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.