Salt we were told to cut down on many years ago. Hypertension appeared to be the main reason. However, salt is an essential nutrient. We simply cannot live without it. Most of us did what we were told by the experts at the time that always knows what's best. Hasn't anyone noticed? We have more hypertension and countless other medical problems today that at any time in history. Much of this hypertension was of course blamed on smoking as is today just about any medical problem. Problem is, practically no one is smoking today, and we have a multi-billion dollar dependency on blood pressure medications that are known to have many dangerous side effects that most often require more drug intervention.

I've always been puzzled as to why when a person is rushed to the hospital in an emergency situation, before the medical staff even knows anything about the patient or why he or she is there, they usually begin an IV drip directly into the blood of a saline (salt) solution? Why would they do this if you had a stroke or heart attack perhaps caused by hypertension possibly brought on by a SALT overload in your diet? If your emergency was from accidentally ingesting rat poison, would they pump rat poison into your blood stream? But then, I'm not an expert - We must always listen to experts.

Sodium Chloride
A dash of sodium chloride, more commonly known as salt, is the culprit that the mainstream media and medical experts  claim we should stay away from. Maybe they’re right, but only because it’s not real salt. Common table salt (sodium chloride) has almost nothing in common with traditional rock or sea salt. If a food label lists salt or sodium chloride as an ingredient, that’s probably the bad stuff – it’s not real. It's highly processed and nutrition-less and filled with chemicals. 

Who suffers? Perhaps millions of people in countless ways.

Who profits? Big Pharma and their drug dealer Big Medical to the tune of billions annually on blood pressure control drugs that more and more medical professionals for years have been saying causes often a number of irreversible medical problems  most likely requiring more medical attention and of course more drugs.$

 

It is way past time to End the War on Salt

Most people today shy away from real salt and many use synthetic salts as a replacement.
But wait – Salt will raise our blood pressure and you’ll have a stroke or heart attack and die.
Not to worry son, just go to the doctor and get a prescription to control the problem.

The zealous drive by politicians to limit our salt intake a few years back has little basis in science.
For decades, policy makers have tried and failed to some extent to get Americans to eat a lot less salt. The imitation salt manufacturers must have been short of money for lobbyists.  Not really – they’re now another  multi-million dollar industry just like with the countless immitation sugar industry.

In April 2010 the Institute of Medicine urged the U.S. Food and Drug Administration to regulate the amount of salt that food manufacturers put into products; New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg had already convinced 16 companies to do so voluntarily. But if the government and Do-gooders  really totally get rid of salt, what will we gain? 

A meta-analysis of seven studies involving a total of 6,250 subjects in the American Journal of Hypertension found no strong evidence that cutting salt intake reduces the risk for heart attacks, strokes or death in people with normal or high blood pressure. European researchers publishing in the Journal of the American Medical Association reported that the less sodium that study subjects excreted in their urine - an excellent measure of prior consumption—the greater their risk was of dying from heart disease. These findings call into question the common wisdom that excess salt is bad for you, but the evidence linking salt to heart disease has always been questionable. You wouldn’t know this by all the tax exempt billion dollar  groups and their never ending BS.

Fears over salt first surfaced more than a century ago. In 1904 French doctors reported that six of their subjects who had high blood pressure - a known risk factor for heart disease - were salt fiends. Worries escalated in the 1970s when Brookhaven National Laboratory's Lewis Dahl claimed that he had "unequivocal" evidence that salt causes hypertension: he induced high blood pressure in rats by feeding them the human equivalent of 500 grams of sodium a day. (Today the average American consumes about 8.5 grams of salt, a day.) Great test right?  Those poor little rats.

Where are the animal rights activists when you need them? If you gave a horse 500 grams of salt a day he’d probably have a heart attack. When a scientist wants to prove something today, they'll often do just about anything to get a paper published.

Dahl also discovered population trends that continue to be cited as strong evidence of a link between salt intake and high blood pressure. People living in countries with a high salt consumption—such as Japan—also tend to have high blood pressure and more strokes. Apparently he didn’t notice that the Japanese have one of the longest life expectancies  for a developed nation on the planet and they still smoke like trains. Their longevity and overall health puts Americans to shame. 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. Nevertheless, in 1977 the U.S. Senate’s Select Committee on Nutrition and Human Needs released a report recommending that Americans cut their salt intake by 50 to 85 percent, based largely on Dahl's work.     Wow - What a surprise.

Isn’t that  Senate Select Committee on Nutrition and Human Needs  the committee that decided the American people should lower their intake of saturated fat, and increase their intake of carbohydrates way back in the late 1970’s? Apparently not many people today seem to notice what has happened since we were given that advice.

Scientific tools have become much more precise since then, but the correlation between salt intake and poor health has remained very questionable. Intersalt, a large study published in 1988, compared sodium intake with blood pressure in subjects from 52 international research centers and found no relationship between sodium intake and the prevalence of hypertension. In fact, the population that ate the most salt, about 14 grams a day, had a lower median blood pressure than the population that ate the least, about 7.2 grams a day. In 2004 the Cochrane Collaboration, an international, independent, not-for-profit health care research organization funded in part by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, published a review of 11 salt-reduction trials.  Over the long-term, low-salt diets, compared to normal diets, decreased systolic blood pressure (the top number in the blood pressure ratio) in healthy people by 1.1 millimeters of mercury (mmHg) and diastolic blood pressure (the bottom number) by 0.6 mmHg.  That is like going from 120/80 to 119/79. WOW - The review concluded that "intensive interventions, unsuited to primary care or population prevention programs, provide only minimal reductions in blood pressure during long-term trials. A 2003 Cochrane review of 57 shorter-term trials similarly concluded that there is little evidence for long-term benefit from reducing salt intake. Anyone ever notice we don’t hear about these things on the news in any important way?

Most salts sold in stores today has been refined, chemically processed and stripped of their minerals. Then, other ingredients are added that are not natural. They do this to control stability, color and taste and to stop the salt from caking. Consuming these ingredients over time can have negative side effects. Be sure to check the label on the salt to make sure there are no additives. Good luck. The following common ingredients are found in salt that has been chemically processed. Anti-caking ingredients, sodium bicarbonate, sodium iodide, silicon dioxide, YPS, E535, soduim silicoaluminate, magnesium carbonate, magnesium oxide, calcium silicate, potassium iodide, tricalcium phosphate, dextrose which is sugar, potassium chloride, potassium bitartrate, potassium glutamate, adipic acid, fumaric acid, polyethylene glycol 400, disolium inosinate, polysilicate and potassium iodide. Would anyone in their right mind put any of the above chemicals in their mouth voluntarily? How about a nice heaping teaspoon of polyethylene glycol 400 to jump start your day.

Real salt is not white, because it has not been bleached or stripped of its vital minerals. Real salt is a natural, off-white color with small flecks of other colors such as pink, gray and brown. Real salt retains its natural flavor.

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