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Comment by gte910h | Hacker News Reader

Not everyone is salt sensitive. Talk to them about measuring your salt sensitivity (or you can do it at home, but less reliably).

If salt is hard and the rest is easy, you may find losing weight and exercise the two you worry about, and ignore salt.

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Salt sensitivity is also far easier to manage, and its impact is limited to putting you over the top when shit hits the fan (eg: high-sodium diet can make or break you when you stray into heart-attack territory).

There was a Finnish study where they had some people try to control salt intake and others just eat as much salt as they want. The "as much salt as they want" group actually had better health outcomes. Their conclusion was that for most people, the body's salt regulation is actually very good.

Link? Studies about salt are notoriously difficult, because hardly anyone actually adheres to a truly low-salt diet, so you get the equivalent of a study that tries to discern whether smoking 1.5 pack of cigarettes (which takes lots of restrain) is any better than 2. Personally, it took 2 months for my blood pressure to start coming down on a high-vegetable low-sodium diet, and I notice that many people already think they are not salt-sensitive if it doesn't work in 2 days. I'm still astonished when I take my blood pressure and it is 115/70 or so. It used to be consistently 150/90.

Here's my favorite summary of the science on salt: http://ije.oxfordjournals.org/content/31/2/311.full

During the Mars-500 experiment they ran a low-salt-diet test.

They found that the body cycle for salt is more complicated that thought before and "It is not only worthwhile reducing the amount of salt added to food for those who are ill - even the blood pressure in healthy individuals such as the Mars500 test subjects was reduced." [1]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MARS-500

[1] http://www.astrobio.net/pressrelease/4329/lessons-from-mars-...

yeah, thats kinda where I am. I don't think I'm salt sensitive, I think I just have bad genes. And the bp meds are managing it rather well. I'm still trying not to go overboard with the salt (I think cutting out fast food was the biggest part of losing weight, beyond the carbs), but I don't worry as much about it. I have also read studies that show too little salt (in the one I read, < 3000mg / day) was just as bad as too much (>8000 / day)

Those studies are usually not very good. They often fail to recognize that people who are on a low-sodium diet are very sick, for example (just like those studies that say that a low BMI is very dangerous but fail to control for the fact that very ill people are thin). I just think it would be really strange if humans had such a high need for salt, because until a few hundred years ago people did not add salt to their diet, getting only the naturally occurring sodium from food, and people did just fine.

According to Harvard School of Public Health, salt sensitivity is a myth: http://www.hsph.harvard.edu/nutritionsource/salt-questions/#...

Here is the article I was quoting: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/05/15/health/panel-finds-no-bene... and the study it was quoting: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/22110105

It looks like I had my high end off, it was actually > 7000mg / day.

> Another study, published in 2011, followed 28,800 subjects with high blood pressure ages 55 and older for 4.7 years and analyzed their sodium consumption by urinalysis. The researchers reported that the risks of heart attacks, strokes, congestive heart failure and death from heart disease increased significantly for those consuming more than 7,000 milligrams of sodium a day and for those consuming fewer than 3,000 milligrams of sodium a day.

In general, I would advice to not get your health advice from the NY Times. This is a response from Harvard's Nutritionsource: http://www.hsph.harvard.edu/nutritionsource/2013/05/17/the-n... who calls it "highly misleading". Nutrition research is difficult, like I said, population studies often fail to account for the fact that in western countries practically the only people who are on a very low sodium diet are people who are already very sick.

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