http://rpc.technorati.com/rpc/ping
An Associated Press story in the morning paper, today, described a move by animal activists to make attacks on researchers who work with animals increasingly personal. Teams that used to hold placards outside conferences and labs now picket scientists’ homes. Some “animal rights” groups use bullhorns to send neighbors the message that “Your neighbor kills animals,” the story said.
These reports rile me up. On lots of levels. First, so-called animal-rights groups seek to compel change through brutish intimidation. They are, in a word, bullies. The goal here is not to change the minds of scientists about the value of their labors but to intimidate their families and annoy — if not enrage — their neighbors. (I don’t like neighbors’ dogs barking all day or night; bullhorn-bleating activists are just a human corollary.)
If these activists have a beef with scientists, they ought to compel with data or the law. If those don’t work, maybe the argument they’ve been trumpeting isn’t all that compelling after all.
Actually, I’d like to see someone probe the behaviors of these alleged animal guardians to see how well they practice what they preach. For instance, I strongly suspect that when the animal crusaders (and especially their loved ones) become ill or injured, they don’t eschew life-saving medicines and procedures that were first pioneered through animal research. And if they don’t, they’re hypocrites to picket, harass — and occasionally even destroy the research of — toxicologists and biomedical scientists.
The animal researchers I know truly love animals. Many trained as veterinarians. Their goal, indeed their passion, is the humane treatment of animals, often in service of understanding — and ultimately eliminating — threats to the health and well being of wildlife.
Another suspicion: Animal rights crusaders don’t have an abiding respect for all fauna. Indeed, I’d like to see some organization — perhaps a major biomedical research group — finance detectives to investigate how deeply animal-protection attitudes run in all members of the movement.
I suspect we’d find that if their homes were under siege by marauding termites or carpenter bees, they wouldn’t let the insects destroy those structures. If activists moved into a roach-infested apartment, they probably would not willingly let these pests share their food, beds, and their infants’ eyebrows (because yes, roaches will eat nails and brows). If their kindergartners were sent home with lice, what do you want to bet they’d just accept the infestation and resort to home schooling these kids?
This morning’s news story quoted Jerry Vlasak of the Animal Liberation Front as saying that although he would not advocate an animal-scientist’s murder, “if you had to hurt somebody or intimidate them or kill them, it would be morally justifiable.” I can’t begin to fathom what moral compass would lead him to that assessment. Such a comment also goes a long way toward undercutting the basic premise of protecting animals (of which Homo sapiens is but one).
I support every American’s first amendment right to free speech. But bullying and harassment is not protected by law in many jurisdictions. Moreover, if we’re talking morality here, which is more moral: to threaten the safety and life of a researcher engaged in studies that may improve the health, well-being, and longevity of millions of people or to threaten the lives of several dozen animals that were bred for the express purpose of being humanely sacrificed for highly regulated and well-supervised health studies?
Where good substitutes to animals in toxicology exist, I support their use. But initially validating even those may require the use of some animals for comparison purposes. And in many instances, good substitutes do not exist (for technical reasons). In those instances, I see no reason to substitute toddlers, grandpa, or college co-eds as our initial hypothesis-testing guinea pigs.
Instead of targeting scientists and harassing their families, I’d like to see animal activists focus their attention on those who not only encourage animal research but also provide most of its funding: Uncle Sam and Big Pharma. If the charge is that animal research is amoral, activists should engage constructively and deliberatively with those responsible for balancing the risks and benefits of research. Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire
But we should never give activists even tacit license to bully researchers, because in short order it may escalate to terrorism.
Wednesday, May 20, 2009
receptor sites 8.sit.33402 Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire
http://rpc.technorati.com/rpc/ping
Elderly people with excess amounts of the protein fetuin-A are more likely than others to develop type 2 diabetes, a new study finds. Because earlier work showed that the protein may interfere with the action of insulin, the new findings potentially implicate fetuin-A in diabetes and suggest the protein may make a good target for drug therapy.
Scientists have found fetuin-A tantalizing ever since lab experiments showed it competed with insulin to bind to receptor proteins on cells. By doing so, fetuin-A seems to crowd out insulin and prevent it from making glucose available to muscle cells.
“We don’t understand why one person who’s obese develops diabetes and another doesn’t,” says Joachim Ix, a nephrologist at the University of California, San Diego and coauthor on the study. Fetuin-A may play a role since it seems to operate irrespective of weight, he notes. That could help doctors to identify people at hidden risk of developing diabetes. “Ultimately that might lead to different therapies in these two different kinds of people,” Ix says.
Further research in mice genetically engineered to lack fetuin-A showed that the animals were the mirror opposites of mice with diabetes. “They were lean, mean mice machines,” Ix says.
Those early findings led Ix and his colleagues to assess the protein’s role in people. The researchers identified healthy elderly individuals who had participated in a medical study starting in the late 1990s while they were all still in their 70s. Each volunteer had given a blood sample at the start of the study. Ix and his team identified 135 people in the study who had developed type 2 diabetes during the six-year study period and another 384 who hadn’t.
High levels of fetuin-A in the blood increased the risk of diabetes by 70 percent.
The researchers accounted for differences between the groups in age, gender, obesity, lifestyle, blood pressure, blood sugar, cholesterol and proteins associated with inflammation. The study appears in the July 9 Journal of the American Medical Association.
“We think fetuin-A is a bad guy,” says Suresh Mathews, a molecular biologist at Auburn University in Alabama. He and his colleagues did much of the initial work establishing fetuin-A’s link to the insulin receptor.
Mathews says the new study breaks ground. A link to diabetes in a longitudinal study in which people are tracked over time hadn’t been shown before, he says.
Several groups are currently studying fetuin-A’s actions in the body. While there is keen interest in developing a drug that neutralizes fetuin-A, a drug doesn’t exist yet. “I think that has a lot for potential to be useful, but it’s not quite ready for prime time,” Ix says.Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire
Mathews’ working hypothesis is that the protein serves as a brake for insulin, to keep people from becoming hypoglycemic if the hormone doesn’t shut off appropriately.
But treatment may not be as simple as turning off the fetuin-A spigot, Mathews says. The protein also seems to regulate calcium levels in the blood. Disturbing that role could cause crystallization of calcium in blood vessels and other part of the body, causing other health problems. Ideally, he says, a drug would disable fetuin-A’s ability to crowd out insulin at the receptor sites while not disrupting its blood-calcium duties.
Elderly people with excess amounts of the protein fetuin-A are more likely than others to develop type 2 diabetes, a new study finds. Because earlier work showed that the protein may interfere with the action of insulin, the new findings potentially implicate fetuin-A in diabetes and suggest the protein may make a good target for drug therapy.
Scientists have found fetuin-A tantalizing ever since lab experiments showed it competed with insulin to bind to receptor proteins on cells. By doing so, fetuin-A seems to crowd out insulin and prevent it from making glucose available to muscle cells.
“We don’t understand why one person who’s obese develops diabetes and another doesn’t,” says Joachim Ix, a nephrologist at the University of California, San Diego and coauthor on the study. Fetuin-A may play a role since it seems to operate irrespective of weight, he notes. That could help doctors to identify people at hidden risk of developing diabetes. “Ultimately that might lead to different therapies in these two different kinds of people,” Ix says.
Further research in mice genetically engineered to lack fetuin-A showed that the animals were the mirror opposites of mice with diabetes. “They were lean, mean mice machines,” Ix says.
Those early findings led Ix and his colleagues to assess the protein’s role in people. The researchers identified healthy elderly individuals who had participated in a medical study starting in the late 1990s while they were all still in their 70s. Each volunteer had given a blood sample at the start of the study. Ix and his team identified 135 people in the study who had developed type 2 diabetes during the six-year study period and another 384 who hadn’t.
High levels of fetuin-A in the blood increased the risk of diabetes by 70 percent.
The researchers accounted for differences between the groups in age, gender, obesity, lifestyle, blood pressure, blood sugar, cholesterol and proteins associated with inflammation. The study appears in the July 9 Journal of the American Medical Association.
“We think fetuin-A is a bad guy,” says Suresh Mathews, a molecular biologist at Auburn University in Alabama. He and his colleagues did much of the initial work establishing fetuin-A’s link to the insulin receptor.
Mathews says the new study breaks ground. A link to diabetes in a longitudinal study in which people are tracked over time hadn’t been shown before, he says.
Several groups are currently studying fetuin-A’s actions in the body. While there is keen interest in developing a drug that neutralizes fetuin-A, a drug doesn’t exist yet. “I think that has a lot for potential to be useful, but it’s not quite ready for prime time,” Ix says.Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire
Mathews’ working hypothesis is that the protein serves as a brake for insulin, to keep people from becoming hypoglycemic if the hormone doesn’t shut off appropriately.
But treatment may not be as simple as turning off the fetuin-A spigot, Mathews says. The protein also seems to regulate calcium levels in the blood. Disturbing that role could cause crystallization of calcium in blood vessels and other part of the body, causing other health problems. Ideally, he says, a drug would disable fetuin-A’s ability to crowd out insulin at the receptor sites while not disrupting its blood-calcium duties.
Monday, May 4, 2009
calcium 3.cal.223 Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire
http://rpc.technorati.com/rpc/ping
Children born to older fathers might have an increased risk of developing bipolar disorder, Swedish researchers report in the September Archives of General Psychiatry.
The finding is a statistical association drawn from a large population survey. But it falls in line with earlier studies suggesting that children sired by older men face a greater-than-average risk of being stillborn, miscarried or having schizophrenia, cancer or autism.
The theory linking paternal age with an offspring’s health rests on the genetics of aging sperm. Spontaneous mutations can accumulate in the genes of a man’s sperm cells as he ages. These cells divide as many as 660 times by the time a man reaches 40, by some estimates. Each division increases the risk of acquiring a harmful mutation from erroneous gene copying, the theory holds.
Women don’t face this risk since the number of eggs a woman carries is set at birth, each having divided 23 times at that point and no more. But older women do face a higher risk of having a child with Down syndrome.
In the new study, epidemiologist Emma Frans of the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm and her colleagues used a national registry to identify 13,428 people who had been diagnosed with bipolar disorder during at least two hospital admissions. For comparison purposes, each of these individuals was matched with five randomly selected people of the same gender and year of birth.
People fathered by men 55 or older had a 37 percent greater risk of being bipolar than those sired by men age 20 through 24. If the father was age 30 through 54, he imparted only a modestly increased risk. Being sired by a father age 25 through 29 did not add a risk. The researchers accounted for education level, age of the mother, family history of psychotic disorders and the number of children the mother had.
For people diagnosed with bipolar disorder before age 20, the late paternity effect was even more pronounced. Researchers found that people born to men over age 40 seemed to incur double the risk of being bipolar in youth as those fathered by men in their early 20s. Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire
Other studies have suggested that having a close, personal relative with bipolar disorder increases a person’s risk of developing the condition. That association’s increase is much greater than any risk from merely having an older father, Frans says.
Bipolar disorder appears to have a clear genetic component, particularly when the condition shows up in youth, says epidemiologist Ronald Kessler of Harvard Medical School in Boston. But this study may not catch all men with bipolar disorder, and many bipolar men go through multiple marriages and often father children as they go along, he says. http://LOUIS-J-SHEEHAN-ESQUIRE.US
“I wonder whether men who have more severe bipolar disorder are just more likely to have kids at 40 or 50?” he asks. If so, that would exaggerate any risk seemingly imparted by aging itself, he says. The explanation “may be a psychosocial one,” he says.
Children born to older fathers might have an increased risk of developing bipolar disorder, Swedish researchers report in the September Archives of General Psychiatry.
The finding is a statistical association drawn from a large population survey. But it falls in line with earlier studies suggesting that children sired by older men face a greater-than-average risk of being stillborn, miscarried or having schizophrenia, cancer or autism.
The theory linking paternal age with an offspring’s health rests on the genetics of aging sperm. Spontaneous mutations can accumulate in the genes of a man’s sperm cells as he ages. These cells divide as many as 660 times by the time a man reaches 40, by some estimates. Each division increases the risk of acquiring a harmful mutation from erroneous gene copying, the theory holds.
Women don’t face this risk since the number of eggs a woman carries is set at birth, each having divided 23 times at that point and no more. But older women do face a higher risk of having a child with Down syndrome.
In the new study, epidemiologist Emma Frans of the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm and her colleagues used a national registry to identify 13,428 people who had been diagnosed with bipolar disorder during at least two hospital admissions. For comparison purposes, each of these individuals was matched with five randomly selected people of the same gender and year of birth.
People fathered by men 55 or older had a 37 percent greater risk of being bipolar than those sired by men age 20 through 24. If the father was age 30 through 54, he imparted only a modestly increased risk. Being sired by a father age 25 through 29 did not add a risk. The researchers accounted for education level, age of the mother, family history of psychotic disorders and the number of children the mother had.
For people diagnosed with bipolar disorder before age 20, the late paternity effect was even more pronounced. Researchers found that people born to men over age 40 seemed to incur double the risk of being bipolar in youth as those fathered by men in their early 20s. Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire
Other studies have suggested that having a close, personal relative with bipolar disorder increases a person’s risk of developing the condition. That association’s increase is much greater than any risk from merely having an older father, Frans says.
Bipolar disorder appears to have a clear genetic component, particularly when the condition shows up in youth, says epidemiologist Ronald Kessler of Harvard Medical School in Boston. But this study may not catch all men with bipolar disorder, and many bipolar men go through multiple marriages and often father children as they go along, he says. http://LOUIS-J-SHEEHAN-ESQUIRE.US
“I wonder whether men who have more severe bipolar disorder are just more likely to have kids at 40 or 50?” he asks. If so, that would exaggerate any risk seemingly imparted by aging itself, he says. The explanation “may be a psychosocial one,” he says.
Friday, May 1, 2009
salt 6.sal.004 Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire
http://rpc.technorati.com/rpc/ping
When you look at your food, some ingredients are easy to see. For example, there is obviously milk in your cereal, cheese on your pizza and peanut butter on your toast.
But your meals are also filled with ingredients you can’t see. And you might be surprised to learn just how much those hidden items affect your health.
Salt is a perfect example of an ingredient that you might not notice, even when you eat a lot of it.
Sometimes, salt is obvious. You can see it on pretzels. You can taste it on french fries. And you can sprinkle it on green beans, straight from the shaker.
But it’s the salt we can’t see that concerns scientists most. For decades, doctors have warned patients that too much salt can be bad for their hearts. Still, most Americans continue to eat way too much salt, even when they try to avoid the salt shaker.
That’s because more than 75 percent of the salt we eat is hidden in restaurant meals, fast food and processed foods, such as spaghetti sauce from a jar, canned soup and frozen pizza. Often, you can’t even taste that the salt is there.
Heart trouble has long been considered a grown-up problem, and parents haven’t worried too much about the salt their kids eat. But new research suggests that salt is starting to affect kids — in their hearts, kidneys and waistlines.
Loading up on salt-filled potato chips, hot dogs and canned tuna today could also set young people up for even more health problems down the road.
“Most national heads of policy-making bodies in the United States and Canada and Great Britain are reaching the same conclusion,” says Lawrence Appel, professor of medicine at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine in Baltimore. “Reduce your salt intake.”
Straight to the heart
Salt is made up of two elements, or basic components: sodium and chlorine. When put in food or liquid, salt, also called sodium chloride, or NaCl, breaks into its two elements.
The chlorine part of salt isn’t that important. It’s the sodium that can stir up trouble.
We need a small amount of sodium to keep our muscles working and our nerves sending messages throughout the body. But the amount of sodium we actually need is really tiny: about 500 milligrams, or less than a quarter teaspoon of salt. A little bit goes a long way.
access
Enlargemagnify
Want salt with that?Some foods just cry out for extra salt, like these fries. That can make them a bad meal choice.Burke/Triolo
Dietary guidelines in the United States and elsewhere recommend that healthy adults consume no more than 2,300 milligrams of sodium a day. That’s about a teaspoonful of salt.
Kids ages 9 to 13 should eat no more than 1,500 to 2,200 mg of sodium a day. Younger kids should get even less.
But the average American eats about twice the recommended daily amount. This worries doctors because too much sodium can cause the body to produce more blood. To pump the extra blood, the heart has to work extra hard. This leads to a rise in blood pressure — a measurement of how stressed out the heart is. High blood pressure, also known as hypertension, often leads to heart disease. Heart disease is the leading cause of death in the United States and can lead to ailments like heart attacks.
“Ninety percent of adult Americans develop hypertension in their lifetimes,” Appel says. It’s a big problem.
You are what you eat
Salt isn’t the only cause of hypertension. Eating lots of junk food, weighing too much and exercising too little also contribute to high blood pressure. But a large number of studies suggest that salt is a major player.
Some of the most powerful strikes against salt come from a pair of studies that took place in the 1990s. The goal of the research was to figure out if what we eat affects blood pressure, and if so, how much.
As part of the studies, hundreds of adults ate exactly what researchers told them to. Called DASH, these studies lasted for months at a time.
The results showed a sizeable drop in blood pressure in people who ate extra fruits and vegetables, lots of whole grains, low-fat dairy products and only small amounts of red meat, sweet treats and fatty foods like fast food and donuts. Eating well, the researchers concluded, is good for your heart.
But blood pressure levels dropped even more when participants who followed the diet described above also lessened their salt intake. In the first DASH study, participants ate a relatively high level of salt — 3,300 mg a day. In the second DASH study, participants’ salt intake dropped to as low as 1,500 mg a day. The low-salt, healthy eating program became known as the DASH diet, and doctors now recommend it to both adults and kids.
“The DASH diet reduces blood pressure in the whole population,” says Eva Obarzanek, a registered dietician and research nutritionist with the National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute in Bethesda, Md. Better yet, she says, the diet works “as much as any [blood-pressure] drug would.”
What’s more, studies from around the world show that hypertension and heart disease rates are lowest in places where people eat the least amount of salt. (In fact, the Yanomami Indians of South America eat very little sodium and have lower blood pressure readings than American 10-year-olds.)
And in a 2007 study, scientists turned up the first direct link between salt and heart disease. They found that cutting down on salt now can lower a person’s risk of heart disease 10 to 15 years in the future.
access
Enlargemagnify
Well dressed?Although most salad offerings, with the exception of olives and other pickled foods, tend to be low in salt, salad dressings can have plenty. Check out the sodium content on the label before splashing plenty on your veggies.Burke/Triolo
“The bottom line is that high sodium levels are definitely bad for you,” Obarzanek says. “It affects everybody. And it’s important even if you don’t have high blood pressure [now], because you’re likely to get it as you get older.”
Start thinking about salt now
Like most kids, you probably don’t spend much time worrying about heart disease. After all, hypertension tends to become more common as people reach middle age and older.
But doctors say it’s never too early to start thinking about your heart — or about salt.
Blood pressure has been going up over the past decade in children and teenagers in the United States and many European countries. And a kid with high blood pressure is more likely to become a grown-up with hypertension.
“It’s better to not have a lifelong exposure to high blood pressure,” Obarzanek says.
Cutting down on salt might help stop the cycle. In one recent study, researchers from the United Kingdom analyzed 10 trials involving nearly 1,000 kids. The trial results showed that lowering sodium intake by 40 to 50 percent led to a significant decrease in blood pressure, even in infants.
Reducing salt might also help combat childhood obesity, a growing public health problem. British researchers recently found that kids who eat less salt also drink fewer sugary soft drinks. Drinking less soda makes kids less likely to gain weight, become obese and develop high blood pressure.
And salt can affect more than just your heart and weight. A study published in October found that a growing number of kids in the U.S are suffering from an ailment called kidney stones. This painful condition used to mostly affect people in their 40s and older. Now, kids as young as 5 are getting it.
The kidneys are responsible for filtering salt out of the bloodstream. So researchers think that kids eating too much salt and not drinking enough water are partly to blame for the trend.
How to lick salt
If you’re like most people, cutting down on salt can be tough, says Gary Beauchamp, director of the Monell Chemical Senses Center in Philadelphia.
His research shows that when given larger and larger amounts of sodium, people want more and more of it. Even babies drink more formula when it’s saltier. That preference starts as early as 4 months old.
Getting used to eating less salt, on the other hand, can take months. And low-sodium food might taste gross at first when you’re used to highly salted versions.
The good news is that you can retrain your taste buds to prefer less salty food. And now is a good time to do it: Research shows that what you eat as a kid strongly influences what you’ll like as an adult. So, the more salt (or sugar, or even spices, such as hot chili powder) you eat now, the more likely you are to crave those ingredients later. And later, your heart might be weaker and less able to handle a heavy salt load.
“It’s an easy change to make at virtually no cost,” says Darwin Labarthe, director of the Division for Heart Disease and Stroke Prevention at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta. “And it has an immense health impact.”
The best way to reduce the amount of sodium you consume, researchers say, is to make changes gradually. Start by sprinkling half as much salt on your dinner as you normally do. Switch to fresh foods instead of canned and bottled versions. And go easy on the condiments. Things like ketchup, soy sauce and salad dressing can carry far more sodium than you might expect.
You might also want to start reading nutrition labels. You may be surprised to find out that a serving of tomato sauce has more than 500 mg of sodium. And that there are 1,150 mg of sodium in a McDonald’s double cheeseburger, and more than 2,000 mg in many frozen meals.
“Kids today need to give salt the shake,” says David Grotto, a dietician and author in Chicago, “For overall health’s sake.”
When you look at your food, some ingredients are easy to see. For example, there is obviously milk in your cereal, cheese on your pizza and peanut butter on your toast.
But your meals are also filled with ingredients you can’t see. And you might be surprised to learn just how much those hidden items affect your health.
Salt is a perfect example of an ingredient that you might not notice, even when you eat a lot of it.
Sometimes, salt is obvious. You can see it on pretzels. You can taste it on french fries. And you can sprinkle it on green beans, straight from the shaker.
But it’s the salt we can’t see that concerns scientists most. For decades, doctors have warned patients that too much salt can be bad for their hearts. Still, most Americans continue to eat way too much salt, even when they try to avoid the salt shaker.
That’s because more than 75 percent of the salt we eat is hidden in restaurant meals, fast food and processed foods, such as spaghetti sauce from a jar, canned soup and frozen pizza. Often, you can’t even taste that the salt is there.
Heart trouble has long been considered a grown-up problem, and parents haven’t worried too much about the salt their kids eat. But new research suggests that salt is starting to affect kids — in their hearts, kidneys and waistlines.
Loading up on salt-filled potato chips, hot dogs and canned tuna today could also set young people up for even more health problems down the road.
“Most national heads of policy-making bodies in the United States and Canada and Great Britain are reaching the same conclusion,” says Lawrence Appel, professor of medicine at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine in Baltimore. “Reduce your salt intake.”
Straight to the heart
Salt is made up of two elements, or basic components: sodium and chlorine. When put in food or liquid, salt, also called sodium chloride, or NaCl, breaks into its two elements.
The chlorine part of salt isn’t that important. It’s the sodium that can stir up trouble.
We need a small amount of sodium to keep our muscles working and our nerves sending messages throughout the body. But the amount of sodium we actually need is really tiny: about 500 milligrams, or less than a quarter teaspoon of salt. A little bit goes a long way.
access
Enlargemagnify
Want salt with that?Some foods just cry out for extra salt, like these fries. That can make them a bad meal choice.Burke/Triolo
Dietary guidelines in the United States and elsewhere recommend that healthy adults consume no more than 2,300 milligrams of sodium a day. That’s about a teaspoonful of salt.
Kids ages 9 to 13 should eat no more than 1,500 to 2,200 mg of sodium a day. Younger kids should get even less.
But the average American eats about twice the recommended daily amount. This worries doctors because too much sodium can cause the body to produce more blood. To pump the extra blood, the heart has to work extra hard. This leads to a rise in blood pressure — a measurement of how stressed out the heart is. High blood pressure, also known as hypertension, often leads to heart disease. Heart disease is the leading cause of death in the United States and can lead to ailments like heart attacks.
“Ninety percent of adult Americans develop hypertension in their lifetimes,” Appel says. It’s a big problem.
You are what you eat
Salt isn’t the only cause of hypertension. Eating lots of junk food, weighing too much and exercising too little also contribute to high blood pressure. But a large number of studies suggest that salt is a major player.
Some of the most powerful strikes against salt come from a pair of studies that took place in the 1990s. The goal of the research was to figure out if what we eat affects blood pressure, and if so, how much.
As part of the studies, hundreds of adults ate exactly what researchers told them to. Called DASH, these studies lasted for months at a time.
The results showed a sizeable drop in blood pressure in people who ate extra fruits and vegetables, lots of whole grains, low-fat dairy products and only small amounts of red meat, sweet treats and fatty foods like fast food and donuts. Eating well, the researchers concluded, is good for your heart.
But blood pressure levels dropped even more when participants who followed the diet described above also lessened their salt intake. In the first DASH study, participants ate a relatively high level of salt — 3,300 mg a day. In the second DASH study, participants’ salt intake dropped to as low as 1,500 mg a day. The low-salt, healthy eating program became known as the DASH diet, and doctors now recommend it to both adults and kids.
“The DASH diet reduces blood pressure in the whole population,” says Eva Obarzanek, a registered dietician and research nutritionist with the National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute in Bethesda, Md. Better yet, she says, the diet works “as much as any [blood-pressure] drug would.”
What’s more, studies from around the world show that hypertension and heart disease rates are lowest in places where people eat the least amount of salt. (In fact, the Yanomami Indians of South America eat very little sodium and have lower blood pressure readings than American 10-year-olds.)
And in a 2007 study, scientists turned up the first direct link between salt and heart disease. They found that cutting down on salt now can lower a person’s risk of heart disease 10 to 15 years in the future.
access
Enlargemagnify
Well dressed?Although most salad offerings, with the exception of olives and other pickled foods, tend to be low in salt, salad dressings can have plenty. Check out the sodium content on the label before splashing plenty on your veggies.Burke/Triolo
“The bottom line is that high sodium levels are definitely bad for you,” Obarzanek says. “It affects everybody. And it’s important even if you don’t have high blood pressure [now], because you’re likely to get it as you get older.”
Start thinking about salt now
Like most kids, you probably don’t spend much time worrying about heart disease. After all, hypertension tends to become more common as people reach middle age and older.
But doctors say it’s never too early to start thinking about your heart — or about salt.
Blood pressure has been going up over the past decade in children and teenagers in the United States and many European countries. And a kid with high blood pressure is more likely to become a grown-up with hypertension.
“It’s better to not have a lifelong exposure to high blood pressure,” Obarzanek says.
Cutting down on salt might help stop the cycle. In one recent study, researchers from the United Kingdom analyzed 10 trials involving nearly 1,000 kids. The trial results showed that lowering sodium intake by 40 to 50 percent led to a significant decrease in blood pressure, even in infants.
Reducing salt might also help combat childhood obesity, a growing public health problem. British researchers recently found that kids who eat less salt also drink fewer sugary soft drinks. Drinking less soda makes kids less likely to gain weight, become obese and develop high blood pressure.
And salt can affect more than just your heart and weight. A study published in October found that a growing number of kids in the U.S are suffering from an ailment called kidney stones. This painful condition used to mostly affect people in their 40s and older. Now, kids as young as 5 are getting it.
The kidneys are responsible for filtering salt out of the bloodstream. So researchers think that kids eating too much salt and not drinking enough water are partly to blame for the trend.
How to lick salt
If you’re like most people, cutting down on salt can be tough, says Gary Beauchamp, director of the Monell Chemical Senses Center in Philadelphia.
His research shows that when given larger and larger amounts of sodium, people want more and more of it. Even babies drink more formula when it’s saltier. That preference starts as early as 4 months old.
Getting used to eating less salt, on the other hand, can take months. And low-sodium food might taste gross at first when you’re used to highly salted versions.
The good news is that you can retrain your taste buds to prefer less salty food. And now is a good time to do it: Research shows that what you eat as a kid strongly influences what you’ll like as an adult. So, the more salt (or sugar, or even spices, such as hot chili powder) you eat now, the more likely you are to crave those ingredients later. And later, your heart might be weaker and less able to handle a heavy salt load.
“It’s an easy change to make at virtually no cost,” says Darwin Labarthe, director of the Division for Heart Disease and Stroke Prevention at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta. “And it has an immense health impact.”
The best way to reduce the amount of sodium you consume, researchers say, is to make changes gradually. Start by sprinkling half as much salt on your dinner as you normally do. Switch to fresh foods instead of canned and bottled versions. And go easy on the condiments. Things like ketchup, soy sauce and salad dressing can carry far more sodium than you might expect.
You might also want to start reading nutrition labels. You may be surprised to find out that a serving of tomato sauce has more than 500 mg of sodium. And that there are 1,150 mg of sodium in a McDonald’s double cheeseburger, and more than 2,000 mg in many frozen meals.
“Kids today need to give salt the shake,” says David Grotto, a dietician and author in Chicago, “For overall health’s sake.”
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