What you are saying though is anecdotal evidence of when you were using motorcycles for your personal pleasure. Fine, don't ask harley davidson but ask some one, somewhere who is an expert about motorcycles instead of trying to make a claim based solely on your life experience. So excuse me if I don't take you at your word there.

Ok, so I am completely ignorant of the physics behind helmets so I did what I thought was the best course and attempted to ask some experts. On another website I frequent there is sub forum where people who have degrees in scientific fields can answer questions related to science, if it has been proven by a moderator that they have a degree, then a colored tag appears next to their screen name with the field of the degree shown. here is the thread I posted: http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/c...ct_of_helmets/

Here were the top two upvoted comments the first by a guy who has a degree in physics and the second by someone who's screen name is "AsAChemicalEngineer"
This reminds me of when people were trying to claim that seatbelts caused more bodily harm than flying through your car and stopping yourself against the steering wheel and windshield.

Helmets serve two functions using two parts. The hard outer shell prevents the road from making undesirable contact with your face, but more importantly prevents objects from penetrating the skull or cracking it, which is extremely important.
The second function of a helmet is to slightly reduce the acceleration felt by your head when hitting the ground, the foam gives a little and allows the stop to happen over a slightly longer distance. Which is also extremely important.
While it is true, helmets can increase the rotational pressures on the neck, any accident which is sufficient enough to severely damage the neck would almost certainly be strong enough to inflict severe blunt trauma onto a person's skull also. This isn't a zero sum game where helmets protect heads but hurt necks. If you don't wear a helmet you simply have two dangerous injuries instead of just one.
There is a reason helmets protect only you head, it's more practical and economical to just protect the most important and vulnerable part of a human being.
I read that article and in no way were they advocating riding freestyle, they mostly pointed out that some of the safety standards were impractical and needed to be changed. They even did tests on different helmets and showcased the most protective ones.
Point is, I understand riding without a helmet, it is loads more fun. It's a choice that one does because it is a better experience, but if you really feel the need to justify your choices with faulty logic instead of just accepting it as a personal choice then your certainly misguided.

So what I gathered is that that statement you got from that doctor was probably lacking the context that while indeed energy is transferred to the neck when wearing a helmet the point of it is that if the energy is enough to snap your neck it would have enough to crack your skull open. Wearing a helmet at least stops one of those two injuries from occurring.

Well then, shouldn't our job be to make sure participants recognize this so we can have a healthy political discourse, or are you saying our job is to keep the level of political discourse at an embarrassingly ignorant level and simply try to work within that?

I can't read the entire article because The New York Times is asking me to log in and I don't have an account. But from the small, possibly out of context portion you have quoted I don't see how this negates what I am saying at all. Like all news stories involving science, this article was written incredibly poorly. The very first paragraph you showed says the results from studies have been inconclusive and contradictory which means studies have and have not shown the benefits of lowing salt intake. Also like every "journalism" newspaper, things that scientists say are taken out of context, see the latest NASA announcement about being able to have organisms utilize large amounts of arsenic instead of phosphorus (but not completely switch) in their internal biochemistry and suddenly every newspaper is claiming we found life based on arsenic completely different then anything lifeform on Earth. Likewise, the statement is given probably out of context "there is little evidence for long term benefit from reducing salt intake" note that the word "concluded" was not said by the scientists and put in their mouths by the journalist. So excuse me when I say, give me the peer reviewed study. For all i know the article could be extremely biased and the full quote was "I disagree that there is little evidence for long term benefit from reducing salt intake."

The second statement seems fair and reasonable there might be not enough to start making policies about it, then again that statement was 4 years ago, so we need to re-evaluate if that statement still holds.

The third paragraph gave me facepalm because they are quoting a study where people who had a deficiency of salt from a low salt diet did extremely bad and suddenly that is evidence that we don't have to cut down on our extremely saturated salt heavy diet? Apparently if having none of it is bad, then we should stick with having too much of it?

The last statement is again, completely without context that the risk involved occur only when your salt intake is below 6 grams of salt (or about a teaspoon0. Now tell me, unless you purposely go out of your way to not eat salt, how exactly are you going to experience a lack of salt in today's modern, processed food diet?

Not if the entire industry if using the bad ingredients. But I will concede that isn't the case anyone, luckily I can buy coke without HFCS, so yeah maybe I spoke to quickly in that aspect of it.

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