PASSIVE VOICE TENSES

Salt Is The Sol of Life

"Salt is as important as oxygen to the body.  It is salt that transports energy from cell to cell and protects the body from dietary and metabolic acid.  In all chronic disease there is always a deficiency of salt.  Salt is the glue that holds the spirit body inside the physical body.  Salt is the sol of life."  Dr. Robert O. Young

Salt, We Misjudged You

Oakland, Calif.

THE first time I questioned the conventional wisdom on the nature of a healthy diet, I was in my salad days, almost 40 years ago, and the subject was salt. Researchers were claiming that salt supplementation was unnecessary after strenuous exercise, and this advice was being passed on by health reporters. All I knew was that I had played high school football in suburban Maryland, sweating profusely through double sessions in the swamplike 90-degree days of August. Without salt pills, I couldn’t make it through a two-hour practice; I couldn’t walk across the parking lot afterward without cramping.

While sports nutritionists have since come around to recommend that we should indeed replenish salt when we sweat it out in physical activity, the message that we should avoid salt at all other times remains strong. Salt consumption is said to raise blood pressure, cause hypertension and increase the risk of premature death. This is why the Department of Agriculture’s dietary guidelines still consider salt Public Enemy No. 1, coming before fats, sugars and alcohol. It’s why the director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has suggested that reducing salt consumption is as critical to long-term health as quitting cigarettes.

And yet, this eat-less-salt argument has been surprisingly controversial — and difficult to defend. Not because the food industry opposes it, but because the actual evidence to support it has always been so weak.

When I spent the better part of a year researching the state of the salt science back in 1998 — already a quarter century into the eat-less-salt recommendations — journal editors and public health administrators were still remarkably candid in their assessment of how flimsy the evidence was implicating salt as the cause of hypertension.

“You can say without any shadow of a doubt,” as I was told then by Drummond Rennie(simple past tense)¹, an editor for The Journal of the American Medical Association, that the authorities pushing the eat-less-salt message had “made a commitment to salt education that goes way beyond the scientific facts.”

While, back then, the evidence merely failed to demonstrate that salt was harmful, the evidence from studies published over the past two years actually suggests that restricting how much salt we eat can increase our likelihood of dying prematurely. Put simply, the possibility has been raised that if we were to eat as little salt as the U.S.D.A. and the C.D.C. recommend, we’d be harming rather than helping ourselves.

WHY have we been told that salt is so deadly? Well, the advice has always sounded reasonable. It has what nutritionists like to call “biological plausibility.” Eat more salt and your body retains water to maintain a stable concentration of sodium in your blood. This is why eating salty food tends to make us thirsty: we drink more; we retain water. The result can be a temporary increase in blood pressure, which will persist until our kidneys eliminate both salt and water.

The scientific question is whether this temporary phenomenon translates to chronic problems: if we eat too much salt for years, does it raise our blood pressure, cause hypertension, then strokes, and then kill us prematurely? It makes sense, but it’s only a hypothesis. The reason scientists do experiments is to find out if hypotheses are true.

In 1972, when the National Institutes of Health introduced the National High Blood Pressure Education Program to help prevent hypertension, no meaningful experiments had yet been done. The best evidence on the connection between salt and hypertension came from two pieces of research. One was the observation that populations that ate little salt had virtually no hypertension. But those populations didn’t eat a lot of things — sugar, for instance — and any one of those could have been the causal factor. The second was a strain of “salt-sensitive” rats that reliably developed hypertension on a high-salt diet. The catch was that “high salt” to these rats was 60 times more than what the average American consumes.

Still, the program was founded to help prevent hypertension, and prevention programs require preventive measures to recommend. Eating less salt seemed to be the only available option at the time, short of losing weight. Although researchers quietly acknowledged that the data were “inconclusive and contradictory” or “inconsistent and contradictory” — two quotes from the cardiologist Jeremiah Stamler, a leading proponent of the eat-less-salt campaign, in 1967 and 1981 — publicly, the link between salt and blood pressure was upgraded from hypothesis to fact.

In the years since, the N.I.H. has spent enormous sums of money on studies to test the hypothesis, and those studies have singularly failed to make the evidence any more conclusive. Instead, the organizations advocating salt restriction today — the U.S.D.A., the Institute of Medicine, the C.D.C. and the N.I.H. — all essentially rely on the results from a 30-day trial of salt, the 2001 DASH-Sodium study. It suggested that eating significantly less salt would modestly lower blood pressure; it said nothing about whether this would reduce hypertension, prevent heart disease or lengthen life.

While influential, that trial was just one of many. When researchers have looked at all the relevant trials and tried to make sense of them, they’ve continued to support Dr. Stamler’s “inconsistent and contradictory” assessment. Last year, two such “meta-analyses” were published by the Cochrane Collaboration(simple past tense)², an international nonprofit organization founded to conduct unbiased reviews of medical evidence. The first of the two reviews concluded that cutting back “the amount of salt eaten reduces blood pressure, but there is insufficient evidence to confirm the predicted reductions in people dying prematurely or suffering cardiovascular disease.” The second concluded that “we do not know if low salt diets improve or worsen health outcomes.”

The idea that eating less salt can worsen health outcomes may sound bizarre, but it also has biological plausibility and is celebrating its 40th anniversary this year, too. A 1972 paper in The New England Journal of Medicine reported that the less salt people ate, the higher their levels of a substance secreted by the kidneys, called renin, which set off a physiological cascade of events that seemed to end with an increased risk of heart disease. In this scenario: eat less salt, secrete more renin, get heart disease, die prematurely.

With nearly everyone focused on the supposed benefits of salt restriction, little research was done to look at the potential dangers. But four years ago, Italian researchers began publishing the results from a series of clinical trials, all of which reported that, among patients with heart failure, reducing salt consumption increased the risk of death.

Those trials have been followed by a slew (present perfect tense)³ of studies suggesting that reducing sodium to anything like what government policy refers to as a “safe upper limit” is likely to do more harm than good. These covered some 100,000 people in more than 30 countries and showed that salt consumption is remarkably stable among populations over time. In the United States, for instance, it has remained constant for the last 50 years, despite 40 years of the eat-less-salt message. The average salt intake in these populations — what could be called the normal salt intake — was one and a half teaspoons a day, almost 50 percent above what federal agencies consider a safe upper limit for healthy Americans under 50, and more than double what the policy advises for those who aren’t so young or healthy. This consistency, between populations and over time, suggests that how much salt we eat is determined by physiological demands, not diet choices.( simple present tense)⁴

One could still argue that all these people should reduce their salt intake to prevent hypertension, except for the fact that four of these studies — involving Type 1 diabetics, Type 2 diabetics, healthy Europeans and patients with chronic heart failure — reported that the people eating salt at the lower limit of normal were more likely to have heart disease than those eating smack in the middle of the normal range. Effectively what the 1972 paper would have predicted.

Proponents of the eat-less-salt campaign tend to deal with this contradictory evidence by implying that anyone raising it is a shill for the food industry and doesn’t care about saving lives. An N.I.H. administrator told me back in 1998 that to publicly question the science on salt was to play into the hands of the industry. “As long as there are things in the media that say the salt controversy continues,” he said, “they win.”

When several agencies, including the Department of Agriculture and the Food and Drug Administration, held a hearing last November to discuss how to go about getting Americans to eat less salt (as opposed to whether or not we should eat less salt), these proponents argued that the latest reports suggesting damage from lower-salt diets should simply be ignored. Lawrence Appel, an epidemiologist and a co-author of the DASH-Sodium trial, said “there is nothing really new.” According to the cardiologist Graham MacGregor, who has been promoting low-salt diets since the 1980s, the studies were no more than “a minor irritation that causes us a bit of aggravation.”

This attitude that studies that go against prevailing beliefs should be ignored on the basis that, well, they go against prevailing beliefs, has been the norm for the anti-salt campaign for decades. Maybe now the prevailing beliefs should be changed. The British scientist and educator Thomas Huxley, known as Darwin’s bulldog for his advocacy of evolution, may have put it best back in 1860. “My business,” he wrote, “is to teach my aspirations to conform themselves to fact, not to try and make facts harmonize with my aspirations.”

A Robert Wood Johnson Foundation Independent Investigator in Health Policy Research and the author of “Why We Get Fat.”

global warming - "Global Warming Poses Serious Consequences For The Environment In The Future"

By: Joshua Spaulding

In case you have been out of the loop, global warming is gradually becoming a serious concern to our environment and our planet as a whole. In general, global warming is caused by carbon dioxide(simple present tense)⁵ and other air pollution that is collection in the atmosphere. As it collects and builds up, it is little by little trapping the sun’s heat and warming up the planet.

So what does this mean for the environment? It is indeed warming up, but not so much that it is considerably noticeable. However, scientists predict that at this rate the average global temperature will be 3 to 9 degrees higher by the end of the century. In result of these rising temperatures, many states in the U.S. are already showing signs of the effects with some of the worst wildfire seasons ever in 2002.

In the same year, drought caused severe dust storms in states like Montana and Colorado, and floods created millions of dollars in damage to the states of Texas, Montana and North Dakota. Because of the continuous rise in heat, many mountains have been affected by their snow totals.(present perfect tense)⁶ Since 1950, snow accumulation has declined by 60 percent in some mountains and many winter seasons have become shorter.

Outside of the U.S., global warming has caused more than 20,000 deaths in Europe just in 2003 because of extreme heat waves. What is the scariest of all facts is the decline of the Arctic’s perennial polar ice cap. At this rate, it is declining at 9 percent per decade.

Every year, scientists learn more about the direct effects of global warming on the environment and what society can do to help the cause. There is no denying the fact that global warming is a serious issue and if it continues on the path it is heading, there is much more devastation to come. Some of the consequences that are to come include melting glaciers and severe droughts causing water shortages, rising sea levels will flood the Eastern coastal seaboard and warmer sea surface levels will fuel more intense hurricanes.

Today’s unstable weather and the futures predicted weather pattern can certainly cause a major catastrophe if we as society don’t stop it today. Things as simple as using a fluorescent light bulb over an incandescent light bulb can preserve energy. By saving energy, it will eliminate a ton of carbon dioxide pollution that is released into the air.

Little by little, more information is being released to the public about global warming and people are gradually becoming more aware of the problem. There is no room to wait for tomorrow to begin saving energy because the future lies within our hands. All it takes is a little effort from everyone in the world to save the future of the planet from the horrific consequences global warming could potentially have.

By: Joshua Spaulding

Facebook is being abandoned by its core market (present continuous tense)⁷. You'd be better off investing in Greek government bonds

By Daniel Knowles World Last updated: May 18th, 2012

In 2005, Rupert Murdoch made one of his greatest business mistakes: the media mogul bought MySpace for $580 million. Until 2008, MySpace was the world's most visited website, and until 2009, America's, pulling in 70 million unique US users a month. And then all of a sudden, it died, as users fled. Despite being profitable in 2005, by 2010, the website was losing money at a rate of $180 million a year. News Corporation was so desperate to get rid of it that it sold for just $35 million.

The reason why MySpace died was simple: its users migrated to Facebook, which had a cleaner user interface and fewer adverts. But where MySpace was, at its peak, valued at half a billion dollars, now we are told that its successor is worth 200 times as much. In its initial public offering (IPO), which is happening today, the firm is expected to be valued at $104 billion. One Hundred And Four Billion Dollars.

That's nuts, but let's just explain why. Ordinarily, an investor would hope to earn at least 5 per cent on an investment – ideally more, since historically, you can earn that just buying Government bonds. So for a company to be worth $104 billion, you would hope for at least $5 billion a year of profit. Really, to justify the risk of owning shares, you'd want more – $10 billion perhaps. Every year. Forever.

But Facebook's revenue is currently just $3.7 billion, and its profit is around $500 million. So the website is making less than one tenth of the profit you would hope it to earn in the long run. By contrast, Google earns 10 times as much revenue – $37 billion – and 20 times as much profit, and yet is only valued at around $200 billion.

OK, so investment decisions are a little more complicated than that. But if investors value the company at $104 billion, then they must think that Facebook will eventually be able to increase its profits by a factor of, at the barest of bare minimums, ten. That would mean tripling revenue, at least, probably more, since it seems unlikely that even Facebook can increase revenue without increasing costs.

And I think that's impossible. Here's why: I'm 24, on a decent salary, relatively well-educated and a Facebook user. I should be generating lots of profit for the firm. But on my calculations, the revenue earned from me over the last month is approximately nothing. I barely use Facebook these days, and when I do, I usually log in through my phone's Facebook app, which has no adverts. Sometimes, I use the shiny iPad app, which again, has no adverts.

My friends barely use Facebook either. When I was a student, I used to log in approximately every ten minutes. If you said "Facebook break", everyone knew what you meant. When I logged in, I could guarantee a stream of amusing "banter" and gossip, as links and pictures were shared. Now, I log in, and it's a wasteland. Almost all the links I click on and the online running conversation I have has migrated to Twitter, which I check religiously. So too have all the most prolific Facebook users I used to know. While we probably still count as "regular users", for more and more of my generation, Facebook is little more than an electronic address book. That's why big advertisers, like GM, are reducing their spend on the company.

And who is in control of this revenue-less, glorified address book? A Harvard geek, barely older than me (Mr Zuckerberg is just 28), whose last big decision was to blow $1 billion on a photo sharing website I've still not signed up to. Because don't forget: those shares being sold today have no voting rights attached. You may own the company, but it will still be Zuckerberg's plaything, not a business, intended to make money.

Facebook has no valuable real assets – no production lines or distribution networks which can be sold. It's nothing but a bunch of servers in California and an egomaniac CEO. And increasingly, it's boring. Even as it spreads across Brazil, it's being abandoned by the highly(present continuous tense)⁸ educated college students who made it. Honestly, I would sooner invest in Greek government debt. Or MySpace.

Update: It's been pointed out that I have used an inaccurate measure of Facebook's profit. In the last quarter, the company made $200m (down 12 per cent since last year). Its annual profits for 2011 were somewhere under $1 billion. Sorry. I was researching it a little too quickly and I made a mistake.

That obviously weakens my argument a little – but only a little. The firm is still producing less than 1 per cent on its supposed worth. Which might be why the investment bank Morgan Stanley, which was underwriting the IPO yesterday, was forced to step in to support the price.