Eating this amount of salt will make your heart give out
Not surprisingly, a research team from Vanderbilt University that published a research paper in JACC: Progress found something that we have always known but did not fully understand its extent: excessive salt is bad. Too much of it can lead directly to heart failure. The problem is that we lacked a definition of what is “too much” salt. The Vanderbilt team set out to define it, to finally determine how much salt is too much, to the point where your heart starts to fall apart.
The study followed more than 25,000 adults in the southeastern United States over nearly a decade using data from the Southern Community Cohort Study. None of the participants had heart failure when tracking began. At the end, around 27 per cent
Sodium intake was a common thread.
Do not consume twice the recommended amount of salt
Participants consumed an average of about 4,269 milligrams of sodium per day, well above the recommended 2,300 milligrams. That level of intake was associated with a 15 percent higher risk of developing heart failure. Each additional 1,000 milligrams of sodium increased the risk by an additional 8 percent, regardless of other factors such as cholesterol, caloric intake, or physical activity.
This is where the advice would be to take some personal responsibility and monitor your sodium intake. But as is often the case with these “pick yourself up by your bootstraps” kind of philosophies, the strict advice doesn’t really survive contact with reality.
But it’s not necessarily your fault if you do
Over 70 percent of sodium intake comes from prepackaged and prepared foods, not the home salt shaker. The problem is systemic and baked into the convenience economy that most people depend on to barely stay afloat in a world that is increasingly pricing them out of the healthier options on the menu.
Many of the study’s participants lived in lower-income communities, which often have limited access to fresh food and have no realistic alternatives to their high-sodium diets. Telling people to just cut back ignores the nuances of their lives and how little control they have over what is available and, perhaps more importantly, what is affordable.
You can’t eat healthy if the opportunity to eat healthy just doesn’t exist for you.
Still, the researchers found the tiniest silver lining: Even modest reductions in sodium intake made a difference. Dropping the average intake slightly, from 4,200 milligrams to 4,000 milligrams a day, could prevent 6.6 percent of new cases of heart failure over 10 years. Again, this is a very thin silver lining, but still significant, although the advice can be difficult to follow given the economic and societal factors at play.
