Salt No Longer Generally Recognized As Safe?

The Center for Science in the Public Interest is at it again:

http://www.cfsan.fda.gov/~comm/registe7.html

First they spread the junk science that indicates that saturated fat is bad for you.  Now they are spreading the junk science that dietary sodium causes high blood pressure.  It seems to me that an organization that claims to act in the public interest ought, you know, to understand something about what’s in the public interest.

If CSPI really cared about reducing blood pressure naturally, without putting a lot of money in the hands of the pharmaceutical companies, they would give up on the ineffective crusade to remove salt from processed foods and concentrate on removing sugar’s Generally Recognized As Safe (GRAS) designation.  Because it is dietary carbohydrate, not dietary salt, that causes blood pressure to rise, by increasing insulin, which signals the kidneys to hold onto water.  Any low-carb dieter can tell you that after the first two days of carb restriction, you will experience what I call The Whoosh - you drink maybe four or five glasses of water in a day, and you excrete maybe 10 or 12!  The Whoosh usually lasts for only a day, because if you continue to eat low-carb, the water doesn’t comes back.  This makes it preferable to the chemical diuretics that you have to take daily to get rid of excess fluid, because you’ve never actually corrected the problem - excess insulin - that makes you retain water in the first place.  If you take a chemical diuretic, every day you are flushing out extra water, and every day insulin tells your kidneys, Hey, hold onto that stuff!

(I will only touch on the idea that salt also has a preservative effect, so if food manufacturers reduce the salt content of foods, they are probably going to substitute some truly toxic chemical in its place.  Look, I eat far fewer manufactured foods than most Americans, so in one way I don’t really care; but at the same time, I pay for other people’s ill health in the form of increased insurance premiums and increased taxes.  So it would be nice if corporations weren’t poisoning us all in the name of “the public interest.”)

So, Michael Jacobson, if you google your name and happen upon this entry, I beg you:  get your attorneys to go through all the legal paperwork surrounding this lawsuit and replace “salt” with “sugar.”  If you do this, then perhaps the Center for Science in the Public Interest will, for once, actually be acting in the public interest.

Oh, and Mr. Jacobson, while you’re at it, can you do something about MSG?  My migraineur friends, as well as folks with other neurological disorders like Parkinson’s, epilepsy, Alzheimers, and MS would thank you if you could do something to get this poison removed from the food supply.