Nonsense. Here’s why.
It’s interesting that the high salt diet contained a full 10 times the amount of salt than the regular diet did. The Purina chow which they fed the Mongolian Gerbils contains the 0.75% salt. They added another 8% salt for a total of 8.75%.
That’s a bit like taking our normal consumption of 9g salt/day being bumped up to 99g/day. That’s not the way it works in real life.
Low salt diets for humans run around 3-4 g salt/day (the American Heart Association recommendation) and the highest salt consumption in the world (Northern Japan) runs around 12-14 g salt/day. In other words, a 4-fold increase between low and high.
In the gerbil study there was a 10-fold difference between low and high. A highly exaggerated case that has no relationship to real life. It is not particularly strange that they achieved this result since they placed an unusually high metabolic stress on the gerbils.
Well, we have another way to reduce a gerbil infestation.
It’s the ulcers that cause the cancer. Salt on your Helicobacter pylori makes no damn difference. Jeeze.
The same with saccharine. The FDA (US Food and Drug Administration) was mandated to ban anything that could possibly cause cancer. The ban on cyclamates has since been lifted, but the well is poisoned and no one is willing to fight the hype.
Isn’t this the usual approach taken when testing anything?
I may be wrong but I vaguely recall the method of testing cyclamate sweeteners: Feed the equivalent of 500 soft drinks a day to the animals and, lo and behold!, they develop cancers!
Q.E.D. The substance must be dangerous.
They should have gone the extra mile, give them 50% salt on each meal. Certain death ensues, salt is the cause.