A Biocultural Approach to Salt Taboos: The Case of the Southeastern United States [and Comments and Reply]

Neumann, Thomas; Arnott, Margaret L.; Baker, P. T.; Dahlquist, Paul A.; Desai, I. D.; Gouletquer, Pierre; Grivetti, Louis E.; Gropper, Rena C.; Katz, Solomon H.; Kerri, James Nwannukwu; Méndez-Domínguez, Alfredo; Nurge, Ethel; Paque, C; Pollock, Nancy J.; Smith, Charline G.; Wilson, Christine S.

doi:10.1086/201889

Cited by 8 publications

(4 citation statements)

References 15 publications

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“…Humans need to maintain fluid balance and need to drink water when required, but should also consider fluid in unprocessed fruits and vegetables and juices. There is further evidence that water and a well‐balanced diet does far more than water alone 8,31,32 and this type of research should not be ignored. It may not be just water that's needed; it may also be the other components that go along with it that will mean the body is well hydrated.…”

Section: Resultsmentioning

confidence: 99%

What drove us to drink 2 litres of water a day?

Tsindos

2012

Australian and New Zealand Journal of Public Health

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Editorialsauthors of journals give a word limit, which differs from journal to journal. It is useful to keep in mind that many databases, including Medline, cut abstracts off at 250 words. Who is it for?Abstracts have different functions, depending on where and how they are read. When they appear as part of the paper, that is, with the full text of the article, readers use them to judge whether they are interested in reading further and also to be orientated. Abstracts are not always accompanied by the rest of the text, however. They appear widely on online databases, which are used not only by researchers and practitioners looking for articles to obtain but also by large numbers of people with an interest in public health in countries where the original article may not be available, and where abstracts serve as a substitute for the full article.To meet the requirements of all these different users, abstracts must be understandable without reference to the text. They must be informative rather than descriptive. They must accurately reflect the content of the article. Both for a reader in a country where a copy of the current issue of a scientific journal is almost unheard of and for the busy editor of the journal, phrases like "The results are discussed in the light of previous findings" stimulate feelings ranging from mild amusement to frustration. What were the results? What do they mean?Your abstract will probably be read by thousands of researchers and practitioners all over the world, many more people than will ever read the full text. The large majority (more than 80%) will not be native English speakers. What's more, the abstract will be translated into other languages − usually by translators who are not scientists. Does all this seem like a lot of responsibility for you to bear when writing an abstract? It's easy to face up to: Keep it simple! Write plain, grammatical English, using the correct technical terms but with no jargon (from a mediaeval French word meaning the warbling, twittering and chattering of birds, with the same root as 'gargle'; i.e. sounds that are meaningless). Avoid pompous sentences and don't use abbreviations unless you really have to. When should it be written?Most people find it easiest to write the abstract when the rest of the paper has been fully constructed, each sentence agonisingly and lovingly rounded out. Then, they take the best of those sentences (they abstract, ab trahere, to pull out), distribute them artfully and sometimes come to an even more polished conclusion than they did in the paper. Perhaps, just as an exercise, it might be interesting to try at least once to write the abstract first. If you can write your abstract first, you will have done a lot of thinking before setting pen to paper or fingers to the keyboard. Once all that thinking has been done, the text of your whole article will be very much easier to write.

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Section: Resultsmentioning

confidence: 99%

What drove us to drink 2 litres of water a day?

Tsindos

2012

Australian and New Zealand Journal of Public Health

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“…Eghindi roughly functions as a salt taboo, enforcing a set of health and food practices and rules. Like salt taboos among other populations (Neumann et al 1977), recognizing and labeling eghindi, and practices that developed in response to it, probably began among Sahrawi in order to limit salt intake. But avoiding salty or brackish water was not easy: wells were few in Western Sahara, and most had brackish water with high concentrations of chloride, sodium, and nitrates (Boyer 1962).…”

Section: Biocultural Roots Of Eghindi Among Sahrawi Nomadsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Edema can be caused by continued or increased intakes of sodium (Neumann et al 1977), and by changes in the hydrostatic and oncotic pressures within the body causing unbalances in fluid homeostasis. Edema caused by fluid retention is usually temporary, and it occurs when water accumulates in the body as consequence of the ingestion of salty food and high-sodium meals.…”

Section: Biocultural Roots Of Eghindi Among Sahrawi Nomadsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Eghindi Among Sahrawi Refugees of Western Sahara

Volpato

2014

Medical Anthropology

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Eghindi is an illness built around a set of pathological states experienced by Sahrawi in the desert environment of Western Sahara. Its core symptoms are caused by osmotic imbalances related to salt consumption. In 1975, many Sahrawi were exiled into refugee camps, and they have since experienced radical sociocultural changes, which are reflected in changing explanatory models of eghindi. Older and conservative refugees, attached to traditional Sahrawi culture, have expanded its conceptualization to include new pathogenic factors, while younger and progressive refugees, acculturated with Western culture, began challenging its existence. Eghindi became embodied within a broader process of negotiation of Sahrawi cultural identity. Our findings provide a framework for thinking about the evolution of illness in response to displacement, and highlight that when explanatory models evolve, intracultural tensions can arise within a population.

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“…Morris (1969) and other theorists would not have had to advance numerous more or less ingenious, but all equally panglossian, reasons to explain why we have become "naked apes." Nobody would feel obliged to search for the adaptive advantages of a disease like color blindness (McCracken, 1971), nor find adaptive utilities for food taboos (Neumann, 1977;Ross, 1978;Harris, 1978a;McDonald, 1977) and cannibalism (Harris, 1978b).…”

Section: Wider Implicationsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Lactose malabsorption reconsidered

Ferro-Luzzi¹

1980

Ecology of Food and Nutrition

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A Biocultural Approach to Salt Taboos: The Case of the Southeastern United States [and Comments and Reply]

Cited by 8 publications

References 15 publications

What drove us to drink 2 litres of water a day?

What drove us to drink 2 litres of water a day?

Eghindi Among Sahrawi Refugees of Western Sahara

Lactose malabsorption reconsidered

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