Though this carbohydrate-induced water retention and the hypertensive effect of insulin were occasionally discussed in nutrition and dietetics textbooks—Modern Nutrition in Health and Disease, for example, which was published in 1951 and was in its fifth edition by the 1970s—they would appear solely in the technical context of water and electrolyte balance (sodium is an electrolyte), whereas the discussion of hypertension prevention would focus exclusively on the salt hypothesis. When they were discussed in obesity conferences after the 1960s, the implications were restricted to a very narrow range, usually as evidence against any metabolic advantage of carbohydrate-restricted diets. (“One claim which is often made for the low-carbohydrate diet is that 3,000 [calories]/day or more can be eaten and the patient will still lose weight if the carbohydrate intake is restricted,” explained George Bray at the Second International Conference on Obesity in 1977. “There are no convincing studies to support this claim. On the contrary…it is now well-established that a low-carbohydrate diet is followed by the excretion of water and that carbohydrate ingestion leads to retention of both salt and water.”) Since lower weight is associated with lower insulin levels, overweight hypertensives were advised to lose weight to reduce their blood pressure, but then low-calorie diets—usually low-fat and thus high in carbohydrates—would be recommended as the means to do it. On very rare occasions, “carbohydrate overeating” would be acknowledged as a nutritional factor involved in the genesis of hypertension, at least in obese patients, and then both carbohydrate restriction and salt restriction would be recommended as treatment. Those investigators, too, had come to assume that the salt hypothesis must be true.