Just like the shrill “saturated fat and cholesterol will kill you!” theory of heart disease, the establishment war on salt is another poorly conceived charade with no foundation in sound science.
For years, I’ve been advising all my clients and anyone else who’ll listen to go ahead and salt their food. When it comes to athletes, especially those that experience large sweat losses from exercising in the heat, the anti-salt sham is more than just a pseudoscientific wank – it’s potentially dangerous.
When someone complains to me their energy levels tend to wane during hot and especially humid weather, and they can’t work out why, one of the first things I ask about is their salt intake. More often than not they’re on a low-salt diet, not for any justifiable medical reason, but simply because that’s what our supposedly all-knowing health authorities and the ‘experts’ who blindly follow their edicts tell them they should do.
My suggestion to these folks is to start adding salt to their foods, and to start adding a little salt to their drinking water and to the carb drinks they use during long training sessions. When this suggestion is on target – and it usually is – the improvements can be quite dramatic.
I’d dearly love to sit down and write an expose on the whole salt issue but, as my regular readers will know, when I throw myself into something it’s never a half-assed affair. The reality is I just don’t have the time at the moment to do this subject justice.
Thankfully, a report on this very issue has just been released by a panel of US researchers under the auspices of the Institute of Medicine of the National Academies. Titled “Sodium Intake in Populations: Assessment of Evidence”, you can access the PDF for free right here (you’ll need to register first).
If you want the Cliff notes version, Gina Kolata over at the New York Times has put together a worthy piece about the new report. She notes:
“In a report that undercuts years of public health warnings, a prestigious group convened by the government says there is no good reason based on health outcomes for many Americans to drive their sodium consumption down to the very low levels recommended in national dietary guidelines.”
She goes on to note that some studies not only show these guidelines to be of little efficacy, but to in fact increase mortality in certain patient groups.
The New York Times story can be read in full here:
No Benefit Seen in Sharp Limits on Salt in Diet
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Anthony Colpo is an independent researcher, physical conditioning specialist, and author of The Fat Loss Bible and The Great Cholesterol Con. For more information, visit TheFatLossBible.net or TheGreatCholesterolCon.com
Copyright © Anthony Colpo.
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