Is a fear of salt sabotaging your health?

Fundamental to life and enjoyable food… but demonized by the mainstream as an easy way to an early grave!

This is the story of salt.

I’m sure you’ve heard this dangerous low-sodium dietary fable many times. And if your blood pressure is a bit on the high side, no doubt your doctor has given you the salt lecture: Trash the salt shaker and stock up on tasteless low-sodium foods.

If you want to stay alive, that is.

But as an eAlert reader, you know that advice is wrong, wrong, and wrong!

And now, a just-out study on sodium by researchers from across the globe has found that all of this nonsense about the danger of salt was never based on any real proof.

“There is no convincing evidence,” they said, that you’ll be doing anything to prevent heart disease or a stroke by carefully counting out each grain of salt you eat.

But even worse, this research clearly found — once again — that when you push sodium levels too low (exactly what the American Heart Association is peddling), you’re putting your health in serious jeopardy.

The PURE truth

Researchers from 21 countries did their best to get to the bottom of this baloney about limiting salt to the point where you hate just about everything you eat.

This research, organized as a study called PURE and just published in The Lancet, was as comprehensive as any analysis could be. It was comprised of close to 96,000 people from 18 countries who were monitored for salt intake (measured in their urine), blood pressure, and heart disease over the course of eight years.

And here’s what researchers found:

• Most people around the world are not consuming too much sodium.
• Only in China, where the salt intake tended to go over 5 grams a day (5,000 mg), did the researchers find any kind of connection between sodium and heart disease.
• If, in fact, you are in those upper limits of salt consumption, simply adding more potassium-rich foods (such as squash, sweet potatoes, beans, yogurt, nuts, and bananas) to your diet will eliminate any problems that may cause.
• And… drumroll please… not being on a sodium-restricted diet was associated with lower rates of heart attacks… and an all-around lower death rate!

As to how this low-salt mantra got started in the first place, the best explanation offered by the PURE team was that “any approach to reducing blood pressure” was believed to translate into less risk of heart disease. But time and time again, we’ve seen how such one-sided thinking in regard to health care perfectly illustrates that old saying about throwing the baby out with the bath water!

Lead author Dr. Andrew Mente, from Ontario’s McMaster University, put it this way: Salt has always been a “holy grail nutrient” for preventing heart disease, and when you lower it too much, it “can actually increase mortality.”

The “sweet spot” associated with the lowest risk of heart problems, Dr. Mente says, is between 3,000 and 5,000 mg per day.

Previous research has found that even for those with high blood pressure, consuming under 3,000 mg of salt a day actually upped their risk for a heart attack or stroke by a whopping 34 percent.

And if your blood pressure is considered normal, cutting your sodium down to what the American Heart Association calls the “ideal limit” of 1,500 mg a day will increase your risk of a heart attack or stroke by over 25 percent.

Another study done by researchers out of Belgium discovered that when you go under 3,000 mg a day, you’re increasing your risk of dying early by 500 percent!

Any way you look at it, following these absurd sodium restrictions would be like playing with fire where your health is concerned.

Dr. Mente’s take-home message for doctors is that instead of harping on lowering sodium, they should encourage their patients to eat more fresh foods, especially potassium-rich fruits and veggies.

And you and I both know how much better those healthy foods taste with a sprinkling of salt on them!

“CV events increase only with high levels of sodium intake: PURE” Batya Swift Yasgur, August 17, 2018, Medscape, medscape.com