt), these proponents argued that the latest reports suggesting damage from lower-salt diets should simply be ignored. Lawrence Appel, an epidemiologist and a co-author of the DASH-Sodium trial, said "there is nothing really new." According to the cardiologist Graham MacGregor, who has been promoting low-salt diets since the 1980s, the studies were no more than "a minor irritation that causes us a bit of aggravation."

This attitude that studies that go against prevailing beliefs should be ignored on the basis that, well, they go against prevailing beliefs, has been the norm for the anti-salt campaign for decades. Maybe now the prevailing beliefs should be changed.

Maybe so.

But, of course, now the anti-salt shit is wrapped up in the OH NOES OBESITY CRISIS, so it's not very likely (ha ha my understatement!) that prevailing beliefs will change—unless, naturally, it's to somehow to make anti-salt crusading even less about health and even more about fat.

[Previously in Gary Taubes.]