In repsonse to an email from them.
The evidence that salt in the diet is responsible for high blood pressure is not proven. Read Gary Taubes latest book, “Good Calories, Bad Calories” which uncovers much of the pop-science that has ruled our food choices over the past 50 years. The reason I stopped my subscription to Nutrition Action Newsletter is that I disagree with a large part of your organization’s philosophy. According to Taubes, and in my own research, the studies on which the salt hypothesis and the lipid hypothesis are based are nothing more than suppositions that have never been proven scientifically. Your fearless leader has bought into both of these with a certainty that is a little frightening. If you really have the public’s interest at heart, it’s time for you at CSPI to open your minds and see that in spite of decades of telling people to eat low fat, low salt diets, the nation has been getting increasingly overweight and chronic disease is becoming almost epidemic. This has coincided with a rise in refined carbohydrate consumption, specifically in the form of junk food/fast food. I’m with you 100% on getting people off the junk food but perhaps your efforts are better placed at pushing a farm bill that would encourage the resurgence of the family farm and stopping subsidies for single crops, alerting the public about GMO crops, and overall advocating for a cleaner, higher quality food supply. I know you do back these issues but more of this is what’s in order rather than perpetuating food myths that don’t stand up to close scrutiny. Fat is an essential part of the human diet – this has been proven scientifically over and over again. That includes saturated fat. The only problem is that the quality of the saturated fat in our food supply is compromised by factory farming – that should be your issue, not trying to get the fat out of people’s diets.
Filed under: Letters
