Not worth refuting?

A long plane ride today afforded the opportunity to read an Anthony Daniels' review of Ibn Warraq's new book, Defending the West: A Critique of Edward Said's Orientalism.  Daniels uses what Benjamin Franklin in the play 1776 said of Thomas Jefferson's writing skills:  "a peculiar felicity of expression."

That expression, offered in the context of refuting Said's famous book, was offered as printed:

Some might say that Ibn Warraq has picked an easy target: Said's work would not have been worth refuting had it not been so phenomenally successful in creating what Auden called, with regard to Freud, "a whole climate of opinion."

Whatever you think about the Said/IWarraq contention, our attention was captured by the strong parallel of Said's conventional wisdom versus Warraq's critique to the Salt Institute's recurrent attempts to engage federal public health nutrition leaders in a discussion of the weakness of the scientific data offered in support of the contention that lowering dietary salt will improve health. 

To paraphrase:  if the federal anti-salt advocacy campaign hadn't been "so phenomenally successful" in creating a "climate of opinion" condemning salt, it would, in Warraq's appropriate words "would not have been worth refuting."  Of the fifteen studies of health outcomes of salt-reduced diets, nearly every one has found no benefit and many have found additional risk. 

We need a controlled trial to sort out the issues raised in these studies; all of them are merely observational.  But the lack of any likelihood that a controlled trial would validate the notion of a health risk of current levels of dietary salt is trumped by the obvious fact that this unsubstantiated policy is already in place.  So, even though the "hypothesis generating" studies would suggest the negative hypothesis, that lowering dietary salt would NOT improve health outcomes, the existence of the current policy based on the contrary assumption, though ostensibly "not worth refuting" is actually well worth examining.

Let's let the science guide our policy, not the momentum of obsolete assumptions.  Secretary Leavitt, fund a health outcomes study of salt-reduced diets.  Please.