Video recordings of Ancestral Health Society’s public talks on August 10, 2014 honoring Seth’s life and work are posted at https://bit.ly/1v33kbM.
Many thanks to Tess McEnulty for putting together these videos, adding captions, and making them accessible. -Amy
Ancestral Health Society will have a series of public talks honoring Seth’s life and work will be held at UC Berkeley on August 10th, 9am – 1pm. Registration will be open to the public on June 20th. Please register at https://www.ancestralhealth.org/post/seth-roberts-n1-loved-all.
For a long time, researchers have found links between high sodium intake and higher blood pressure, and between higher blood pressure and increased risk of stroke. At the same time, critics, including Gary Taubes, have argued that the data do not support the idea that most people should reduce their salt intake.
New evidence suggests the critics were wrong. Four different studies support the idea that high amounts of salt intake are generally bad.
One study recently appeared in BMJ Open. ”The UK initiated a nationwide salt reduction programme in 2003/2004. The programme has been successful and resulted in a 15% reduction in population salt intake by 2011,” write the authors. That might not seem like much but the reduction was in the salt in processed foods, which for most people is most of their salt intake. The more processed food you ate — and the more extreme your salt intake — the greater the reduction.
The main finding of the study was that over the same period, there was a large and steady decrease in both blood pressure and strokes in the UK. Mortality from stroke and ischemic heart disease (IHD) went down by 40%!
There were small changes in other environmental variables over the same period: people ate slightly more fruit and vegetables, weighed slightly more, smoked somewhat less, and so on. Maybe these other changes were what led one critic to dismiss the results in a New York Times article:
Dr. Niels Graudal, a senior consultant in the department of internal medicine at Copenhagen University Hospital, said that connecting the two events “is meaningless.”
“This paper describes two independent incidents,” he added. “That these incidents should be in any way connected is absolutely unlikely.”
Consistent with the low quality of science journalism in the New York Times, it seems the reporter, Nicholas Balakar, did not ask Dr. Graudel any hard questions — for example, for an alternative explanation of the decline.
The BMJ study did a poor job of determining the a priori likelihood of such a big decline. It could have looked at year by year changes in stroke and IHD mortality before 2003, for example. Was stroke and IHD mortality rising or falling? It could have looked at changes in stroke and IHD mortality in similar countries without a salt reduction program over the same period. Such comparisons would have helped a lot. But the BMJ study did report the results of other nationwide salt reduction programs.
Japan, in the late 1960s, carried out a government-led campaign to reduce salt intake. Over the following decade, salt intake was reduced, particularly in northern areas from 18 to 14 g/day. Paralleling this reduction in salt intake, there were falls in BP and an 80% reduction in stroke mortality in spite of large increases in fat intake, cigarette smoking, alcohol consumption and obesity which occurred during that period. Finland, in the late 1970s, initiated a systematic approach to reducing salt intake through mass media-campaigns, co-operation with the food industry and implementing salt labelling legislation. This led to a significant reduction in the average salt intake of the Finnish population from ≈14 g/day in 1972 to less than 9 g/day in 2002. The reduction in salt intake was accompanied by a fall of over 10 mm Hg in systolic and diastolic BP and a decrease of 75–80% in stroke and IHD mortality.
Again, reductions in salt intake happened just before huge decreases in stroke and IHD mortality. It is the triple repetition of an unlikely event (big reductions in mortality) and the experimental aspect (something was specifically changed) that convince me. The critics are not going to come up with a plausible alternative explanation of all three cases (UK, Japan, Finland) any time soon.
A paper co-authored by the same Dr. Graudal who dismissed the new findings found that high sodium intake was associated with increased mortality. It also found that low sodium intake was associated with increased mortality. This is why a reduction in the salt in processed food makes so much sense: 1. It’s easy. You don’t have to do anything. 2. It reduces salt intake the most in people who eat the most salt — exactly where it is likely to be the most beneficial.
Just to be clear, this data also says that if you don’t eat a lot of salt, there is no good reason to reduce your salt intake (unless you have high blood pressure).
After I blogged about my belief that a good teacher tries to bring out what is inside their students (not just transfer brain contents), a reader named Terri Fites commented:
We homeschool, and I see lots of what you said in my kids.
I asked her to elaborate. She replied:
Here is where I learned the most starting on day one of kindergarten with my first child five years ago; it is my job to identify strengths, weaknesses, and to help the learner achieve the goal using what they can. For example, I was embarrassed and appalled that my first child didn’t read or show any interest in reading to herself until about second grade (7 years old). However, I continued to provide the necessary environment–reading wonderful books aloud, having her read a sentence from our selections, occasionally forcing her to read from her own readers. She had a great verbal understanding and would listen to anything I read aloud to her. Eventually, slowly, she transitioned and has NO issues with reading now. Her strength is verbal understanding and listening comprehension. Her weakness is focus on her own activities and sitting still.
My second child came along and was strong in different ways that I had to discover and appreciate. Her verbal skills, although perfectly normal, are not her strength, but music rises out of her at every moment. Clearly we have to do more than music. Using this strength, I make sure to provide plenty of musical CDs in Spanish for Spanish (which she struggles with–we have had tutors come for years with the intent the girls become fluent). We memorize and recite poetry routinely as part of our lessons, and she “sets” hers to song/music. When we do math facts (addition, subtraction, multiplication flash cards), she does best if she hears them in a sing-song voice. Her strengths are effort, music, rhythm, and art. Her weaknesses are verbal reasoning and remembering verbal types of things (not so prominent in math and geography skills so her spatial and math skills overcome this problem remembering things).
I would say, particularly in elementary school, that although the reading, writing, and arithmetic skills needed should not be optional–the timing of learning them and the method of learning them ought to be fluid to a degree. Everybody should learn to read but we’re losing kids because they’re not developmentally ready until second or third grade for some of these verbal/reading things. By then the bulk of the spelling and phonics rules have been expected to have been learned and the child is probably destined to be a poor speller, decoder, and poor at reading aloud. (This would be my husband. Obviously he was able to overcome this, but his spelling and read aloud are not pleasant. He says he remembers the year when words and reading just started coming together for him. Unfortunately, that was fifth grade. Did he need to learn to read and spell then in fifth grade!? I’d argue NO! But, in this case, recognition of a child/type of child is important. He is very, very logical, and the way that spelling/phonics is taught now/then is NOT so logical. A rule is given here. It is broken here. It is ignored here. No explanation is given. A kid learns long A as a_e here or -ay there, but not all the other combinations that make the long A sound– and certainly not all together in a lesson sequence!!!: ea, ae, ei, eigh, ai, etc. The logical child gives up. There are programs out there like Orton Gillingham, for example, designed to teach the “rules” of English in such a logical manner. Or I design my own curriculum. But this is not an option for most school teachers. Autonomy is being denied.) And now, multiplication is being moved forward in school grades, too. And analytical, thinking math is being moved forward. I think we’ll lose students! Good students! “I’m no good at math.” Geesh. Because you can’t do story problems in second grade? Because you’re still mastering the facts and you’re being pushed into application too early?
I got Cure Unknown: Inside the Lyme Epidemic (2008) by Pamela Weintraub from the library and found something surprising: an angry foreword. Weintraub is a science journalist; the foreword is by Hillary Johnson, another science journalist and apparently a friend of Weintraub’s.
In her anger, Johnson says several things I say on this blog.
The more Weintraub investigated, the more virtually everyone with a shred of authority was losing their credibility. . . The so-called “objective” scientists were sending an entire disease down the river and over the cliff [meaning they ignored it] for reasons that seemed frequently to have more to do with mere opinion and crass external forces — cash, prestige, careerism — than with scientific erudition.
She rejected the science writer’s inbred habit of relying on the government official with the highest pay grade or the scientist with a job at Harvard as the final word on a topic. . . . I think of her, with enormous respect, as a “recovered” science journalist.
As one who also suffers from the disease I chronicled with kindred passion in Osler’s Web, I sometimes wonder if the only investigative writers who will possess the necessary temerity to remove the white gloves and tackle those putative experts to the ground will be those . . whose personal experience demands they follow the rocky trail that leads to the truth.
The last point is the most important, I think. You can curse the careerism of Harvard medical school professors and the servility of science writers but that does nothing, or not much, and what you are upset about (careerism and servility) is unsurprising. Less obvious, at least to me, is that there is a way to overcome the careerism and servility. It still surprises me that I was able to figure out interesting stuff about sleep, obesity, depression and so on that the experts in these fields hadn’t figured out — and that sometimes contradicted what they said. (For example, I found sugar isn’t fattening.) As Johnson says, one reason I was able to learn so much was that I wanted to sleep better, lose weight, be in a better mood, and so on. Unlike the experts in those fields, for whom research was a job.
A recent Ph.D. from Berkeley named Dragan commented here:
Probably the biggest disappointment of my professional life was realizing that Universities are not very much like what I imagined them to be.
I asked him to elaborate. He replied:
My peers dreamed of being in the sports or movies, of being lawyers, of being rich. Those dreams didn’t seem so great to me. Instead I fantasized about being a scholar and later in life climbed up the educational ladder towards a PhD at a leading research university. The closer I came to becoming a professor — my professional goal in life — the more disappointed I became.
I am somewhat embarrassed to remember this, but I used to say things like: “Universities are places where people can devote themselves to a life of study, investigation, and imagination. In exchange for a home like this, we provide society with ideas. And, of course, we teach.” I guess I thought that there should be a home for people who are capable and devoted to intellectual pursuits, a rather naive notion it seems.
I wanted a place where I would be judged primarily by my intellectual and creative ability. Instead I have been made keenly aware of the importance of networking, of doing favors for the right people, of who to cite, whose criticism to acknowledge and whose to ignore. I used to despise such things, now they’re second nature. The irony, that I now know far more about popularity than I did back in high school. One of the first things I learned is that it is imperative to do research that brings money and/or prestige. In other words: popular research. I didn’t know such a thing existed.
What if I don’t want to do popular research? The most common advice I received during my graduate studies: “Wait till you’re tenured to do that,” always said with good intentions.
Only one person told me: “Do what you believe in. Tenure and accolades will come in time.” I liked this advice more. But the professor who gave it was fully tenured before I was born. Perhaps things were different in his time? I suspect they were. Last year, two retired professors, each from a major research university, assured me that they would never get tenure in this day and age. They took years with their research and published few yet original papers. “You have to wait until tenure nowadays,” they said.
This is not what I thought I’d find. Nor did I expect to find that efficiency and money-making are priorities here. I love what I do, or at least what I want to do. If I could afford to, I’d do it for free. I mean that as an academic, money seems relatively unimportant. Yet universities seem to be run by people who aren’t academics and whose primary interest is making money, rather than fostering research. It occurs to me that these two aims may be in conflict.
Don’t get me wrong: I am not saying that academia is altogether bad. I can honestly say it beats unemployment and the handful of low-wage jobs I had as a teenager. And there are days when all the things I just wrote about seem less important and I focus on my research or my teaching. But other times I think, silly me. If only I was smart enough to get rich in the first place, I could have done anything I wanted to — like pursue research that actually interests me.
As a professor (with tenure) at Berkeley, I was fascinated by how mediocre I was. By the usual metrics, I was in the bottom quarter of the distribution. Yet I had made discoveries that I knew were important — for example, a surprising way to lose weight, a really surprising way to improve mood. Although these discoveries impressed me, they did not impress my colleagues.
High-frequency trading is a misnomer. It’s actually short-latency trading, a name that makes clearer why it is so unsavory. As Michael Lewis explains in Flash Boys, short-latency traders use a buy order on one exchange to quickly buy that stock on other exchanges before the original buy order reaches the other exchanges. Lewis writes:
The deep problem with the system was a kind of moral inertia. So long as it served the narrow self-interests of everyone inside it, no one on the inside would ever seek to change it, no matter how sinister or corrupt it became — though even to use words like “corrupt” and “sinister” made serious people uncomfortable.
I thought of health care. Our health care system — centered on treating symptoms with drugs you take for the rest of your life — serves the narrow self-interests of those inside it, such as doctors and medical school professors. That is surely one reason its predatory aspect is rarely mentioned.
But I also noticed how poorly Lewis, an excellent writer, describes the problem. “Moral inertia”? No, the problem is not that Person X or Person Y is slow to get outraged. “Corrupt”? No, no one is being paid off to look the other way or vote a certain way or introduce a certain bill. “Sinister”? It’s unclear what that means. Is Lewis just using a fancy synonym for “bad”?
Elsewhere Lewis uses the word predatory, which seems accurate. Short-latency traders preyed on those who sold stock, taking advantage of their ignorance. Of course, no one is forced to buy or sell stock and the loss on one trade is small. But everyone gets sick.
Thanks to Tyler Cowen.