Cutting all that salt out of your diet can be a fatal mistake
For years they all said the same thing. Researchers, mainstream doctors, and government scientists marched together in lockstep to spread the “low-sodium myth.”
They told you salt was bad. They worked to drive America’s sodium guidelines to new and dangerous lows. And they demonized anyone who dared challenge them.
Now, the federal government is on the verge of releasing a new set of dietary guidelines – and a funny thing is happening.
Scientists around the world are breaking ranks. They’re warning that a low-sodium diet could put your health in serious danger – and maybe even threaten your life.
Salt in our wounds
Andrew Mente knows just how deadly a low-sodium diet can be.
He’s a professor at McMaster University in Ontario and one of the researchers on what became known as the PURE study.
Mente and his colleagues tracked 100,000 people around the world for three years and discovered that low-sodium diets can trigger production of a hormone called renin. It damages blood vessels and increases your risk of heart attack and stroke big time.
In fact, the PURE researchers found that if you want to lower your risk of heart disease or death, you need 3,000 to 6,000 mg of sodium a day.
A massive study out of Denmark last year reached almost the same conclusion. Researchers found that eating less than 2,645 mg of sodium a day will actually increase your risk of death.
Could a sodium guideline above 3,000 mg a day be around the corner?
Don’t count on it. The federal government – and the key panel that advises it – have been wary about straying too far from the 1,500 mg daily sodium limit the American Heart Association recommends.
And that’s a problem for all of us. Because even the former AHA president, Dr. Suzanne Oparil, admits the 1,500 mg limit is “based on almost nothing.”
Prior to 2003, the official mantra on salt was rather vague. The older Dietary Guidelines only said we should have “less salt,” but didn’t put a number on it.
So a committee from the Institute of Medicine decided to change all that.
Now, proper levels for vitamins and minerals are usually determined by seeing what a healthy population consumes. And here’s where things start to go off the deep end.
The “healthy” population the IOM selected was a tribe living in the Amazonian Rain Forest called the Yanomami.
These Yanomami have amazingly low blood pressure…and they only consume around 500 mg a day of sodium.
Of course 500 mg was too low, even for the IOM people. So they arbitrarily tripled it. Their nice round figure of 1,500 mg a day was based on nothing – and was eventually adopted by groups like AHA.
But what the IOM never reported was that the Yanomani – those same tribespeople with the perfect blood pressure – were dropping dead.
If they make it out of their 40s, it’s considered remarkable. And they not only die young, but with sky-high levels of that damaging hormone renin circulating in their bodies.
Who knows why IOM omitted that little detail? Maybe they figured that what we didn’t know wouldn’t hurt us.
But they were wrong, and now scientists like Mente and Oparil are fighting back against years of junk science. They’re trying to get our government to abandon the low-sodium myth forever — before more of us end up like the Yanomani.
“There is no longer any valid basis for the current salt guidelines,” Mente told the Washington Post recently. “So why are we still scaring people about salt?”
Source:
“More scientists doubt salt is as bad for you as the government says” Peter Whoriskey, April 6, 2015, The Washington Post, washingtonpost.com
