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You cannot use insignificant numbers to draw statistically significant conclusions. He and colleagues¹ claim to have shown a positive relationship between salt intake and the later development (over a 19-year time frame) of congestive heart failure in overweight (P = .02 for trend) but not normal weight men and women. Their major investigative variable, reported 1-day salt intake extrapolated to presumed lifelong salt intake, is based on the First National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey (NHANES I) numbers derived from each individual's recall of a single day's food and salt intake.

Even if it were valid to extrapolate a lifetime of salt intake from a single day's estimated value (which is highly questionable), it is amazing that the authors give credence to, and base their conclusions on, "estimates" of salt intake that are so obviously wrong, both in their absolute numbers and in the population distribution curve. Somehow, the . . . [Full Text of this Article]

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