Well, inconclusive doesn't mean disproven either. I skimmed through the article but will definitely read it more thoroughly when I have a chance. Off-hand (and again, just skim reading) the notion that temporarily raising blood pressure is ok doesn't bother me, but the amount of salt in so much of our food is so high that I suspect "temporary" easily becomes "temporarily permanent." I know that when it comes to blood pressure some people are more sodium sensitive than others, but I've conclusively found that mine benefits from lower sodium intake.

A couple benefits I've experiences since limiting sodium: I find that I appreciate the nuances of food more now that I don't count on it to be a vehicle for salt. And I find the less salt I eat, the better I sleep because I don't wake up to drink and pee, then pee and drink all night.

But yeah, salt is probably just another of the myriad things that are deemed bad then not so bad. Thanks for post this perspective.

I agree, things are said to be bad and then found not to be so bad. Everything in moderation, that's what I think.

That said, the sodium level in things like canned soup is so high that it's definitely not moderate. I am one of those people whose blood pressure does not seem to be sensitive to salt intake, and I like salt, but that stuff is even too salty for me, it just doesn't taste good.

So salt may be like coffee, reviled and now embraced as practically a health food.

Thanks, CC, for posting this, it's good to sometimes hear the other side of the story too.

Annie

Again, too much is no doubt not good for you, but seems like common sense goes out the window at times too. Remember how eggs were evil at one time too? Now, it's proven that our ancestors weren't eating poison. Aspirin was evil and a killer (mostly coming from the ibuprofen & acetaminophen folks), but now it's shown that it saves lives and is far better than the liver-killer competitor.

All in using it right. I've cut back a lot on salt but I don't hesitate to add salt when needed.

Cynic, I remember when eggs were "bad" for us. My doctor even then told me that an egg a day was OK, that any cholesterol effects would be "statistically insignificant". He also told me that butter was better than margarine, but just a little bit should be used. Now that we've discovered the evils of trans-fats it appears he was right on that one too. So coffee, eggs, butter, chocolate, red wine, aspirin, and now, maybe, salt.

I've also cut back on salt, and on butter/fat, and on sugar, red meat, many things. I still eat them all, just in smaller quantities. That same doc told me to eat anything I wanted, but just eat half of it and I still eat far too well. (grin)

Now, I understand that some people have medical conditions like heart disease or diabetes that require restricted diets in one fashion or another, but I think the majority of healthy people just need to use less of most everything.

Annie

I've read this article twice now. It refers to several trials and summarizes their findings in one or two sentences. It seems like the point is that some studies have shown that lowering sodium intake lowers blood pressure but may not significantly affect prolonging length of life or diminishing the possibility of future heart disease. I did wonder about one sentence: "One could still argue that all these people should reduce their salt intake to prevent hypertension, except for the fact that four of these studies - involving... patients with chronic heart failure - reported that the people eating salt at the lower limit of normal were more likely to have heart disease than those eating smack in the middle of the normal range." How is someone already suffering from heart failure more likely to develop heart disease? Isn't chronic/congestive heart failure considered heart disease?

And I'd really like more information on this statement: "But four years ago, Italian researchers began publishing the results from a series of clinical trials, all of which reported that, among patients with heart failure, reducing salt consumption increased the risk of death."

My husband has heart failure and I know what excess salt in his diet does to him. His heart works at about 15% capacity of a normal person's heart. Too much salt and his feet swell up and are extremely painful for days. His lungs fill up with fluid, and, as a result, he has difficulty breathing and lying down to sleep. The concerns about future health are nothing compared to the discomfort of living with overly salty foods. For him, it's a matter of quality of life now.

I know some people who suffer from Meniere's disease and following a low sodium diet allows them to control their symptoms and live a useful life. The same with those whose kidney functions are compromised.

One of the telling statements was "...the normal salt intake - was one and a half teaspoons a day, almost 50 percent above what federal agencies consider a safe upper limit for healthy Americans under 50, and more than double what the policy advises for those who aren't so young or healthy." 1-1/2 tsp of salt is about 2500 mgs. of sodium. But most Americans consume far more each day if they eat fast food, processed foods, salty snacks, etc.

I've read some low sodium advocates encouraging others to lower their sodium intake to 500-800 mgs. per day. I personally think that's going overboard. Perhaps that's the kind of low sodium diets being studied. If that's the case, then I could understand the negative results. (Also,the statements summarizing these various trials and studies should define what constituted a low sodium diet -- 500 mgs., 800 mgs., 1200 mgs., 1500 mgs.) Trying to keep your sodium intake too low means not only forgoing added salt but also denying yourself many tasty and nutritious foods that may have a high sodium content naturally. Six years ago my husband's doctors told him to shoot for about 2000 mgs. per day, and that's what we've stuck with.

Perhaps that was a retrospective study, in which people with chronic heart failure were asked about their habits. Studies like that have obvious problems, of course.
I don't know how accurately the article reports on this. I just posted it for people to read. Gary Taubes has his own diet thing he pushes; he's very anti-carb.

I think the important point is that there's no clear evidence that healthy people have to restrict salt.
The same diet that may be essential for an ill person is too often extrapolated to be the right way for everyone to eat. We've seen this with cholesterol too.

Cloudy, I agree with your last statement: "The same diet that may be essential for an ill person is too often extrapolated to be the right way for everyone to eat." And also, just because lowering overall sodium intake (or fat intake, sugar intake, red meat intake, whatever) might be beneficial, a drastic reduction may not be. That's why I haven't jumped on the 500-800 mgs of sodium per day bandwagon. I'm not convinced such a drastic move would be beneficial for my husband health wise. And I know for sure it would not do anything for his morale and willingness to follow such an extreme diet.

This is an Op-Ed (opinion) piece from the NYT. The NYT is one of the best newspapers in the world, but like other newspapers, it doesn't "fact check" its Op-Ed pieces. Those are meant to be opinion and advocacy, inherently slanted, not actual factual news reporting.

That said, I did go looking for data on one claim he makes, which is that salt intake is similar around the world. That led me to this interesting report:

SODIUM INTAKES AROUND THE WORLD
http://www.who.int/dietphysicalactivity/Elliot-brown-2007.pdf

See table 5 near the end - shows daily sodium excretion in samples of about 100 people in each country. Unit is mmol, multiply by 23 to get milligrams, i.e. "100" means 2300 mg/day excretion. Excretion more or less equals intake. Even considering the sample size and standard deviation, it still looks like sodium excretion is in fact quite similar across almost all countries, with only a handful of exceptions.

You get to that report through this page
http://www.who.int/dietphysicalactivity/reducingsalt/en/index1.html

Anyway, my personal approach on salt is: I eat very little commercially prepared food. Whether fast food or fine restaurants, it is all usually very high in sodium. I also don't eat much packaged and processed food, which is also very high in sodium. In my own cooking, I use kosher salt for various reasons - easy to handle, tastes better - and don't try particularly hard to limit sodium use. It turns out to be hard to consume too much over 1000 mg/day if you're scratch-cooking with kosher salt.

Do I have a strong reason to think that consuming >1000 mg/day or >2000 mg/day of sodium is bad for me? Not really. True, I was diagnosed with high blood pressure since I was about 30 y/o but a very sodium-restricted diet made no difference, and currently, weight loss and exercise seem to have brought my BP down to "normal" levels without sodium restriction.

My thinking is simply that, through most of human evolution, large amounts of sodium was not easily available to us. We are evolved to a rather modest level of sodium intake. (Some coastal, fish-eating populations excepted.) Absent evidence of any benefit from high sodium intake, it seems reasonable to try to avoid consuming 5X more of sodium than our species was evolved to consume.

Here is a link that might be useful: SODIUM INTAKES AROUND THE WORLD