The most recent research, just published in the peer-reviewed scientific journal, Cell Metabolism, has shown that the Government’s dogmatic salt reduction agenda is not based on sound science (1). An international team of researchers, working on the long-term space simulation projects, Mars105 and Mars520 at the Institute for Biomedical Problems in Moscow, have determined that all the studies relating hypertension to salt consumption are critically flawed .
Up until now, it has been assumed that the gold standard for calculating salt consumption is the amount of sodium found in a 24 hour urinary analysis. However, in what was the largest and most highly controlled, long-term study of salt metabolism ever carried out in a fully enclosed system, these researchers found that that the body does not eliminate the sodium from consumed salt on a regular basis, but stores and releases it in a fixed biological cycle. So measuring the amount of sodium excreted in any 24 hour period is meaningless. Sodium excretion has to be measured over a much longer time period to accurately estimate salt intake. This explains why so many previous studies have been so inconsistent.
(1) Rakova, N. et al. Long-Term Space Flight Simulation Reveals Infradian Rhythmicity in Human Na+ Balance.Cell Metabolism. 2013; 17: 125–131. (January 8, 2013)
