Tag Archives: sodium
FDA Issues Guidance on Dietary Salt
Written by Neil Kurtzman | 14th October 2021The FDA has issued guidance about dietary salt intake. Their advice needs to be taken with a grain of salt – sorry, I couldn’t resist. The summary below conveys their intent and message. The whole report is below and can be downloaded. This guidance supports the goal of reducing sodium intake as recommended by scientific…
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Salt Intake in Chronic Kidney Diease
Written by Neil Kurtzman | 24th January 2017How much salt people should eat continues to be a murky issue. A paper in the February 2017 issue of the American Journal of Kidney Diseases examines the issue of salt (actually sodium) intake on the prevention of cardiovascular disease in patients with chronic kidney diseases (CKD) stages 2-4. It is a commentary on an…
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Salt, Science, and Politics
Written by Neil Kurtzman | 1st June 2016Salt is in the news again. Thomas Frieden the head of the CDC published an article in the JAMA innocuously titled Sodium Reduction—Saving Lives by Putting Choice Into Consumers’ Hands. It more closely resembles propaganda than science. It argues that reducing dietary sodium intake to 1200 mg/day or less will lower the incidence of hypertension…
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Report of the Dietary Guidelines Committee
Written by Neil Kurtzman | 22nd February 2015The Scientific Report of the 2015 Dietary Guidelines Advisory Committee has just been released. At 571 pages it is a mind boggling compendium of recommendations and data that go far beyond diet alone. It’s useful as a source of information concerning almost every aspect of American life remotely connected with food and health. You want…
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Licorice and Hypokalemia
Written by Neil Kurtzman | 23rd May 2009I’ve been asked about licorice and hypokalemia. So here’s the short answer. The adrenal cortex make two classes of steroids – glucocorticoids (cortisol) and mineralocorticoids (aldosterone). Steroid hormones initiate their effect by activating an intracellular receptor. I’ll limit my discussion to the effect of aldosterone on the principal cell of the cortical collecting tubule. There…
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