Cave Salem!

If my blog and I were transported back in time, and you, Dear Reader, were an Ancient Roman, then I might well say to you, "Cave salem!" thus giving you a bit of advice to improve your health. Though of course, as an Ancient Roman, you would not be particularly in need of that bit of advice...(o: 

 

But in our present-day culture, and speaking in English, I say, "Beware of salt!" and that is a very necessary warning for most people, because there is way too much added salt in our modern diets. The Food Industry ladles a great deal of salt into the ready meals and other processed food products it manufactures. - Excessive salt intake may well be contributing to your weight problem, or to your high blood pressure and breathlessness. It may well have been the main factor in the stroke or heart attack you had or any/all of the chronic ill-health you suffer. - Be that as it may, if you cut down on the amount of salt and salty food you eat, you will feel ever so much better, have more energy and think more clearly. Give it a try! - Read about salt in food.

If you are going to start taking prescribed steroids, e.g. prednisone, or prescribed antidepressants, e.g. amitriptyline, you would be wise to avoid food containing added salt

If you are going to start taking prescribed HRT or steroids, e.g. prednisone, or prescribed antidepressants, e.g. amitriptyline, you would be wise to avoid food containing added salt/sodium. See my webpages http://www.wildeaboutsteroids.co.uk/steroids.html and http://www.wildeaboutsteroids.co.uk/ami.html. See also my webpage about salt/sodium in food.

Health Campaigning Charities - creatures of the Drug Industry?

The Pharmaceutical Industry has a malign influence on the big health campaigning charities. I have visited this subject before: see http://wildeaboutobesity.blogspot.co.uk/2012/05/for-new-perspective-on-conflicts-of.html This corruption has been brought to my attention again because some journalists and other concerned individuals/bodies, e.g. here, have been drawing attention recently to the way big charities have been subverted away from their original charitable aims and objectives. They have become instead bloated, overpaid quangos, largely funded from taxation, serving political aims, campaigning for political objectives and deceiving ordinary citizens into donating their time, money and effort to organisations they would not want to fund if they knew the truth about them.

 

My own particular concern is the big health campaigning charities, which I regard as a front for promoting pharmaceutical drugs and thereby increasing the profits of Big Pharma. If drug promotion benefited people's health, I would not be against it. But that is not the case.

 

When the aim is to get more and more people taking prescription drugs, rather than the aim being to prevent, ameliorate or cure the disease, we are clearly in a dystopian world of lies and corruption, of blighted lives and unnecessary suffering. Although these health charities give a modicum of good advice, it is outweighed by misinformation, drug promotion and failure to draw attention to simple, really useful dietary measures. Here are some examples:

 

A crucial dietary measure that would reduce the incidence and severity of childhood asthma is to avoid feeding children salty meals and snacks. - See this article, where you will read, "According to a new study published in the American Dietetic Association, high-salt foods and snacks are linked to lung changes that trigger asthma symptoms.," and that researchers in Greece found, using questionnaires, "Kids who ate high-salt foods more than three times a week saw their risk of asthma symptoms go up almost five times." 

 

We read in this Telegraph report of research in Rome, Italy, led by Dr Giuseppe Corbo. "The study of 20,000 six and seven-year-olds, published in the medical journal Epidemiology, confirmed a strong link with asthma and obesity, but found that salt was the biggest risk. Those with the highest intake were two and a half times more likely to develop asthma." (my emphasis) See also Salt/Sodium in Foods. But AsthmaUK don't tell people about the massive difference salt reduction makes to the incidence and severity of childhood asthma, surely a greater benefit than any drug treatment and with no harmful side-effects or habituation to medications. - My personal opinion is that everyone's health and pocket would benefit if AsthmaUK were to close down.

 

Similarly, Diabetes UK (i.e. www.diabetes.org.uk) gives precisely the wrong dietary advice about diabetes. See this article by Dr Briffa. And this one.

 

And what shall I say about the British Heart Foundation (BHF)? The British Heart Foundation is a charity that states that it aims to prevent people dying from heart diseases. I don't believe that the advice it gives is very likely to succeed in that aim. - To me, the most important preventative measure, and indeed the most important remedial measure with regard to heart problems, is avoiding salt and salty food. This reduces the risk of stroke, high blood pressure, heart attack and heart failure, reduces obesity and reduces breathlessness. It is also helpful to cut down on carbohydrates and eat plenty of healthy fat. (Check out LCHF - Low Carb/High Fat - on your favourite search engine.) - Yet what does the BHF and its spokespeople plug over and over again? - Why statins, of course. It is a drug-oriented website. Its aim does not seem to me to be to prevent people dying from heart diseases. Its aim seems to be to get people to take drugs, especially statins. Statins are controversial, vastly over-prescribed drugs with many adverse side-effects.

 

Did you know that many of the most-prescribed drugs (tricyclic anti-depressants, steroids, antipsychotics, etc.) - by causing sensitivity to salt - can and do actually cause obesity, heart problems and type 2 diabetes, among many other serious degenerative health conditions? And that salt intake is also linked to stomach cancer? And that Paracetamol/Calpol/Tylenol/Acetaminophen (a painkiller) is especially harmful to children? And that there is massive overprescribing of powerful painkillers by UK GPs, leading to addiction and to death by overdose among their unfortunate patients?

 

It seems clear to me that the health campaigning charities should be strongly advising people to reduce salt and sugar intake and cut down or cut out processed food products, since these measures are of enormous benefit to health, particularly with regard to degenerative diseases. And rather than encouraging people to take pharmaceutical drugs that have so many harmful side-effects, often far more harmful than the illness they are being prescribed for, they should be on the side of avoiding drugs unless they are absolutely necessary.

Food Additives could be Harming Your Health

Food Additives could be seriously harming your health: read this article in the Ecologist. Remember also that salt is a very harmful food additive if you are vulnerable to salt.

Health Challenge: Convert your body to a Biscuit-Free Zone!

You really can improve your health by giving up eating biscuits. Just consider their many unhealthy ingredients: transfats/hydrogenated vegetable oil/partially hydrogenated vegetable oil, salt (yes, even sweet biscuits usually contain a lot of salt!), sugar, wheat flour. If you are overweight and you eat biscuits then I'm sure you know that the biscuits are contributing to the excess weight. But you may not know that the transfats in biscuits do not just contribute to overweight, they are actually toxic to the body because they do not exist in natural food and so your body cannot metabolise them in a normal way. They are added for commercial reasons to extend the shelf life of the biscuits. Sadly they do not extend the life of the people who eat the biscuits...)o:- Go on! - Try giving up biscuits! - You'll feel better for it!

New warning about high salt content of bread

BBC News reports that Consensus Action on Salt & Health (CASH) campaigners are warning again about the high salt content of bread. "A third of breads contain more salt than recommended under guidelines being introduced next year, a survey found. Most breads were within the current guidelines of 1.1g of salt per 100g - but this is being cut to 1g per 100g. Campaign for Action on Salt and Health (Cash), which looked at 300 breads, said it was "outrageous" that bread contained even the current level."

These are the groups of people who are vulnerable to salt. If you are vulnerable to salt you may like to consider cutting down on the amount of bread you eat. At any rate, you could benefit your health by choosing a lower salt bread, using the information given on the CASH website.

The Department of Health remains complacent: "The Department of Health said "considerable" salt reductions had already been made." - That's as in 'considerable' salt reductions from the scandalously high levels of salt most bread has contained for many years. The bread industry has assuredly played a major part in the distressingly high incidence of high blood pressure, stroke, heart disease and obesity in modern times. It has also helped to cause most people in our country to develop a taste for salt - like an addiction - such that food with little or no added salt tastes too 'bland' to them.

"British Retail Consortium food director Andrew Opie said retailers and manufacturers are to fund independent research to look for ways of meeting the 2012 target - "while still making foods which consumers want to buy"." - I'll translate that for you. - It means that they are doing their damnedest, by means of additives and technology, to lower the salt content by the minimum they can get away with, while retaining the same degree of salty taste in order to keep their customers addicted to salty bread.

Children's health is being damaged and their lives shortened because they are eating too much salt and salty food

Children's health is being damaged and their lives shortened because they are eating too much salt and salty food. See Children are vulnerable to salt. It is important to protect children from processed foods/salty snacks/ready meals and the like. Children are more at risk from their salt intake than adults are.

Children are especially vulnerable to salt because of their small size and small blood volume, and because their blood vessels are weaker than those of adults. Salt, and the water it attracts to it, can more easily distend weak blood vessels than fully mature ones. The resulting increase in blood volume and other fluid retention results in weight gain, as well as higher blood pressure and many other undesirable consequences. The smaller the child, the less salt they should have - and a baby, of course, should have no salt at all. - Babies can die if they are fed salty food.

Because children have much smaller bodies than adults it would be best if they had no more than half as much salt as adults. Most children, however, have much more than this because they eat so many snacks and instant foods. Just one cheeseburger, for instance, contains almost double the recommended daily salt maximum for children. There are high amounts of salt in packet soups, instant noodles, ketchup and sauces, sausages, burgers and savoury snacks. Fat children will lose weight fast if they eat less salt. And even faster still if they eat plenty of fresh fruit and unsalted vegetables, because these are rich in potassium, which helps to displace sodium from the body. Overweight children should not be put on a diet; dieting is harmful and unnecessary and does not usually result in weight loss. Once children start dieting it is often the beginning of a lifetime of yo-yo dieting and increasing weight and ill-health.

Unfortunately bread contains a lot of salt and most families eat quite a lot of bread because of using it for sandwiches in packed lunches, and for toast, etc. Because of its high salt content bread is not a healthy food for little children or for anyone who is overweight. Some bread manufacturers have lowered the salt content of certain loaves, but most bread still usually contains 0.5g or more of sodium per 100g. This is too much. - Always check on the packet; look for the lowest sodium content.

Cheese is often recommended as being good for children because it contains calcium, but cheese is not really good for children because it has a high salt content. So don't give them a lot of it. Children can get plenty of calcium by drinking milk and by eating dairy yogurt (but avoid non-dairy yogurt and low-fat yogurt and the sort of yogurt that has added sugar or sweeteners, colours or other synthetic chemical additives).

You may think you don't eat much salt, but have you ever really looked at the nutrition info on the convenience foods you buy?

I think if you check the label information about salt/sodium in your food cupboards and in your fridge you may be shocked at how much salt you are actually eating, even though you very rarely sprinkle salt onto your food yourself. - The food manufacturers usually add a lot more salt to food than you yourself would add. If you were making up a breakfast cereal from scratch yourself, it would probably not even occur to you to add salt to the bowl of cereal, but most breakfast cereal manufacturers add a lot of salt to it. - It's a very cheap ingredient for one thing. I'm sure you can think of other reasons too.

Most health advisers these days recommend that adults should eat no more than 6g a day of salt. That's 2.4g of sodium a day, because to convert sodium content to salt content you need to multiply by 2.5. And for children, because of their smaller size, the recommendation per day is less, in proportion to their size. Salt is especially harmful for babies. Babies should not be given food that contains any added salt at all.

It's very easy to eat too much salt because so many modern foods contain high concentrations of it, for example most bread is high in salt; so is bacon, and cheese, and cornflakes, and processed meats. I invite you to visit my webpage that tells you more about which foods are high in salt and which are low in salt.

Did you know that for people who are sensitive to salt, salt intake can cause weight gain? - You may be sensitive to salt and not know it. Most people who are sensitive to salt do not know that they are. Cutting down on salt and salty food can be a very easy, very fast, completely safe way to lose weight. - What's not to like? - Lose weight by eating less salt! - Go on! - Try it! - You have nothing to lose but your excess pounds!

Study finds Pay-for-Performance does not benefit patient health

"As news outlets throughout Europe and the U.S. report on the plummeting health of Western adults and children, there is no shortage of culprits. One villain often bandied about is the "fee for service" system of incentives for physicians. Clearly, if doctors are financially rewarded for simply performing more procedures, costs will soar at the expense of patient health."

But, as physorg.com reports, Pay-for-Performance, an emerging movement in which physicians are rewarded not for what they do, but for quality of care and patient outcomes, has also not been found to benefit patients with hypertension, despite enormous administrative costs. - Andrew Lansley: please note!

My take on this is that until the healthcare industry acknowledges and promotes evidence-based facts about the causes of the continued rise in obesity and its related degenerative diseases, patient health can only continue to go from bad to worse. The 'prescribe more and more and more drugs' culture embraced by most doctors is harming patients; the falsely-named 'healthy eating' advice given by healthcare agencies and promoted by the Food Industry and the Dieting Industry that profit by it, the salt-laden processed food that crams the shelves of the supermarkets, are disabling and truncating more and more lives.

We need to revert to eating more natural food, without added salt, free of synthetic added chemicals that do not exist in real food, free of cloying sweetness that perverts the taste: food that is naturally nutritious, not with added this and added that to pretend that it is nutritious. We need to curb the pharmaceutical industry's excesses and put legal limits on what and how much doctors are allowed to prescribe - especially to children.

Good nutrition is the foundation for good health. 'A pill for every ill' is a damaging delusion.

Ten Food Additives to avoid

Read Top Ten Food Additives to Avoid. - Plus avoid added salt/sodium, of course, especially if you are overweight or have high blood pressure or suffer from breathing problems.

Are you a Steroid Victim? - Do you suffer from Steroid-Induced Cushing's Syndrome? - Then you are also "sensitive to salt". - Read on.

A personal note from me: - Almost all of the following side-effects are not side-effects of the drug itself; they are the effects of the doctor not observing the correct protocol for prescribing steroids: so they are the effects of being prescribed too high a dose and/or being prescribed it for too long a time and almost certainly because of not being adequately or appropriately monitored while taking the drug - and CRUCIALLY of not being warned to avoid eating salt or food containing added salt while taking the medication, because these drugs cause sodium retention and sensitivity to salt, which can lead to massive fluid retention and morbid obesity. - i.e. the side-effects are the effects of MEDICAL NEGLIGENCE. - There are hundreds of thousands of steroid victims the world over - victims of medical negligence on a VAST scale...)o:

The following list of side effects that steroid victims suffer from is taken from one of the webpages of the Steroid Warning Network

LIST OF SOME STEROID SIDE EFFECTS

WEIGHT GAIN
HYPERTENSION
SKIN ATROPHY (wasting away)
MYOPATHY (muscle disease/weakness)
IMPAIRED WOUND HEALING
POST TRAUMATIC (after-shock) STRESS (anxiety, fear)
SUPPRESSION (lowering) OF IMMUNE RESPONSE (defense of body against virus, bacteria)
SUBCUTANEOUS (under skin) TISSUE ATROPHY (decrease)
MOOD SWINGS (ranging from Euphoria to Suicidal thoughts)
STEROID PSYCHOSIS (including Hallucinations, Mania, Delusions)
SKIN INFECTIONS
DEPRESSION
HAIR LOSS
EXCESSIVE FACIAL HAIR GROWTH
INGROWN HAIRS
ARTHRITIS
CORONARY ARTERY DISEASE
OSTEOPOROSIS
CONTACT DERMATITIS
ACNE, ECZEMACYSTS, RASHES
LESIONS, BLISTERS
OPEN-ANGLED GLAUCOMA
FATIGUE
CATARACTS
MENSTRUAL IRREGULARITIES
PREMATURE MENOPAUSE
SECONDARY DIABETES MELLITUS
SLEEP DISORDERS
WATER RETENTION
GROWTH RETARDATION IN CHILDREN
CUSHING'S SYNDROME (affects almost every system in the body; moonface, humpback, central obesity, chronic fatigue and other symptoms)
STEROID INDUCED ASTHMA
HEADACHES
SHAKINESS AND TREMORS
EASY BRUISING
ADHESIVE ARACHNOIDITIS (from Epidural Steroid Injections)
NECROSIS (a localized death of tissue)
OSTEONECROSIS
INCREASED SUSCEPTIBILITY TO INFECTION
REDISTRIBUTION OF BODY FAT
INCREASE IN CIRCULATING BLOOD FATS (Triglycerides)
TOXIC SHOCK
MUSCLE CRAMPING, JOINT PAIN

A person with steroid-induced Cushing Syndrome suffers from the symptoms of BOTH CUSHINGS and the Systemic effects from the STEROIDS. Cushing's syndrome can take years to recover from. Many of the devastating effects from steroids are permanent and life-threatening.

I am a steroid victim. - I am trying to put an end to the medical negligence that results in more and more steroid victims, and gives damaging advice to the existing steroid victims. - I need my MP to visit me because I am too ill and too disabled to go to see him at his surgery. - He came to see me nearly two years ago but did not understand about the problems of steroid victims because he had not read the information I had sent to him. He does not seem to intend visiting me again despite my many requests to him to do so.

If you would like to help me in my mission to prevent/reduce great and needless suffering you might like to write to my MP, Nick Clegg, at nickclegg@sheffieldhallam.org.uk asking him to visit me, Margaret Wilde, as soon as possible and not be in a rush as he was when he came before.


Lose weight by eating less salt! Go on! - Try it! - You will feel so much better!
See my website www.wildeaboutsteroids.co.uk and in particular,
page http://www.wildeaboutsteroids.co.uk/steroids.html
The site does not sell anything and has no banners or sponsors or adverts - just helpful information.