RUSH: How many of you believe that eating too much salt is a no-no? Eating too much salt is a horrible thing. I know you all do. Guess what? It’s not so. Folks, let me tell you something, I’m seriously beginning to think that much of what is wrong with us generally, and particularly health-wise, is due to the way the liberal academia, liberal scientists, report what they do and study what they do. It’s not science. It’s nothing more than an agenda that is supposedly cloaked in science, but it’s nothing more than agenda-driven liberalism.

This salt debate. There’s a debate on it now, a debate thought to be over long ago: Too much salt, high blood pressure. All kinds of horrible things. But no less than the New York Times on Saturday, by the way: “Salt, We Misjudged You.” Let me give you the pull quote here. “One could still argue that all these people should reduce their salt intake to prevent hypertension –” high blood pressure for those in Rio Linda, “– except for the fact that four of these studies — involving Type 1 diabetics, Type 2 diabetics, healthy Europeans and patients with chronic heart failure — reported that the people eating salt at the lower limit of normal were more likely to have heart disease than those eating smack in the middle of the normal range.

“Proponents of the eat-less-salt campaign tend to deal with this contradictory evidence by implying that anyone raising it is a shill for the food industry and doesnÂ’t care about saving lives.” The author is Gary Taubes, he says, “An N.I.H. administrator told me back in 1998 that to publicly question the science on salt was to play into the hands of the industry. ‘As long as there are things in the media that say the salt controversy continues,’ he said, ‘they win.'” The upshot is that you can do damage to yourself by not eating enough. If you eat too little, you raise your possibilities of heart disease and Types I and II diabetes. If you eat more than what is normal, there are fewer health problems that are caused.

I am going to have to start a list, folks, because it’s too long for me to remember. All of the foods that you and I grew up with thinking were hurtful. The egg and cheese and dairy products, it turns out, are not nearly as harmful as what people, science, left-wing scientists led us to believe. It turns out that hydrogenated margarine is much worse for you than butter is. Coconut oil, which was banned as one of the most healthful oils you can eat. Eggs, saccharine, coffee, oat bran, all of these things were going to lead to high blood pressure. They were going to kill you, high fat food. We find out now if you don’t have enough fat in your diet you are not preparing yourself to withstand sickness, illness, any number of things. Every supposed stated fact turns out to be a myth.

Now, the salt story prints out to a lot of pages. It’s like seven or eight. I didn’t print them all out. I didn’t have to. “We Only Think We Know the Truth About Salt,” is the headline of this story. And it could be said about oat bran. It could be said about coffee, nicotine. For example, what did we learn about nicotine? Nicotine helps ward off Parkinson’s or Alzheimer’s, I forget which. Alzheimer’s. Yet we’ve all been told nicotine is a killer, nicotine is horrible. It has some benefits to it that nobody’s told about it.

But the classic here is you have a bunch of liberal — and they are liberals. I mean, I know people cringe when I try to make everything a left/right issue. But it is. Everybody trying to force you to live a certain way happens to have a political ideology. They do. It’s not even arguable. You can call and argue with me all day long if you want. But I’m telling you, these are people that are interested in control and domination, and they do it with fear. They do it with guilt. And, by gosh, if somebody comes along and tells you, “You know, you’re killing yourself but I can save you,” you’re going to listen to them. If they tell you salt is killing you, salt is raising your blood pressure, you’ll listen to them. Nobody wants to die.

So all of these things get started. They become accepted conventional wisdom. And slowly but surely we’re learning, just like global warming and just like coconut oil, just like a bunch of other things that everybody presumed that were fact, they’re not. And here this guy who writes a story reveals that he has been trying to write the truth about salt for years, since 1998. He was always attacked and he’s accused of being a tool of the salt industry. Now we’ve got Big Salt. Who knew. Big Pepper, not that far behind. Well, what have people said could happen to you for having too much pepper? I don’t know. Nothing. Anyway, I’m glossing over this now but it’s worth a little bit more time at some point because we’re being lied to and we’re being misled, and it’s all oriented towards control and surrendering control. Power over our lives.

By the way, have you noticed the number of people that agree with Bloomberg on this silly 16-ounce soft drink ban. In the left wing media, they’re all over the place who say it’s about time somebody put their foot down on this. More than you can count on two hands, who are prominent, who think it’s about time, it’s a great thing, in the sports media to boot. I’m even reading about it in the sports media, praising Bloomberg for finally having the courage to say what needs to be said. That a 16-ounce Coke is just too damn much, when the truth is it’s nobody’s business. When you get down to brass tacks, it’s nobody’s business. And it’s all prefaced on a bunch of lies, that sugar is going to kill you or the carbonation is going to kill you, or this is going to make you sick. It’s all based upon a bunch of lies. Where does salt go to get its reputation back? And, by the way, Doomburg was leading the assault on salt, too. Trans fats and now sugar. And these people become very militant about it.

BREAK TRANSCRIPT

RUSH: I checked the emailed during the break. “Rush, do you know how ridiculous you sound defending salt?” Yeah. But I’m not afraid to. Folks, I never bought any of this stuff in the first place. I don’t watch the amount of salt I eat and my blood pressure is normal. I’ve never followed conventional wisdom. I don’t go along with the crowd. I realize we’re all individuals. The New York Times last week had a story on how exercise is not good for everybody, and I can totally understand that. We are all different. We are not the same. It’s impossible that something is good for everybody and bad for everybody. And I mean everybody. There are exceptions to everything.

Now, this salt business, I want to read you an excerpt from this story. “Already a quarter century into the eat-less-salt recommendations — journal editors and public health administrators were still remarkably candid in their assessment of how flimsy the evidence was implicating salt as the cause of [high blood pressure.]” Would you like to know how it happens?

“Why have we been told that salt is so deadly? Well, the advice has always sounded reasonable. It has what nutritionists like to call ‘biological plausibility.’ Eat more salt and your body retains water to maintain a stable concentration of sodium in your blood. This is why eating salty food tends to make us thirsty: we drink more; we retain water. The result can be a temporary increase in blood pressure, which will persist until our kidneys eliminate both salt and water.” Meaning if you eat too much, your body takes care of it. Unless you have a problem, which you should go get treated for. But it’s not universal that this stuff is going to kill you. The fact is you can’t live without it, is the bottom line.