http://www.smh.com.au/national/heal...0801-23fpg.html

Heart campaigns a 'waste of money'

DIET and exercise campaigns are so ineffective at preventing heart disease that they should be abandoned and replaced with strict regulation of salt levels in food combined with wider medication use, a study has found.

Pushing the public to change risky diet and exercise habits was a waste of money that had a ''trivial'' effect on improving population health, according to Linda Cobiac, a research fellow with the University of Queensland's school of public health who led a joint-university study into the effectiveness of cardiovascular disease prevention methods.

Heavy-handed food industry regulation by the government combined with more aggressive prescribing of heart drugs would be cheaper and save more lives than lifestyle counselling, she said, because most people found it hard to sustain exercise and diet programs long term.

''Instead, addressing high levels of salt hidden in processed foods is a very good way to subtly lower blood pressure across the whole population,'' Dr Cobiac said. ''It leads to sustained improvements in people's health and to very large reductions in the costs of treating cardiovascular disease down the track.''
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The research published online by the Public Library of Science also included Deakin University in Melbourne and the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation in the US. It found $4.2 billion could be saved in healthcare expenditure annually if salt limits were imposed on foods, cholesterol-lowering drugs were made more affordable and preventive drugs were given to those with a 5 per cent or higher risk of developing cardiovascular disease within five years.

Current Australian guidelines recommend drugs as a first-line approach only for those with a 15 per cent or higher risk of developing the disease.

The senior director of the George Institute for Global Health, Bruce Neal, said he agreed with the findings but added the government had a ''hands-off'' approach to food industry regulation.

''The last thing the government wants is a battle with another industry group, but if there is any industry it should be having a battle with at the moment it is the food industry,'' Professor Neal said. ''The primary cause of bad health in Australia is the food industry and unless the government takes a firm hand and puts in regulation of salt in food, nothing is going to change.''

Although many people tried to adopt public health messages such as ''eat less salt'', they were doomed to failure because it was impossible to easily tell which foods were high in salt, he said.

A clinical adviser with the National Prescribing Service, Danielle Stowasser, said anyone with an overall heart disease risk of 5 per cent or more should talk to their doctor before changing their treatment regime.

I..I..I... have no words.

You ever see a fish flop around on dry land? Sometimes policy makers seem to do the same sort of gyrations.

Well said, Nancy.

Yes, telling people to eat low fat and high carb hasn't worked, so that must obviously be because people are not capable of following such advice. Couldn't possibly because the advice was wrong! So let's now try forcing some bad advice (low salt) on them instead. Arrgghh!

Guess I found a few words...

I really want to see a lot of strong evidence that salt intake leads to heart disease. So far I have not seen any.

When do people finally admit that what they are doing is not working? How long does it take? I am reminded of the planet Pluto. I guess now it is not really considered a planet anymore, but they had to wait until the guy who discovered it died before anyone was allowed to say anything. I think we are going to have to wait until the current guard dies before we can stop making people so sick.

Isaac Asimov once wrote an essay to that effect. Afraid so.

*headdesk*

*facepalm*

Yep, take all the taste out of food and give 'em more drugs, that's the ticket.

O.M.G.

I'm with you Rosebud... there's just no words.

It seems obvious where funding for a study like this must come from!

really???
Salt??

Maybe we should avoid processed food altogether - that might remove the need for medications.

I can kind of agree with the headline, though... the programs they do have are a waste of time and money because they give the wrong advice.

These regulations are troubling to me from a big picture point of view but personally, they would be no issue.

In terms of foods containing less salt, that wouldn't bother me a bit, since I generally don't eat prepared foods anyway. And, even if I did, I could just add salt myself.

And just because a doctor might prescribe something does not force me to fill the prescription and take the medicine.

But ultimately I don't think the proposed measures would improve anything for the people they are supposed to be intended to help.

Agreed. I think it was kind of the juxtaposition between the headline ("yeah, someone's finally figured that out!") and the crappy recommendation they had to replace it with ("more drugs and laws against salt") when I was expecting something else, possibly something ELSE that made sense based on the headline making sense, that made it so "leave-me-speechless" shocking! lol

This isn't necessarily so. Before I found low carb, I was able to restrict sodium intake to 1500 mg per day by eating more natural foods, reading labels of pre-packaged foods and using software to learn the sodium content of the non-packaged foods I typically ate. It really wasn't all that difficult. And, I found that if I avoided packaged/restaurant foods most of the time, it was pretty easy to achieve this. The real problem? It didn't work. I was eating a "heathful" diet low in fat and high in whole grains that also happened to be low in sodium. My blood pressure didn't drop one iota. It's not a good diet for me. When I adopted a low carb diet, I still kept the sodium restriction, and my blood pressure dropped. But, here's the kicker. After a while, I decided to stop restricting sodium, but keep my low carb diet. My lowered blood pressure did not rise back up. So much for sodium restriction in my world. I realize some people are quite sodium sensitive, but that's not all of us. And, a low carb diet can be quite effective for many people at lowering bp independent of sodium intake. Bad advice = bad results. Bad results? Blame the general public upon whom the bad advice has been hoisted.




So, what, exactly, constitutes this type of risk? Do the experts REALLY know? It doesn't seem so. So, then, we should just medicate so-called "symptoms" that may have little to nothing to do with the development of heart disease? Drugging masses of folks based on a guess? This seems no wiser than giving out bad dietary advice.

Hear hear! I poop on theez story!