Salt’s Bad Shake

For years, health experts have been hammering home the notion that we need to cut back on salt to improve our heart health.  The World Health Organization (WHO) recommends a daily consumption of less than 2,000 mg of sodium, that’s just one teaspoon of salt, to keep our hearts healthy.  And the American Heart Association (AHA) is even more strict with the salt shaker, limiting people at risk for heart disease to just 1,500 mg of sodium a day.

But that may all be changing, thanks to a new study published in The Lancet.  The study, authored by a team of Canadian researchers, followed more than 95,000 people ranging in age from 35 to 70 from almost 20 countries, for an average of eight years.

For salt lovers everywhere, the results were encouraging.  The research found that only when average sodium consumption surpassed 5,000 mg a day (or about 2.5 teaspoons of salt), did they detect a link between intake and heart disease.  And it gets better: consuming a diet high in potassium-rich foods like fruits and vegetables seems to counteract even the participants who reported high sodium intake.

While the study isn’t necessarily telling everyone to throw aside the AHA and WHO guidelines, or encouraging people to start dumping salt on everything in sight, it does give people hope that they may not need to be as strict as previously believed.  As with anything, the key is moderation and focusing more on overall dietary health than putting all your eggs in one sodium basket.

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