Salt is Good

Many have come to know the Lord Jesus Christ as their Lord and Saviour on this website. Of this fact, we rejoice mightily before the Lord. I encourage my new brothers and sisters, and old ones as well, to tell others of their salvation. Doing this will strengthen your soul and bear eternal fruit. Revelation 12:10-11:

10 And I heard a loud voice saying in heaven, Now is come salvation, and strength, and the kingdom of our God, and the power of his Christ: for the accuser of our brethren is cast down, which accused them before our God day and night.

11 And they overcame him by the blood of the Lamb, and by the word of their testimony; and they loved not their lives unto the death.

Romans 10:10:

For with the heart man believeth unto righteousness; and with the mouth confession is made unto salvation.

Jesus said to the mad man of whom he cast out devils to go and tell. Mark 5:19:

Howbeit Jesus suffered him not, but saith unto him, Go home to thy friends, and tell them how great things the Lord hath done for thee, and hath had compassion on thee.

May the face of our God shine upon you and yours. Now for today’s subject.

GOD SAID, Matthew 5:13:

Ye are the salt of the earth: but if the salt have lost his savour, wherewith shall it be salted? it is thenceforth good for nothing, but to be cast out, and to be trodden under foot of men.

GOD SAID, Leviticus 2:13:

And every oblation of thy meat offering shalt thou season with salt; neither shalt thou suffer the salt of the covenant of thy God to be lacking from thy meat offering: with all thine offerings thou shalt offer salt.

GOD SAID, Mark 9:50:

Salt is good: but if the salt have lost his saltness, wherewith will ye season it? Have salt in yourselves, and have peace one with another.

MAN SAID:  Did Jesus Christ have any understanding of the human anatomy at all? If he was the Creator, why didn’t He know that salt is a killer?

Now THE RECORD. For thousands of years, the word of God has been on record outlining positions of truth on the issues of life and death. Man, in his limited knowledge, has rejected God’s word as the writings of mere outdated men, to the devastation of the population at large; thus the proof theme on this website: “God Said, Man Said, Now you have THE RECORD.”

The scriptures are replete with dietary directives. On this website, there are 16 subjects dealing with dietary matters which vindicate the word of God. The subject you’re currently reading or listening to weighs in at number 17. God’s truth never changes because real truth remains constant. On the other hand, man’s “truth” of yesterday is debunked by man’s “truth” of today. Man’s “truth” of today will be discredited by man’s “truth” of tomorrow. This is simply because man’s “truth” is not truth. Listed below are the 16 related dietary subjects on this website. 

∙ Margarine and Nutritional Armageddon

∙ Eggs

∙ Milk...Man Leads The World Astray...Again

∙ Olive Oil

∙ Wine

∙ Honey and the Finger of God

∙ Breast-Feeding

∙ Smell

∙ Locusts and Wild Honey

∙ Swine...The Other White Meat

∙ Blood

∙ Its Not What Goes In But What Comes Out That Defiles

∙ The Difference Between Clean and Unclean

∙ The Fat Epidemic

∙ The Perfect Diet

∙ Yeast Infections and Seven Days

The health mantra today is that too much salt is bad for your health. As in most situations, too much of anything is not good for you: too much air, too much water, food, sleep, etc. The scriptures, of course, teach moderation. Salt has become medical media’s whipping boy – the blood pressure, the hypertension boogieman. Before we get into the details of the salt controversy, you should know that the health food industry’s endorsement is on sea salt – sea salt that still retains its many minerals.

Salt is 40% sodium and 60% chloride – truly staples of life. Sodium represents around 93% of basic mineral elements in blood serum and stands chief in regulating blood pH. Muscle contraction depends on sodium and it plays a crucial role in nerve impulse transmission, heart rhythm, plus much more. Chloride, on the other hand, is the primary anion in blood and represents approximately 66% of its acidic ions. The movement of chloride in and out of our red blood cells is critical in maintaining the required acid-base blood balance. It’s essential to the digestion process and, I’m sure, a whole host of other things we are and aren’t yet aware of. Salt is critical to life.

In ancient history, salt was deemed so valuable that soldiers, for instance, were actually paid in salt. This is where we get the word “salary” and the old axiom, “You aren’t worth your salt.”

Could Jesus Christ, with his endorsement of salt, stand right in the face of “obvious” contradiction? It will be a surprise to many that much research and many health professionals reject today’s prominent position against salt. In August 1998, under the heading, “The (Political) Science of Salt” in Science magazine, the following excerpts were found:

So what’s the problem? For starters, salt is a primary determinant of taste in food – fat, of course, is the other – and 80% of the salt we consume comes from processed foods, making it difficult to avoid. Then there’s the kicker: While the government has been denouncing salt as a health hazard for decades, no amount of scientific effort has been able to dispense with the suspicions that it is not. Indeed, the controversy over the benefits, if any, of salt reduction now constitutes one of the longest running, most vitriolic, and surreal disputes in all of medicine.

On the one side are those experts – primarily physicians turned epidemiologists, and administrators such as Roccella and Claude Lenfant, heads of NHLBI – who insist the evidence that salt raises blood pressure is effectively irrefutable. They have an obligation, they say, to push for universal salt reduction, because people are dying and will continue to die if they wait for further research to bring scientific certainty. On the other side are those researchers – primarily physicians turned epidemiologists, including former presidents of the American Heart Association, the American Society of Hypertension, and the European and international societies of hypertension – who argue that the data supporting universal salt reduction has never been compelling, nor has it ever been demonstrated that such a program would not have unforeseen negative side effects. This was the verdict, for instance, of a review published last May in the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA). University of Copenhagen researchers analyzed 114 randomized trials of sodium reduction, concluding that the benefit for hypertensives was significantly smaller than could be achieved by antihypertensive drugs, and that a “measurable” benefit in individuals with normal blood pressure (normotensives) of even a single millimeter of mercury could only be achieved with an “extreme” reduction in salt intake. “You can say without any shadow of a doubt,” says Drummond Rennie, a JAMA editor and a physiologist at the University of California (UC), San Francisco, “that the [NHLBI] has made a commitment to salt education that goes way beyond the scientific facts.”

Again from the article:

In fact, the salt controversy may be what Sanford Miller calls the “number one perfect example of why science is a destabilizing force in public policy.” Now a dean at the University of Texas Health Sciences Center, Miller helped shape salt policy 20 years ago as director of the Center for Food Safety and Applied Nutrition at the Food and Drug Administration. Then, he says, the data were bad, but they arguably supported the benefits of salt reduction. Now, both the data and the science are much improved, but they no longer provide forceful support for the recommendations.

Again from Science magazine:

One-sided interpretations of the data have always been endemic to the controversy. As early as 1979, for instance, Olaf Simpson, a clinician at New Zealand’s University of Otago Medical School, described it as “a situation where the most slender piece of evidence in favor of [a salt-blood pressure link] is welcomed as further proof of the link, while failure to find such evidence is explained away by one means or another.” University of Glasgow clinician Graham Watt calls it the “Bing Crosby approach to epidemiological reasoning” – in other words, “accentuate the positive, eliminate the negative.” Bing Crosby epidemiology allows researchers to find the effect they’re looking for in a swamp of contradictory data but does little to establish whether it is real.

This situation is exacerbated by a remarkable inability of researchers in this polarized field to agree on whether any particular study is believable. Instead, it is common for studies to be considered reliable because they get the desired result. In 1991, for instance, the British Medical Journal (BMJ) published a 14-page, three-part “meta-analysis” by epidemiologists Malcolm Law, Christopher Frost, and Nicholas Wald of the Medical College of St. Bartholomew’s Hospital in London. Their conclusion: The salt-blood pressure association was “substantially larger” than previously appreciated. That same year, Swales deconstructed the analysis, which he describes as “deeply flawed,” at the annual meeting of the European Society of Hypertension in Milan. “There was not a single person in the room who felt the [BMJ] analysis was worth anything after that,” says clinician Lennart Hansson of the University of Uppsala in Sweden, who attended the meeting and is a former president of both the international and European societies of hypertension. Swales’s critique was then published in the Journal of Hypertension.

Science again:

Not until after these campaigns were well under way, however, did researchers set out to do studies that might be powerful enough to resolve the underlying controversy. The first was the Scottish Heart Health Study, launched in 1984 by epidemiologist Hugh Tunstall-Pedoe and colleagues at the Ninewells Hospital and Medical School in Dundee, Scotland. The researchers used questionnaires, physical exams, and 24-hour urine samples to establish the risk factors for cardiovascular disease in 7300 Scottish men. This was an order of magnitude larger than any intrapopulation study ever done with 24-hour urine samples. The BMJ published the results in 1988: Potassium, which is in fruits and vegetables, seemed to have a beneficial effect on blood pressure. Sodium had no effect.

With this result, the Scottish study vanished from the debate. Advocates of salt reduction argued that the negative result was no surprise because the study, despite its size, was still not large enough to overcome the measurement problems that beset all other intrapopulation studies. When the NHBPEP recommended universal salt reduction in its landmark 1993 report, it cited 237 different journal articles in support of its recommendations. The Scottish study was not among them. (In 1998, Tunstall-Pedoe and his collaborators published a 10-year follow up: Sodium intake now showed no relationship to either coronary heart disease or death.)

The second collaboration was Intersalt, led by Stamler and Rose. Unlike the relentlessly negative Scottish Heart Health Study, Intersalt would become the most influential and controversial study in the salt debate. Intersalt was designed specifically to resolve the contradiction between ecologic and intrapopulation studies. It would compare blood pressure and salt consumption, as measured by 24-hour urine samples, from 52 communities around the globe, from the highest to the lowest extremes of salt intake. Two hundred individuals – half males, half females, 50 from each decade of life between 20 and 60 – were chosen at random from each population. In effect, Intersalt would be 52 small but identical intrapopulation studies combined into a single huge ecology study.

After years of work by nearly 150 researchers, the results appeared in the same 1988 BMJ issue that included the Scottish Heart Health Study. Intersalt had failed to confirm its primary hypothesis, which was the existence of a linear relationship between salt intake and blood pressure. Of the 52 populations, four were primitive societies like the Yanomamo with low blood pressure and daily salt intake below 3.5 grams. They also differed, however, in virtually every other imaginable way from the 48 industrialized societies that had higher blood pressure. The remaining 48 revealed no relationship between sodium intake and blood pressure. The population with the highest salt intake, for instance – in Tianjin, China, consuming roughly 14 grams a day – had a median blood pressure of 119/70 mmHg, while the one with the lowest salt intake – a Chicago African-American population at 6 grams a day – had a median blood pressure of 199/76 mmHg. Only body mass and alcohol intake correlated with blood pressure in this comparison.

The Intersalt researchers did derive two positive correlations between salt and blood pressure. One weak association appeared when they treated the 10,000-plus subjects as a single large population rather than 52 distinct populations. It implied that cutting salt intake from 10 grams a day to four would reduce blood pressure by 2.2/0.1 mmHg. The more potent association was between salt intake and the rise in blood pressure with age: Populations that ate less salt experienced a smaller rise than did populations that ate more salt. If this relationship was casual, Intersalt estimated, then cutting salt intake by 6 grams a day would reduce the average rise in blood pressure between the ages of 25 and 55 by 9/4.5 mmHg.

These findings made Intersalt Rorschach-like in its ability to generate conflicting interpretations. John Swales wrote off the results in an accompanying BMJ editorial, saying the potential benefit, if any, was so small it “would hardly seem likely to take nutritionists to the barricades (except perhaps the ones already there).” Today, the majority of the researchers interviewed by Science, including Intersalt members such as Daan Kromhout and Lennart Hansson, see it as a negative study. Says Hansson, “It did not show blood pressure increases if you eat a lot of salt.” [End of quotes]

The information in this debate is monumental. Science magazine:

The argument that salt reduction is a painless route to lower blood pressure also assumes that there is no downside to this kind of social engineering. Social interventions can have unintended consequences, notes NIH’s Harlan, which seemed to be the case, for instance, with the recommendation that the public consume less dietary fat. “It was a startling change to a lot of us,” Harlan says, “to see the proportion of fat in the diet go down and weight go up. Obviously it’s not as simple as it once seemed.” [End of quote]

The intricacies of God’s creation outstrip man’s ability to fully know anything.

Finally from Science magazine,

Of all these studies, the one that may finally change the tenor of the salt debate was not actually about salt. Called DASH, for Dietary Approaches to Stop Hypertension, it was published in April 1997 in The New England Journal of Medicine. DASH suggested that although diet can strongly influence blood pressure, salt may not be a player. In DASH, individuals were fed a diet rich in fruits, vegetables, and low-fat dairy products. In 3 weeks, the diet reduced blood pressure by 5.5/3.0 mmHg in subjects with mild hypertension and 11.4/5.5 mmHg in hypertensives – a benefit surpassing what could be achieved by medication. Yet salt content was kept constant in the DASH diets, which meant salt had nothing to do with the blood pressure reductions. [End of quote]

The lack of iodized salt leads to disease and death.

CNN, in a 1996 feature titled, “Salt May Not Be Blood Pressure Bad Guy,” said:

New studies are casting doubt on the old belief that salt can cause high blood pressure.

One study, performed by a group of Canadian doctors, concludes that lowering salt consumption is helpful only to people over the age of 45 who already have a problem with high blood pressure.

“For the vast majority of people who have a normal blood pressure, our study shows that individuals can probably stop worrying about the intake of salt,” said Dr. Alexander Logan, one of the study’s creators.

The study, to be published in the Journal of the American Medical Association, was sponsored by grants from soup-maker Campbell and Canadian groups. Doctors coordinating the study looked at the results of 56 surveys of blood pressure and salt intake.

The results have led to questions about the United States’ salt recommendations. In Logan’s words, the doctors “feel that any campaign against salt should be set aside and rather be replaced by a vigorous campaign promoting a balanced diet, healthy weight and regular exercise.” [End of quote]

Excessive salt intake, as in the excess of nearly anything, is a bad policy to follow. Salt, in moderation, is Biblically called good, necessary, and a great blessing from God. Of course, Jesus Christ, by whom God created the world, knew it all the time.

GOD SAID, Matthew 5:13:

Ye are the salt of the earth: but if the salt have lost his savour, wherewith shall it be salted? it is thenceforth good for nothing, but to be cast out, and to be trodden under foot of men.

GOD SAID, Leviticus 2:13:

And every oblation of thy meat offering shalt thou season with salt; neither shalt thou suffer the salt of the covenant of thy God to be lacking from thy meat offering: with all thine offerings thou shalt offer salt.

GOD SAID, Mark 9:50:

Salt is good: but if the salt have lost his saltness, wherewith will ye season it? Have salt in yourselves, and have peace one with another.

MAN SAID:  Did Jesus Christ have any understanding of the human anatomy at all? If he was the Creator, why didn’t he know that salt is a killer?

Now you have THE RECORD.

 

References:

King James Bible

Halsey, E., “Salt May Not Be Blood Pressure Bad Guy,” www.cnn.com, 5/22/96

Taubes, G., “The (Political) Science of Salt,” Science magazine, 8/14/98

www.nlm.nih.gov

www.saltinstitute.org, “Salt & Trace Minerals In Animal Nutrition & Agriculture”

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