Three months after the federal government urged most Americans to sharply cut their salt intake, a new study questions whether the recommendation will benefit those without high blood pressure.
The findings published yesterday in the Journal of the American Medical Association indicate that healthy people who eat the least amount of sodium don’t have any health advantage over those who eat the most. In fact, they had slightly higher death rates from heart disease.
The study from Belgian researchers is likely to add fuel to an already heated debate over public health guidelines regarding salt consumption. Already yesterday, some nutritionists criticized the study’s rigor, saying it did not justify a retreat from the government’s latest salt advice.
Eating less salt has been shown to modestly lower blood pressure in people with hypertension, but more than a dozen studies since the mid-1990s have reached conflicting conclusions about whether lowering salt intake helps healthy people avoid high blood pressure and its serious consequences: heart disease, stroke, and kidney failure.
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