Substituting the world's salt supply

The adverse effects of excess dietary sodium intake on blood pressure levels are well-established. On average the world eats dietary sodium, mostly in the form of salt, at twice the level recommended by the World Health Organization and five times the level consumed during a million years of hominid evolution. At the same time, average dietary potassium intake is below recommended intake levels in many populations, and inadequate potassium intake is also associated with high blood pressure. Potassium-enriched salt substitute, in which some of the sodium chloride is replaced with potassium chloride, was first showed to lower blood pressure more than a decade ago. Most recently, in 2021, the Salt Substitute and Stroke Study showed that potassium-enriched salt can also reduce the risks of stroke (rate ratio 14%; p = 0.006), major cardiovascular events (13%; p < 0.001) and premature death (12%; p < 0.001). This large-scale randomised trial done amongst 21,000 individuals followed for 5 years also showed that these benefits were achieved without harm, and in particular, with no evidence of hyperkalemia (rate ratio 1.04; p = 0.76). Potassium-enriched salts are a pragmatic means of reducing dietary sodium intake and supplementing dietary potassium intake in parallel. Unlike many other sodium reduction strategies, they are easy to implement because potassium-enriched salt can be used in just the same way as regular salt. This provided for excellent adherence in the Salt Substitute and Stroke Study, with 93% of participants still using the salt substitute at the end of the study. The potential health gains from a switch to potassium-enriched salt are very large. Modelling done for China indicates that about 1 million strokes and heart attacks could be prevented each year if the switch was made nationwide. Several million more events might be averted if implementation was global. Another key feature of potassium-enriched salt is that it can be provided at low cost. While on average about twice as expensive as regular salt, potassium-enriched salt has a median price of less than $3 per kilogram in low- and middle-income countries. Over the last 50 years, the fight against iodine deficiency disorders has seen the global salt supply switched from salt to iodized salt. It is now time to make a second switch from iodized salt to iodized and potassium-enriched salt to also prevent blood pressure related diseases

After the storm

Even the most sophisticated technology will not predict some natural disasters, but it can help us to prepare, and to deal with the devastation that follows

backbone: An R Package for extracting the backbone of bipartite projections

Bipartite projections are used in a wide range of network contexts including politics (bill co-sponsorship), genetics (gene co-expression), economics (executive board co-membership), and innovation (patent co-authorship). However, because bipartite projections are always weighted graphs, which are inherently challenging to analyze and visualize, it is often useful to examine the 'backbone', an unweighted subgraph containing only the most significant edges. In this paper, we introduce the R package backbone for extracting the backbone of weighted bipartite projections, and use bill sponsorship data from the 114th session of the United States Senate to demonstrate its functionality

THE POWER FLOW THROUGH THE SWINGING LIMB DURING AN INSTEP KICK IN SOCCER

INTRODUCTION: Studies concerning soccer kicking have looked extensively at the kinetics (Nunome et al., 2001) involved with the skill. However, there remains a dearth of literature concerning the energetic transfer which occurs between the segments. Early work by Zernicke and Roberts (1978) used two dimensional kinematics and inverse dynamics to estimate the joint contact forces of the kicking limb. They proposed a ‘flail’ like movement pattern where the thigh is rapidly decelerated at the onset of knee extension, suggesting a large passive contribution to rapid knee extension. Putman (1983) developed further theories suggesting the motion of the shank segment affects thigh deceleration prior to ball contact

Reviews

Lisa Tyler. Writing and Healing: Toward an Informed Practice. (Charles M. Anderson and Marian M. MacCurdy, eds., 2000). Fran Claggett. Revisioning Writers\u27 Talk: Gender and Culture in Acts of Composing. (Mary Ann Cain, 1995). Bruce Novak. Tomorrow\u27s Children: A Blueprint for Partnership Education in the 21st Century. (Riane Eisler, 2000). Neal Lerner. Stories from the Center: Connecting Narrative and Theory in the Writing Center. (Lynn Craigue Briggs and Meg Woolbright, eds., 2000)

Gratitude to God, Self‐Rated Health, and Depressive Symptoms

Peer Reviewedhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/107511/1/jssr12110.pd

The Potential Cost to New Zealand Dairy Farmers from the Introduction of Nitrate-Based Stocking Rate Restrictions

Introducing a stocking rate restriction is one possible course of action for regulators to improve water quality where it is affected by nitrate pollution. To determine the impact of a stocking rate restriction on a range of New Zealand dairy farms, a whole-farm model was optimised with and without a maximum stocking rate of 2.5 cows per hectare. Three farm systems, which differ by their level of feed-related capital, were examined for the changes to the optimal stocking rate and optimal level of animal milk production genetics when utility was maximised. The whole-farm model was optimised through the use of an evolutionary algorithm called differential evolution. The introduction of a stocking rate restriction would have a very large impact on the optimally organised high feed-related capital farm systems, reducing their certainty equivalent by almost half. However, there was no impact on the certainty equivalent of low feed-related capital systems.environmental regulation, dairy farms, whole-farm model, evolutionary algorithm, Environmental Economics and Policy, Livestock Production/Industries, Q12, Q52, C61,