Richard L. Hanneman
Salt Institute
Salt and Health newsletter
Winter 2006
While implementation presents an immense challenge, a focus on implementing salt reduction ignores the basic question: why do it at all? What evidence do we have that reducing dietary sodium will lower the risk of heart attacks and strokes as forecast? A strong consensus has emerged that health outcomes are the appropriate metric and that how we lower blood pressure makes a difference. While a major federal government trial of various drug therapies has been completed, no trials of lifestyle interventions have been undertaken to determine the safety and efficacy of interventions like salt restriction in improving cardiovascular outcomes or all-cause mortality. Only a limited number of observational studies have been reported on the question of whether those on low-salt diets have achieved the long-predicted lowering of heart attack incidence. It turns out that these few studies show that salt restriction does not improve health outcomes at all.