{"id":4799,"date":"2010-07-31T11:41:00","date_gmt":"2010-07-31T15:41:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/?p=4799"},"modified":"2024-12-03T15:50:41","modified_gmt":"2024-12-03T20:50:41","slug":"qotd-take-experts-advice-with-a-pinch-of-salt","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/2010\/07\/31\/qotd-take-experts-advice-with-a-pinch-of-salt\/","title":{"rendered":"QotD: Take experts&#8217; advice with a pinch of salt"},"content":{"rendered":"<blockquote>\n<p>More and more, the history of dietary guidelines that our public-health authorities promulgate resembles the Woody Allen comedy <em>Sleeper<\/em>, in which the main character, awaking from a centuries-long slumber, learns that every food we once thought bad for us is actually good, starting with steak and chocolate. But you wouldn\u2019t know that from government experts\u2019 increasing efforts to nudge us into their approved diets. In 2006, New York City passed the nation\u2019s first ban on the use of trans fats by restaurants, and other cities followed suit, though trans fats constitute just 2 percent of Americans\u2019 caloric intake. Now the Bloomberg administration is trying to push food manufacturers nationwide to reduce their use of salt &mdash; and the nutrition panel advising the FDA on the new guidelines similarly recommends reducing salt intake to a maximum of 1,500 milligrams daily (down from 2,300 a day previously). Yet Dr. Michael Alderman, a hypertension specialist at Albert Einstein College of Medicine, observed in the <em>New York Times<\/em> that because sodium is an essential component of our diets, the city\u2019s effort amounts to a giant uncontrolled experiment with the public\u2019s health that could have unintended consequences. And in 2006, Harvard Medical School professor Norman Hollenberg concluded that while some people benefit from reduced salt intake, the evidence \u201cis too inconsistent and generally too small to mandate policy decisions at the community level.\u201d <\/p>\n<p>Steven Malanga, <a href=\"http:\/\/www.city-journal.org\/2010\/20_3_snd-dietary-guidelines.html\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">&#8220;Egg on Their Faces: Government dietary advice often proves disastrous&#8221;, <em>City Journal<\/em><\/a>, 2010-07<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>More and more, the history of dietary guidelines that our public-health authorities promulgate resembles the Woody Allen comedy Sleeper, in which the main character, awaking from a centuries-long slumber, learns that every food we once thought bad for us is actually good, starting with steak and chocolate. But you wouldn\u2019t know that from government experts\u2019 [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":35193,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[8,74,66,28,41],"tags":[39,322,244,1543,1574],"class_list":["post-4799","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-bureaucracy","category-food","category-health-science","category-media","category-quotations","tag-junkscience","tag-nannystate","tag-publichealth","tag-salt","tag-technocracy"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/06\/favicon.png","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2hpV6-1fp","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4799","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4799"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4799\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":88786,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4799\/revisions\/88786"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/35193"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4799"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4799"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4799"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}