If you consume too much sodium, however, this can upset your fluid balance and potentially lead to long-term health problems. Your kidneys help regulate the amount of sodium in your body. If you take in more than you need, your kidneys remove it by making more urine, a liquid that contains sodium.
However, if the amount of sodium in your body is too great, your kidneys may not be able to get rid of the excess. As a result, the extra sodium can cause your blood volume to increase, raising pressure on the walls of your blood vessels and causing high blood pressure. Over time, this can damage your vessel walls, making them less elastic and increasing your risk of atherosclerosis, or hardening of the arteries. High blood pressure can also increase the load on your heart, making it work harder and raising your risk of heart attack and stroke.
It recommends limiting your intake to 2. If you already have high blood pressure or are at risk of developing the disorder, or if you have diabetes, kidney disease or heart failure, the Institute says you should limit your sodium consumption to 1. To keep your salt consumption in a healthy range, limit your use of table salt, opting instead for salt-free seasoning blends, or herbs and spices that enhance flavor without adding salt; keep several shakers of these spices handy at the table during mealtimes.
But if the U. Bland french fries, for sure. But a healthy nation? Not necessarily. This week a meta-analysis of seven studies involving a total of 6, subjects in the American Journal of Hypertension found no strong evidence that cutting salt intake reduces the risk for heart attacks, strokes or death in people with normal or high blood pressure.
In May European researchers publishing in the Journal of the American Medical Association reported that the less sodium that study subjects excreted in their urine—an excellent measure of prior consumption—the greater their risk was of dying from heart disease. These findings call into question the common wisdom that excess salt is bad for you, but the evidence linking salt to heart disease has always been tenuous.
Fears over salt first surfaced more than a century ago. In French doctors reported that six of their subjects who had high blood pressure—a known risk factor for heart disease—were salt fiends. Worries escalated in the s when Brookhaven National Laboratory's Lewis Dahl claimed that he had "unequivocal" evidence that salt causes hypertension: he induced high blood pressure in rats by feeding them the human equivalent of grams of sodium a day.
Today the average American consumes 3. Dahl also discovered population trends that continue to be cited as strong evidence of a link between salt intake and high blood pressure. People living in countries with a high salt consumption—such as Japan—also tend to have high blood pressure and more strokes.
But as a paper pointed out several years later in the American Journal of Hypertension, scientists had little luck finding such associations when they compared sodium intakes within populations, which suggested that genetics or other cultural factors might be the culprit.
Nevertheless, in the U. Scientific tools have become much more precise since then, but the correlation between salt intake and poor health has remained tenuous. Intersalt, a large study published in , compared sodium intake with blood pressure in subjects from 52 international research centers and found no relationship between sodium intake and the prevalence of hypertension.
In fact, the population that ate the most salt, about 14 grams a day, had a lower median blood pressure than the population that ate the least, about 7. In the Cochrane Collaboration, an international, independent, not-for-profit health care research organization funded in part by the U.
The DASH diet can drop high blood pressure significantly. The problem is that salt is very tasty, just like sugar. The combination of salt, sugar and fat is unbelievably tasty. All mammals have the desire to eat these bad foods. The amount of salt that is available today, just like the amount of sugar that is available today, is far beyond what we were meant to have in our diets. Rachel Johnson, professor of nutrition at the University of Vermont in Burlington:.
Excess sodium increases blood pressure because it holds excess fluid in the body, and that creates an added burden on the heart. Too much sodium will increase your risk of stroke, heart failure, osteoporosis, stomach cancer and kidney disease. And, 1 in 3 Americans will develop high blood pressure in their lifetime.
Limiting your sodium is tough because about 75 percent of sodium in Americans' diets comes from processed or prepared foods, not salt that we add at the table. If you're a savvy nutrition label reader, it can be shocking. Even foods such as breads and cereals can have high amounts of salt. We call it a silent killer because a lot of people don't realize they have high blood pressure. Marisa Moore, registered dietician and spokesperson for the Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics:.
The average American eats about 3, milligrams sodium a day, but the recommended amount for a healthy person is 2, milligrams a day.
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