PURE Study on Salt Has Critics All Shook Up

According to some, salt is at the root of many evils. Archive photo.

TALK about stirring the pot!

It's a four-letter word. Salt.

The medical community and the food community have doubleteamed over the last 30 years or so, damning salt, pillorying salt at every turn and telling everybody who has ears that too much salt is bad – very bad; very, very bad. Too much salt can make you ill. Too much salt can kill. Talk about character assassination!

Seemingly, everybody with ears got the memo: High-salt intake has been implicated in just about every ailment known to humanity with the possible exception of athlete's foot.

But imagine that the world is so consumed with avoiding salt that it is now consuming too little salt. And if that is the case, what are the consequences, particularly if high blood pressure is not involved?

Salt intake is intertwined with high blood pressure. Photo courtesy of WebMB Web site.

According to new thinking – published in no less a rag than “The New England Journal of Medicine” – that is not a good thing. Too little salt, like its polar opposite, can also cause problems.

In an article title, Urinary Sodium and Potassium Excretion, Mortality, and Cardiovascular Events, a group of researcher suggests that consuming too little sodium can also cause “cardiovascular events.”

What's that noise? The hue and cry. Talk about stirring the pot! … More shortly

Visit http://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMoa1311889 to read “Urinary Sodium and Potassium Excretion, Mortality, and Cardiovascular Events.”