Salt Of The Earth

"Clinical studies have suggested that insulin resistance might lead to sodium retention and extracellular fluid volume expansion, thereby increasing blood pressure responses to sodium intake. In this study, waist circumference was significantly associated with blood pressure responses to dietary sodium intake, implying that abdominal obesity might be an especially important factor in determining an individual’s blood pressure response to variation in sodium intake."

From here. Important study because previous research on salt and hypertension had shown mixed and contradictory findings. Maybe it was because people's waist circumference hadn't been sufficently studied as an important variable... Finding: fat people are more susceptible blood pressure increase due to dietary salt than skinny people.

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I suppose some of you might be wondering about the reference to salt (and Australumptious sandwich/toast spread Vegemite, which packs a hefty sodium punch) in my blog yesterday. I had been browsing some medical stuff while playing with the iPhone and somehow the salt reference above snuck its way into the writing part of my brain... and hence into the blog. As the lady says, it's like an amusement park inside my head. You see, I have rather a rotund tummy, and my insulin resistance is growing... I'm a long way from being diabetic but when I returned a glucose tolerance test result that was 0.1 over the normal range, my GP told me 50% of my pancreas function was gone... That was a bit of shock treatment, I must admit...

Meanwhile, he said to change the subject away from his rapidly impending demise, did I tell you about my purchase in the antiquarian bookshop in Cairo last year? Hilarious. Old volume, 1850 or so, with stamps of the pyramid and the sphinx embossed on the cover. I thought it was going to be a learned tome about Egypt and ancient civilizations and their poetry and mysticism, etc..

[Addendum: Revelations of Egyptian Mysteries and Allegories of The Greek Lyric Poets CLEARLY INTERPRETED. History of the Works of Nature. With a Discourse on Health According With The Wisdom of the Ancients. Robert Howard M.D. London 1850.]



Title page of Part II. Reading the book with a coffee and cake(s). Inside the bookshop.

Turns out the author had never even been to Egypt. Turns out that "Poets" means the poet Hesiod. He is crazy doctor guy somewhere in England who had whipped himself into a strange health nutter's obsessionist frenzy. He'd become violently opposed to... minerals. He was definitely not like my friend Px who won't drink filtered or distilled water as there's "nothing in it".

Along with all minerals unprocessed by nature, hence tainted pieces of raw earth, salt was his main target. The only minerals allowed are those which were processed naturally in the factory of vegetables. He'd not let any obscure opportunity go where he might be able to drop the salt admonition. "The Queen of Sheba had big tits - but they would have been bigger if she abstained from adding salt to her potatoes!" sort of thing. He says all sorts of other weird stuff too, like volcanoes are caused by lightning: total fruitcake, great find on my part.

As I said, I don't have the book here in the office, it's at home. I'll try and find something quotable from it for you later, maybe tomorrow - I'm out for dinner tonight, must rush. A low salt dinner, with a view of the Pyramids.

[Addendum: How's this -- "Thus in accordance with the very clear evidence of nature, it is declared that man's fall [no less!], or disease and death, was occasioned by his departure from the vegetable kingdom, that is, the tree of life, and partaking of crude mineral substance, the source of death." pg 64. The Fall of Man was caused by Adam and Eve... eating salt. Nutter... I rest my case.]

E@L

p.s. on the subject of the iPhone -- I took my portable HDD home last night but forgot to set the sharing permission before I left the office, so I couldn't write any songs to it. Mother fucker! And today I left it at home... Sigh.