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Could A Low-Salt Diet Be Bad For Your Heart?

A spilled salt shaker

A paper in a recent edition of  Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) offers the contradictory conclusion that taking in less salt—a key goal of U.S. health and dietary recommendations—is bad for you. But before you roll your eyes and groan about flip-flops in science, know that this study isn’t the kind of work on which you or anyone should base dietary decisions.

In this study of 3,681 men and women from Belgium, Bulgaria, Italy, Poland, Romania and Russia whose health was followed for eight years, participants with the lowest sodium excretion (which is a good measure of sodium intake) were 56% more likely to have died from cardiovascular disease than those with the highest sodium excretion. Among the nearly 2,100 participants with normal blood pressure at the study’s start, sodium excretion (sodium intake) had no effect on the development of high blood pressure.

These are startling findings. If true, they would undercut major programs by the U.S. government to reduce Americans’ intake of salt—the main source of sodium—from prepared and processed foods and at home. Read more »

*This blog post was originally published at Harvard Health Blog*

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