Startling Study in Belgium Suggests Rate of Heart Disease Decreases With More Salt in Diet

Maybe Mayor Bloomberg should move to Belgium. A startling study was just published in the Journal of the American Medical Association. It disputes the conventional wisdom that too much salt in the diet leads to all sorts of negative health consequences.

Doctors in Belgium studied 3,681 healthy Europeans and tracked their salt usage. They found that those with a heavy hand on the salt-shaker were no more likely to develop high blood pressure than those with a lighter touch. In fact the rate of heart disease seemed to decrease with the amount of salt added to the diet.

Particularly confounding to the “experts” here was the fact that there were 50 deaths in the third of participants with the lowest salt consumption, and just ten deaths among those with the highest salt levels. Doctors from the Centers for Disease Control dispute this study, sticking to their guns and their belief that the intake of salt should be limited.

Considering the fact that even the doctors can’t agree on the effects of salt in our diets, why would anyone want to take the advice of such “expert” bodies as the New York City Council, the State Legislature in Albany, or even Mr. Bloomberg?

After all, the doctors from Belgium may be on to something important, given that Belgians have a particularly healthy attitude towards what they put in their stomachs. How can you not like a country where every other store sells chocolate? And not just any chocolate, but the finest in the world.

Belgians also have a national dish, moule frites. These are mussels steamed in a broth that more often than not includes butter, wine, and garlic. To show how committed the Belgians are to a balanced diet, these bivalves are almost always served with French fried potatoes — although the Belgians will not concede this dish to the French, and many may come right out and tell you these are “Belgian fries.”

And where there are fries, can salt be far behind?

Washing all this down will be a bottle or two of one of the famous Belgian beers.

So we’ve got chocolate, butter, fried potatoes, a bit of salt, and a glass of beer – clearly a combination that would not be held in high regard by the “health police” here in Gotham or by those pontificating from the headquarters of the Centers for Disease Control in Atlanta.

It turns out that, contrary to the dire warnings, the Belgians seem to be somewhat healthier than those of us here in America.

According to the World Bank, the average American can expect to live 78.7 years. The average Belgian lives nearly two years longer and, arguably, since those extra two years are presumably filled with beer, butter, salty fries, and chocolate, they will be years well worth living.

Let Mr. Bloomberg take note. While the average New Yorker will live a tad longer than the average American, our friends in Belgium still typically live more than a year longer than we do.

So maybe smoking bans, calorie counts posted in all restaurants, and efforts to control the intake of sugared soda or salt will not have the desired effect.

The latest initiative demonstrates just how far we’ve gone to “protect” the public. Restaurants here are now given letter “grades” to shield the public against something, I’m not quite sure what. Hospital emergency rooms have not been filled with victims of food poisoning as far as I know, either before or since the letter grades have been posted. But restaurants are spending millions to avoid anything less that an “A” grade.

Before we go even further into government interference on our diets, setting limits or even banning the use of salt in restaurants (as was proposed by at least one assemblyman), let us consider the advice of the lead author of the Belgian study, Dr. Jan Staessen, head of the hypertension laboratory at the University of Leuven. "Our findings do not support a generalized reduction of salt intake in the population."

So as I eat my moules frites, I’ll raise a Belgian beer to that. And, please, pass the salt. And, oh yes, don’t forget the chocolate.

Mr. Wolf is a contributing editor of The New York Sun.