MMMMM salt. It’s like my second favorite food group. After chocolate, of course. Hey everyone, Laci Green here for DNews. There are warnings abound about the dangers
of a high sodium diet. And it’s true that most packaged foods are
full of the stuff. Probably half the reason it tastes so good,
to be honest. But just how terrible is salt? Is there such thing as not enough? A new international study in the New England
Journal of Medicine monitored over 100,000 people in 17 countries for 4 years and found
that those who ate MODERATE amounts of salt were healthier than those who consumed A LOT
of salt and those who only consumed a LITTLE salt.
They defined “moderate” as 3000-6000mg
a day. For perspective, Americans eat 3400mg of salt
a day and the World Health Organization recommends that people only consume about 2000mg a day. The scientists found that those who consume
between 3000-6000mg of salt have a lower risk of cardiovascular issues. They also had a lower risk of death over the
4 year study. They tracked the patients’ salt intake with
daily urine samples in the morning, which is a reliable way to measure how much sodium
and potassium the individual had consumed. The potassium was important to track because
it protects against some of the negative effects of salt, like raising your blood pressure. Those who ate more than 1500mg of potassium
a day were *also* less likely to have heart disease or die. Not that surprising, both because of potassium's
effect on salt and because potassium is in a lot of fruits and veggies. Those people probably have healthier diets. The researchers emphasize what some recent
studies have been finding: it is possible to get too LITTLE salt, especially amongst
generally healthy people.
And it’s possible that all of the high sodium
fear is a little misguided. Another study last April in the American Journal
of Hypertension found that those who consume 2500-5000mg of salt per day have lower mortality
rates and that low sodium diets could be harmful to the healthy. The Institute of Medicine also released a
report last year finding that consuming under 2300mg a day didn’t prevent heart disease.
Still, the American Heart Association isn’t
convinced – they say the methods of the new study are questionable, especially how they
measured the salt in peoples urine. There’s also another study in the same issue
of the New England Journal of Medicine with directly conflicting findings. The second study, carried out at Harvard,
found that 1.65 million global cardiovascular deaths are linked with high sodium consumption. Unfortunately because the evidence is so conflicted,
there’s no final word on salt yet.
In the meantime, it appears to be safer to
err on the side of *not enough* salt than *too much*. Do you eat a lot of salt? Or are you low sodium? Tell me about it in the comments and I’ll
see you next time..
