Hello people,

I'm kind of new here. I've been reading posts here off & on for several
months.

I recently found out that I'm a blood type O+ non secretor, and that I'd do
best on a Paleo type diet. I eat Paleo now, without grain, legumes, or
dairy. I also abide by the ER4YT terms too, which has helped me to some
extent.

I think this thread is very interesting, and I believe in it. I copied it
yesterday and posted it on the ER4YT board, and this is a reply I got from
it.

PS - I'm not saying that I agree with this guy. I have cut most salt out of
my diet, except for a little Celtic salt in my slow cooker stew once in a
while [which I think I may be better off to omit in the future]. I'm hoping
to see what you thought of this info. Thank you very much.


Here's his reply to this thread :


The great salt lie

Date: Wednesday, 6 February 2002, at 3:53 p.m.

In Response To: Salt quiz

What a compilation of untrue facts and fabricated lies. Things I read on
this message board
make my hair stand up. Here is what I wrote and good luck with your low
Sodium diet, you
need it. If you have followed this low Sodium bull... most likely your heart
muscle is
already damaged:

Many years ago experts determined that the average American diet contained
far too much
salt = Sodium Chloride. They looked at what AVERAGE Americans ate back then
and they
ate a lot of food loaded with salt. The food companies who produced these
foods knew that
adding salt meant adding taste.

After these experts spoke, alarm bells rang and “The low Sodium” trend was
born.
Unfortunately, the pendulum swung too far to the other side. Americans
started to drink
pure water, even Glacier water with no mineral content whatsoever and
converted to a
strictly "low sodium diet", depriving their bodies of all other minerals,
which normally occur
alongside Sodium Chloride as well. The low Sodium trend also contributed to
lowering blood
viscosity, which puts great strain on the heart. Blood viscosity plays an
extremely
important part in our overall well-being.
I never followed the low Sodium trend and was always suspicious about this
trend.

Approx. 25 years ago, before the low Sodium hype started, I read a
scientific report from a
Swiss mountain region village. There, young man in their forties who were on
an extremely
healthy natural diet with plenty of physical exercise died of unexplainable
heart disease.
Their hearts simply stopped. A Swiss team of scientists found that they were
on a low
Sodium diet and drank soft water. Basically, the granite rock formation did
not add any
minerals and what they drank was essentially rainwater. So they were told to
use more salt
in their food, drink a high mineral content mineral water and they slowly
recovered. That
story stuck in the chemists mind and being familiar with viscosity,
equilibrium and osmosis
helped.

When the low Sodium hype appeared the food companies gladly obliged and
drastically
reduced Sodium Chloride in their foods. Everybody was eager to label his or
her product
“Low Sodium”. However, food manufacturers knew that salt meant taste and
often cheated
by putting “other salts” into their preparation. Why not, after all the dumb
public was only
concerned with Sodium. In my opinion this created a dangerous imbalance and
meant
further problems for our health.

The American Heart Association (and just about any other Association and
Organization)
blamed salt for high blood pressure. Interestingly, the only study of the
health outcomes of
persons actually consuming low-Sodium diets over an extended time (over four
years) found
that the lowest sodium-consuming quarter of 1,900 hypertensive patients
experienced more
than four times as many heart attacks compared to the highest
Sodium-consuming
quadrant. This study appeared in the American Heart Association journal,
Hypertension in
mid-1995. Other organizations targeted salt as the enemy as well. Did they
conduct further
studies? No. In fact no further major study was financed to determine the
truth about the
relationship between health and Sodium intake. After all, how can you expect
drug or food
companies to do research on the importance of salt in our daily lives when
they can't make
money on it? Who does research to put themselves out of business?

In the meantime, people in France and Switzerland, who have the longest life
expectancy in
Europe and the Japanese and other Asian nations continued to add plenty of
salt to their
foods, although sadly even there the "low Sodium" trend started to become
popular.

Most tragic, people who were on a healthy diet to begin with never realized
that they did
not eat like the “average American”. Nobody will ever know why they started
to drastically
lower their Sodium levels also. However, the health food industry went along
and obliged
as usual.
All this went on until recently and a great deal of harm was done to
people’s health.

Then the bomb dropped with a loud bang.

Unconventional Wisdom
by Emma Ross
The Associated Press
Low-Salt Diet a Risk?

London, March 12 - A low-salt diet may not be so healthy after all. Defying
a generation of
health advice, a controversial new study concludes that the less salt people
eat, the higher
their risk of untimely death.

The study, led by Dr. Michael Alderman, chairman of epidemiology at Albert
Einstein School
of Medicine in New York and former president of the American Society of
Hypertension,
suggests the government should consider suspending it's recommendation that
people
restrict the amount of salt they eat.

"The lower the sodium, the worse off you are," Alderman said. "There's an
association. Is it
the cause? I don't know. Any way you slice it, that's not an argument for
eating a low
sodium diet.

Come again? “A new study concludes that the less salt people eat, the higher
their risk of
untimely death”. Nicely put, "higher risk of untimely death", in other words
"low Sodium,
not high Sodium is reducing your life expectancy". This from the former
President of the
American Society of Hypertension = high blood pressure. Canadian
hypertension expert
Alexander Logan reached similar conclusions in research published in The
Journal of the
American Medical Association nearly two years ago. Is somebody reminding us
that the
environment of an unborn baby is water and salt, that no two substances in
the Bible are
mentioned more than water and salt and that the salinity of the water
outside the cells in
our bodies is the same as the ocean?

http://members.optusnet.com.au/~yatesc/bt4.html

So, low Sodium is a bad idea. How come the American Heart Association and
all the other
wonderful organizations, which were responsible for spreading the "Low
Sodium" lie did not
react? They are still advocating their low Sodium philosophy and as far as I
know, these
organizations have not initiated any additional major studies to look at the
subject further.
But what do you expect? That all those so-called medical experts,
nutritionists, government
officials, the food industry and the health care industry actually admit
contributing to
cutting people’s life short by given them wrong advice? The embarrassment is
huge and
needless to say, a lot of cover-up needs to be done to slowly but surely
coax the level of
salt in our diets back to healthy levels again. It’s going to be tricky and
a few minor
embarrassments probably can’t be avoided but they will find ways. Right now
the Senior
Executive Masters of the Universe, who have so much power over our health,
will probably
not allow their image to be tainted by saving lives.

But the process of reeducation, of what realy causes high blood pressure,
has already
started. Finally we learn that most of us have no problems to get rid of
excessive salt. And
all of a sudden a correlation was found between prevalence of high blood
pressure and the
ratio of POTASSIUM to Sodium in food intake. So High Sodium is not
responsible for all the
high blood pressure after all? Don’t get me wrong. I don’t advocate a high
Sodium diet, as
usual the emphasis is on moderate. And some people with specific conditions
might have
to continue reducing their salt consumption. But a low Sodium diet is simply
a very bad
idea for the vast majority of the population.

Please, be kind to your heart, make sure your blood has the right viscosity,
add moderate
amounts of salt to your diet, drink plenty of high mineral content mineral
water and eat
broth, rich in minerals. Balance moderate Sodium with moderate Potassium
levels by
regularly eating Potassium rich foods like bananas, dried apricots, figs,
prunes, avocados,
etc.