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Wednesday 27 April 2011

Dr. Jay Wortman on salt intake and diabetes.

We are constantly told salt is a killer and we all consume too much, everyone knows that, yes. I like many have cut back on it drastically over the last few years. A day never goes by when we don’t hear of the perils of saturated fat, the same pretty much goes for too much salt eh. Over the weekend on a UK diabetes forum a new member (forum name Canuck) known in the real world as Dr. Jay Wortman made some very interesting comments regarding salt, and general observations regarding sustainable long term lowcarb diets.

As so often on the forum in question, a person with an alternative point of view, a point of view that does not sit well with moderators and a small group of sycophants, all hell broke loose. The following debacle has been well documented on this blog, and resulted in Jay being banned, labelled a troll and most of his interesting and informative posts deleted.

One of the points Jay raised was the need to consume adequate quantities of salt, the know-alls rubbished his comment, but Jay got me thinking. Could we go too low on the salt ? Well the answer to that is yes we can, and it can lead to very serious consequences.

Check out the link.
 
CONCLUSIONS

In patients with type 2 diabetes, lower 24-h urinary sodium excretion was paradoxically associated with increased all-cause and cardiovascular mortality. Interventional studies are necessary to determine if dietary salt has a causative role in determining adverse outcomes in patients with type 2 diabetes and the appropriateness of guidelines advocating salt restriction in this setting.
 
Advice to reduce dietary salt intake is a key element of many lifestyle intervention programs for type 2 diabetes. However, the association between dietary salt intake and mortality outcomes has not been previously studied specifically in the context of type 2 diabetes. In this article, we show that 24hUNa was independently associated with all-cause and cardiovascular mortality in patients with type 2 diabetes such that the highest mortality risks were observed in individuals with the lowest sodium intake and vice versa. 


What a tragedy, that a forum that likes to describe itself as the largest diabetes forum in the UK, stifles immediately, anyone who goes against the dogma, or has an alternative point of view, especially when the moderator likes to state “"You see we have a great tradition on this Forum that we don't all blindly kowtow to medical people as if they have some right to tell us what we should do." Who is the guy kidding, not us for sure.

To be continued.

Eddie

http://care.diabetesjournals.org/content/34/3/703.full

5 comments:

Lowcarb warrior princess said...

Great to see that there are enlightened medics around, a shame that some people seem to feel threatened by fact, they should try reading Dr Jay's story & blog.

Anonymous said...

Hi Eddie,

That study on salt is interesting. They appear not to have considered that reduced carbohydrate will increase the rate of renal excretion. This appears to be the result of more than one mechanism. Insulin causes sodium retention in the distal tubule of the kidney. Fructose causes retention in the proximal tubule. A low-carb diet will dramatically lower both insulin levels and fructose levels which results in unimpeded sodium excretion. It appears that a high-carb diet interferes with normal sodium homeostasis in this manner and that carb reduction corrects that problem.

Regards,
Jay

Anonymous said...

I agree with lowcarb warrior princess a fascinating article, thank you.

AliB said...

It is interesting. I tried to email the linked author to see what kind of salt they used for the study - but the email address was 'bad'. There is a consensus that all salt is the same, but it isn't. The sea contains buffered SC, the blood contains buffered SC so the diet should contain buffered SC. Without all those 80+ minscule amounts of minerals and trace elements that are naturally present in Celtic sea salt, the body can't use the SC properly - or get rid of the excess properly. So that begs the question - is it really salt that is the problem, or is it actually refined salt that is the problem???

Anonymous said...

What an interesting article this is.

Check out Dr Wortmans story and blog.