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The FDA is asking food makers and eating establishments to voluntarily reduce salt levels in their products to help reduce Americans' high salt intake.
The draft guidelines target these sources of salt with the goal of reducing Americans' average daily salt intake from 3,400 milligrams (mg) a day to 2,300 mg a day.
[...] Currently, 90 percent of American adults consume more salt than recommended, the FDA pointed out.
[...] The public has until the fall to comment on the FDA's voluntary salt guidelines for food manufacturers and restaurants.
The FDA claims that people can always add more salt to their food, which is true, but they ignore that salt changes how food is cooked and adding salt to the surface of food affects taste differently than when it is evenly distributed.
http://www.medicinenet.com/script/main/art.asp?articlekey=197193
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Health_effects_of_salt
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday July 27 2016, @01:11AM
No, science has proven itself reliable. As I said, the problem with some research is that it's not science (ie rarely is anything replicated, rarely is anything predicted with any kind of precision, etc), so you get fads rather than accumulation of knowledge.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by aristarchus on Wednesday July 27 2016, @02:21AM
As I said, the problem with some research is that it's not science (ie rarely is anything replicated, rarely is anything predicted with any kind of precision, etc), so you get fads rather than accumulation of knowledge.
Some research? Exactly what research do you refer to? We are talking the FDA, USian Food and Drug Administration, not Paleo Diet or homeopathy. Do you think the FDA operates on the basis of fads?
I think you need to wave your hands away from such general discounting of nutritional research, and towards some specifics, or you are just blowing smoke or trying to start a fad. Anti-science fad.
(Score: 2) by Whoever on Wednesday July 27 2016, @04:55AM
I think that the problem has been a lack of science in the recommendations. How many diet recommendations have been shown to be useless when actually subjected to experimentation in the last few decades. Science is good, but it has been seriously lacking when it comes to nutrition.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday July 27 2016, @09:31PM
Science is the PROBLEM. Let the Free Market solve it! It will efficiently find the best nutrition for you and your family, in 233 delicious flavors. Order now and get a free ab rocker(TM).
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday July 27 2016, @07:24AM
Argumentum ad verecundiam, magister?
Are they really so infallible? (fat bad, sugar good for decades)
(Score: 2) by aristarchus on Wednesday July 27 2016, @07:59AM
Scientific consensus changes with further research. Doesn't mean all research is "different" or that the scientific consensus is a "fad". All I am asking for is specifics, not some kind of vaxxer argument!
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday July 27 2016, @08:31AM
Too bad that scientific consensus of a time may end indistinguishable from as a fad, however amount of honest work is poured in that research - that's inherently linked with the human limitations, can't get around them.
And it's also true that some sciences are more prone to quasi-fads, especially those sciences which need to rely mainly on observations rather the experiments (astrophysics, weather, anything that relates with socials).
I'll let this [xkcd.com] for you as an exercise in grokking - set aside the humour and feel the reason there's a grain of truth in there
(epistemology - by no means a science itself, you already know that, but at least it organizes a bit the view over science).
(Score: 1) by kurenai.tsubasa on Wednesday July 27 2016, @02:12PM
Do you think the FDA operates on the basis of fads?
On these matters, yes, absolutely, emphatically. Fads and probably the corn lobby.
Pretty much every diet recommendation out there from Paleo (which region's Paleo???) to Atkins to fat-causes-fat are fads. It's pretty much all cargo cult science. Remember the food pyramid? The closest thing I can find to something resembling science is the research that's gone into showing added sugar may be a big problem. (Of course the people who go on about fructose!!!eleven! corn syrup!!eleven! seem to have troubles both with orgchem. One would find it difficult to find an apple without fructose. And don't even get me started on the gluten crowd—people with celiac disease excluded.)
I think you're confusing the more important aspects of the FDA such as vetting drugs with its apparent tendency to want to play mommy and create One Diet to Rule Them All.
The FDA clamps down on fat, salt, cholesterol, whatever the “bad” thing in food is this week, and food manufacturers just keep adding sugar to compensate. Then we find out a decade later that “whoops! we goofed! it's actually good for you!” Except the low-fat, no-salt, sugar-loaded crap doesn't come off the shelves, and the FDA is even slower getting the memo.
I'm perfectly aware of how science gets done, and being wrong is part of that process. There's nothing wrong with being wrong when we're doing science. We need more than longitudinal studies that too often mix up correlation and causation (it's knee-jerk here for a reason) and meta-analyses before we start calling common components in food “bad.” For longitudinal studies especially, anybody with an agenda can cook up one of those to show whatever the hell they wanted to show. I'm sure I could show bacon++ having great health benefits if Soylent would like to find my research!
I don't even like salty foods, but my body doesn't retain sodium well, especially when it gets hot and humid enough that I can't move without being drenched in sweat. So I end up drinking Gatorade (it's got 'lectrolytes, apparently what my body craves). That's the advice they gave me when they released me from the hospital after I'd been there for 5 days with low sodium.
I'm sure I'd be singing a different tune if they'd told me, oh, you have $some_rare_condition, but they didn't.
Now I'm not (that) unreasonable. If we get single payer healthcare, I'll go back to being a good little girl and avoiding salt, as long as they're able to keep giving me a private room whenever I need a saline drip for a few days. …and put me farther away from that guy who showed up at 6 and yelled at his grandmother for 3 hours every day… could do without that. It's kind of relaxing, not having a care in the world for a few days…. If I'm paying, I'd rather go on a month-long luxury cruise for the same price.
Really, the best thing that the FDA could do if it wanted to promote a healthy diet would be to convince people to or help people learn how to cook their own food again. It really all starts with a well-equipped (this can be done well enough on the cheap too, nothing fancy needed), organized, and clean kitchen.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday July 27 2016, @10:35PM
By all means, find it already.