A while back my co-blogger Adam took a stand against the anti-salt crusaders. In general the state of knowledge about healthy behaviors is fairly low. Pretty much all of us agree that activity is generally good for the cardiovascular system. Pretty much all of us agree that trans-fatty acids are likely bad for the cardiovascular system. We all agree that you need vitamins as well as fatty acids and essential proteins to survive.

I think the agreement pretty much ends there.

Even on issues like smoking and lung cancer – which the vast majority of people consider a closed case – has smart reasonable people arguing the other side. And, admittedly it is damn hard to find a randomized controlled trial that supports the notion that smoking causes lung cancer.

I say that not to cast doubt on the connection between smoking and lung cancer but just to show how hard it is to get any result in the field behavioral health. No one is going to let you forcibly subject human beings to long term exposure to something you believe to be deadly. Thus, scientific progress requires careful inference and is mind numbingly slow.

All that having been said here is the latest on salt courtesy of Huffpost HT to Mrs. Modeled Behavior

In an analysis that set off a fierce debate over the health effects of salt, researchers said on Wednesday they had found no evidence that small cuts to salt intake reduce the risk of developing heart disease or dying prematurely.

In a systematic review published by The Cochrane Library, British scientists found that while cutting salt consumption did appear to lead to slight reductions in blood pressure, that was not translated into lower death or heart disease risk.

The researchers said they suspected the trials conducted so far were not big enough to show any benefits to heart health, and called for large-scale studies to be carried out soon.

Perhaps larger scale studies will yield results. However, the same argument was made about fat and when the newer, larger scale study was done it came out with ziltch. The response was that a study that large could not possibly have the controls necessary to find an effect.

None of this is to say that there isn’t an effect in either case but we should be clear that the evidence is sorely lacking and that public health authorities have been bordering on dishonest about these issues.

I am always one to be skeptical about conspiracy theories but in this case I think the motivation and method used to promote the conspiracy are clear: people thought they were saving lives. Its hard to get people to band together into some giant united effort at deception but the idea that you are saving the world is one of the few things that can do it.

Unfortunately that type of zeal blinds folks to the data.

The salt case was riddled with issues from the start. Not least of which was that there was no real theory here. It is clear that salt could increase blood volume and thereby temporarily raise blood pressure. However, proponents of the salt theory were suggesting that permanent hypertension would result and from the start it was never exactly clear why this should be the case.

This happens shockingly often in medicine and health.

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