Saturday 14 May 2011

Sick quitters?

Robin Hanson points to new work showing that folks on low salt diets are more likely to die than folks eating normal or high amounts of salt. The study follows over 3600 people for about eight years and controls for baseline health correlates like blood pressure, BMI, smoking, and being on blood pressure medication.

I still wonder though whether the "sick quitter" hypothesis raised as explanation for the alcohol J-curve (and thoroughly refuted in that case) might need to be checked. If a couple years after starting in the sample group, your doctor tells you to cut the salt from your diet because your blood pressure's blowing out and you then have a heart attack two years later despite having reduced salt intake, the finding could be spurious.

I'd need to check the actual JAMA paper to see how well they've ruled that out. Off campus access to gated resources is such a pain though.

Full disclosure: I eat a lot of salt. Sometimes, but rarely, I'll even eat a teaspoon of salt if the mood strikes me. BP's fine though. I tend to figure that evolution gave me a taste for salt for a damned good reason and that I'd be overthrowing the wisdom of 30,000 generations were I to hold back. I do compensate somewhat by eating a lot of potassium.

4 comments:

  1. I've got high blood pressure but limiting my salt intake doesn't seem to do nearly as much to lower it as keeping warm does.

    I like salt, but "a teaspoon of salt"? Ugh!

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  2. Off campus access to gated resources is such a pain though.

    It shouldn't be. There are lots of ways to do it, but I find the easiest is to set up google scholar to include links from the Otago library subcription (Preferences -> Library links -> search for Cant.). Puts and extra screen between you and the result, but no great hassle

    I tend to figure that evolution gave me a taste for salt for a damned good reason and that I'd be overthrowing the wisdom of 30,000 generations were I to hold back.

    Yes, but sadly organisms are adapted to the environment of their ancestors, and our environment is a little different than theirs.Moths have an instinct to fly towards light, which hasn't worked out so well since the invention of candles...

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  3. "I'll even eat a teaspoon of salt if the mood strikes me"...

    Don't let your life insurance provider read this post. ;-)

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  4. @David: Will try the Google Scholar fix, but all subscriptions require going through EZProxy link for the library, which often works poorly. It maybe it just has issues with Chrome.

    @Todd: BP fine. I match my salt with potassium.

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