Happy Sunday! Today's episode has some juicy information. The 2 pieces mentioned in here — about Salt and Covid Vaccine — are definitely worth the read. So if you have time, read through them.

I'm going to finish the "Vitality" piece by the end of this next week so be on the lookout for that next Sunday.

Alrighty, on to the Stir!

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The World of Salt

Do you pick low sodium options and worry about your salt intake because it's linked to hypertension? Take 7 minutes today and read this article - The Salt Scam. There's a commonly accepted myth that salt intake is directly correlated to hypertension. This article breaks down the massive study in the 80's that got us to believe that/ If you don't read the article, reading the quotes below will give a good bit of information. Also in 1994 the mandatory Nutrition Facts Label proclaimed that Americans should only eat 2,400 mg per day (about one teaspoon of salt). That's what it says still on nutrition labels.

Yet the stubborn fact remains that virtually every healthy population in the world eats salt at levels far above that recommendation.

Our belief in the benefits of low salt consumption are largely based on mis-information and myth-information.

It was only after World War II, when refrigeration replaced salting as the primary means of preserving food that Americans lowered their average salt intake to 9g/ day where it has remained since. During that period pre-WWII, there was no concern of excess deaths from heart disease, stroke or kidney disease — the main things used to scare us into lowering our salt intake.

From its very inception, there were problems with the hypothesis that lowering salt could save lives. Dahl failed to notice all the various high-salt eating cultures that had no adverse health consequences. The Samburu warriors, consume close to two teaspoons of salt per day even going as far as eating salt directly from the salt licks meant for their cattle. Despite eating all this salt, the average blood pressure is just 106/72 mmHg and does not rise with age. In comparison, about one-third of the adult population in America is hypertensive with a blood pressure of at least 140/90 mmHg or higher. For reference, a normal blood pressure is less than 120/80 mmHg and generally rises with age in the United States.Villagers from Kotyang, Nepal, eat two teaspoons of salt per day, and the Kuna Indians eat one and a half teaspoons of salt per day, with no hypertension words, clearly contradicting Dahl’s hypothesis that a high-salt diet causes hypertension.

The central Asian region had the highest salt intake, followed closely by high income Asia Pacific region including Japan and Singapore. The Japanese diet is notoriously high in sodium with copious use of soy sauce, miso and pickled vegetables. The Japanese themselves seem to suffer no ill effect as they have the world’s longest life expectancy at 83.7 years. Singapore is third in life expectancy at 83.1 years. If eating salt was really so bad for health, how could the world’s longest lived people also eat one of the world’s saltiest diets?

But there was still the question of the massive INTERSALT study. Further analysis of the data began to paint a significantly different picture of salt. Four primitive populations (the Yanomamo, Xingu, the Papua New Guinean, and the Kenyan) had been included in the initial analysis, which had significantly lower sodium intakes than the rest of the world. They lived a vastly different, primitive lifestyle from the others, and one had a sodium intake 99% lower than the rest. These outliers had limited generalizability to the rest of the world and because they were such outliers, had an outsized effect on the averages.

These 4 primitive societies differed from modern ones in far more than just diet. For example, the Yanomamo Indians of Brazil still live traditionally, hunting and gathering just as they had done centuries ago. They practice endocannibalism, where the ashes of loved ones are consumed because they believe it keeps them alive. There is no processed foods. There is no modern medicine. Comparing this tribe living in the forests of the Amazon to a modern American in the forests of New York is hardly fair. Isolating a single component of their diet, sodium and proclaiming it to be solely responsible for high blood pressure is the height of bad research. It is no different than concluding that wearing loincloths lowers your blood pressure.

When those four primitive populations were removed and forty-eight Westernized populations were left in the study, the results were completely opposite the original findings. Blood pressure actually decreased as salt intake increased. Eating less salt was not healthy, it was harmful.

The evidence from the United States was not encouraging either. The National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey (NHANES) are large scale surveys of American dietary habits carried out periodically. The first survey found that those eating the least salt died at a rate 18% higher than those eating the most salt. This was a highly significant, and disturbing result.

The second NHANES survey confirmed that a low salt diet was associated with a staggering 15.4% increased risk of death. Other trials found an increased risk of heart attacks of eating a low salt diet in treated hypertensive patients. Those were precisely the patients doctors had been recommending a low salt diet!

But dogma is hard to change. The 2015 Dietary Guidelines continues to recommend reducing sodium intake to less than 2,300 mg of sodium (about one teaspoon of salt) per day with a recommendation of no more than 1,500 mg of sodium (about two-thirds of a teaspoon of salt) per day in hypertensives, blacks, and middle-aged and older adults.

Salt is crucial to maintain an adequate blood volume and blood pressure ensuring that our tissues are perfused with the oxygen carrying blood and nutrients.

The World of COVID Vaccines

Who should get the vaccine first? Maybe we should sell them to the highest bidder. This article offers a unique perspective on the way we currently 'test' vaccines and one I hadn't considered before about how the free market would handle vaccines. Maybe we should be focusing on vaccinating the people at highest risk of spreading the disease, instead of vaccinating the people at highest risk to the disease.

A good vaccine policy might be to give it to those most likely to spread it to others, with the goal of swiftly reducing the prevalence of the disease. That argues for giving the vaccine in bars. That is not our public policy. The entire discussion centers around who should be protected first, from a disease whose prevalence is taken as given. Old people, nursing homes, health care workers, essential workers -- the argument is not the externality. The argument is entirely who should get the individual benefit of protection from the vaccine.

So the question is not, really, "Who should be protected from the virus?" The question is, really, "Who should get a treatment that allows them to be out and about, risking contact with the virus, rather than protect themselves by traditional means?" It is really mainly an economic benefit, avoidance of the cost of other measures to stay healthy. There is an economic answer: people should be out and about first who generate the most economic benefit from being out. And, therefore, are willing to pay the most to get the vaccine.

Basically, people who really want to be out and about should be able to pay whatever they are willing to pay in order to get the vaccine. There's several benefits to this: Vaccine companies make tons of money and make even more effective vaccines.

The medical freedom to allow early adopters the vaccine speeds up testing. They can learn from early vaccines so that they can make it more effective quicker. It's a win - win. More effective vaccines and people have the freedom to decide what they put in their bodies.

The Moderna vaccine only took one weekend to develop and was ready in February. And then it was tested for almost an entire year when we could have been selling it on the free market for anyone who wanted to take the chance while continuing to iterate on the vaccine design.

If it goes to the highest bidder, then the highest value activities, that benefit most from reduction in social distancing, come back faster. I don't know what those are, but pretty much by definition, the economy recovers faster. That brings back jobs a lot faster than stimulus checks. Heck tax it and transfer the money to people who choose to stay home.

What's the free-market way? A drug company can sell a vaccine on January 14, and you can buy it, without fear of going to jail.

What happens in free market nirvana? Read the entire 10 minute article.

The World of Mainstream Media

Two pictures to describe Mainstream Media's bias. They've lost all credibility!

Sad to say but most journalists today aren't journalists, they are activists. And they intentionally distort the truth to create narratives that advocate for their ideologies.

The World of Tweets

@awilkinson Entrepreneurship in a nutshell: Solving problems people are willing to pay you to solve using delegation and systems.

The World of Proverbs

Even a fool who keeps silent is considered wise; when he closes his lips, he is deemed intelligent. - Proverbs 17:28

The less you say, the more wise you seem.

End Note

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Live free,

Brennen