www.wildeaboutsteroids.co.uk...
Obesity and the Salt Connection
What follows is a slightly modified version of an article I wrote for the monthly glossy magazine of Mensa, the high IQ society, of which I am a member. It was published in the December 2004 issue. Four months later, the April 2005 issue contained a letter from Joyce Barnard, who has given permission for her name to be used here. She wrote that by following the advice I had given her a few years earlier - i.e. that to lower her high blood pressure and lose weight she simply needed to eat less sodium - she had lost 5 stones in weight (70 pounds) in a year! - All she did was stop sprinkling salt onto her meals and use LoSalt instead of ordinary salt when cooking.
Many years ago I gained a great deal of weight because of taking HRT prescribed by my GPs, mainly on the advice of an endocrinologist. - I did not realise at the time that the weight gain was because of the medication. I became desperately ill and exhausted and had very high blood pressure for which I took Atenolol, a beta-blocker. I was so fat I could barely walk. Yet I was not overeating. My feet, hands and breasts were exquisitely painful and very red and swollen. I was unable to use my hands for many tasks. I needed a larger size in shoes. My face and neck became beetroot red and very swollen. I developed acne and eczema. I suffered from breathlessness.
Having never sprinkled salt on my food in my life, and never used it in cooking, in 1997 I became aware that there was a lot of salt in bread and cheese and breakfast cereals. Because of the connection between hypertension and salt intake I altered my eating to reduce, and eventually to exclude, all avoidable sodium. This lowered my blood pressure and I no longer needed to take Atenolol.
More spectacularly, and very unexpectedly to me, eating less salt reduced my weight by 51 pounds! - This was nothing to do with calories, fat or sugar. - The weight I lost was clearly water, which I worked out was held in my body by the salt - held in my veins, which had become massively distended and painful since I had embarked on the HRT.
I worked out that it was the oestrogen that had caused the sodium and water retention and this was confirmed when I looked in the British National Formulary for the side-effects of oestrogen. I then realised that oestrogen was a steroid, though it is not normally thought of in that category, and that the sodium and water retention came about because certain steroids and certain other prescribed drugs relax/weaken the walls of the blood vessels so that they take in excess salt and the water which accompanies it. I realised that I was a 'steroid victim'.
For many years I have been providing a free telephone helpline for people in pain in my area and for the last five years have been advising all callers to reduce their salt intake, particularly when they were obese. Their weight loss, too, has been dramatic and swift. One Mensa member whom I helped lost about a stone in a month just by eating less salt. Her dog, too, lost weight when she stopped salting his food!
I firmly believe that the massive rise in the incidence of obesity, especially child obesity, is due to the prevalence of salt in modern diets, mainly from manufactured foods, and that calorie counting and advice about reducing fat and sugar intake and increasing exercise are counter-productive.
But salt causes obesity only in vulnerable people, i.e. People whose veins are weak because of immaturity (babies, children), People whose veins are weak because of steroids or HRT or amitriptyline or certain other prescribed drugs, too readily prescribed, often in very high dose, People whose natural oestrogen levels are higher than normal (e.g. pregnant women). People whose blood vessel walls have been weakened by 'slimming' - i.e. eating insufficient food.
