Doctors have long encouraged patients to slash their salt intake for good heart health.

A European study finds that those who ingest less sodium have an increased risk of cardiovascular death, but U.S. experts are taking the results with a grain of salt.

The American Heart Association encourages people to consume no more than 1,500 milligrams a day of sodium to reduce their risk of high blood pressure, heart attacks, stroke and kidney disease. This is less than half of what people consume now.

One reason for this advice: Elevated blood pressure is a major public health problem approximately 90% of all Americans will develop hypertension over their lifetime, the heart association says.

But a new European population study coordinated in Belgium raises questions about sodium and its effect on the heart.

Researchers followed 3,681 people, average age 40, for about eight years, testing sodium excretion in the urine. They found that systolic blood pressure (the top number) was slightly lower in those who excreted less sodium, but this didn’t translate into a lower risk of cardiovascular death — in fact, those with lower sodium excretion had an increased risk of cardiovascular death. The findings were consistent in participants younger and older than 60 years.

Jan Staessen, a professor of medicine at the University of Leuven in Belgium and one of the authors of the study in Wednesday’s Journal of the American Medical Association, says this study does not support the recommendation of a general reduction of salt intake for everyone, although salt reduction could be beneficial in lowering the blood pressure of people with hypertension. “Lower sodium intake is recommended for people with high blood pressure and people with heart failure, but recommending it to the population as a whole, I wouldn’t do without proving it’s completely safe,” he says.

“If one lowers sodium intake to lower blood pressure, this change in sodium activates several systems (including the renin-angiotensin aldosterone system) that conserve sodium, and those systems are implicated in disease processes such as damaging the arterial wall and kidneys,” Staessen says.

This study may apply to Americans of white European descent, but it might less applicable to blacks because they are believed to be more salt sensitive, he says.

The research is already drawing fire from medical experts here. Ralph Sacco, president of the American Heart Association and chairman of neurology at the University of Miami, says this is only one study of a relatively young, mostly white population and blood pressure tends to rise with age and affect African-Americans disproportionately.

“We have based our recommendations on the many scientific studies which show a strong relationship between reduced sodium consumption and a lower risk of heart attacks, congestive heart failure and stroke,” he says. “There are good randomized, controlled studies the gold standard of scientific studies that show a lower sodium diet has a meaningful effect on blood pressure.”

Gina Lundberg, a preventive cardiologist in Atlanta, supports the 1,500-milligram guideline. “We’re all eating too much sodium because we eat too many prepared, processed foods.”

Leaders in the salt industry applaud the new research. This study basically says that salt reduction to reduce cardiovascular disease is a strategy that is not going to work, says Morton Satin, vice president of science and research for the Salt Institute, an industry group.
 

Health-Report comments:  

It is a very misinformed doctor or nutritionist that would suggest eliminating salt from the diet has any bearing on lowering blood pressure or reducing the risk of heart attack in this day and age. Yet almost with monotonous regularity we are exhorted to reduce salt consumption by perhaps well meaning government sponsored doctors and nutritionists who haven't bothered to read the in depth research on this subject.

It is typical of the dogma that surrounds the medical fraternity. If they are determined to "prove" a point they will selectively gather data so they are shown to be right and to hell with the real results. As long as their position is vindicated then they have justified their existence.

Of course most studies are funded by vested interests with a financial interest in the results. So what scientist is going shoot themselves in both feet at once by coming up with a finding completely opposite to what he is being paid to find?  It's too easy to put a pair of blinkers on and focus on just one aspect of a particular problem without looking at the whole! Holistic healers look at the person as a whole - never seeking to isolate a single symptom and treat it with allopathic drugs and chemicals.

High blood pressure is invariably caused by many other factors other than salt!

Geoff Goldie