I just read a report online that flies in the face of what conventional medicine has been pushing on the public for years. New research suggests not eating enough salt could be WORSE for your heart than consuming too much of it.
Yawn. Excuse my lack of enthusiasm. After all, this is old news to me — and it should be to you as well. I’ve been telling you for years that salt is good for you.
The new study was published in the online Journal of General Internal Medicine, and while it doesn’t actually come out and say that a low-salt diet is actually BAD for the heart, it does cite some intriguing stats showing that people who eat the least salt suffer from the highest rates of death as a result of heart disease.
The one quarter of patients in the study who ate the least salt were 80 PERCENT more likely to die from cardiac issues than the 25 percent in the study who consumed the MOST salt. This should really be no surprise in the medical community. In spite of what you hear on TV and read in magazines, there’s no agreement in the medical community that salt is the key factor in the development of such dangerous maladies as high blood pressure and hypertension.
Dr. Hillel W. Cohen, the author of the study, finally acknowledged the questionable link between salt intake and high blood pressure. "The main argument for reducing salt in the prevention of heart disease has been that there’s a relationship between higher sodium and high blood pressure," he said. "But when one actually looks at the numbers, the average blood pressure difference associated with quite a bit of sodium intake is very modest."
The fact is, without salt, you’d die. It’s an essential nutrient that your body can’t manufacture on its own. It plays a critical role in regulating vital bodily function, and it’s a key element in the fluids that transport life-giving oxygen throughout the body. Salt maintains the body’s fluid balance. What’s more, the body automatically disposes of excess salt in your system.
So the claim that you can have "too much" salt in your diet? Well that’s just not physically possible.
Perfectly seasoned,