NEWS RELEASE
For immediate release: August 16, 2006
Alexandria, VA (Aug. 16)…Salt Institute president Richard L. Hanneman has issued this response to Janet Helm “Shaking our salt addiction” published in the Chicago Tribune, August 16, 2006:
Janet Helm’s article on salt is unbalanced. She leads with an anti-salt recommendation from the generalists in the American Medical Association and buries the opposite recommendation by the medical specialty experts of the International Society of Hypertension and American Society of Hypertension (though Helm does quote the ISH president disparaging the AMA resolution as a “reckless recommendation”). While correctly noting that “doctors can’t seem to agree on how important it is to restrict salt” because “other factors may play a more powerful role,” Helm never elaborates on what those important health factors are. They include how low salt diets adversely increase insulin resistance and plasma renin activity producing adverse health outcomes; U.S. government data shows a 37% greater cardiovascular mortality among those who follow a low-salt diet. As an award-winning Science magazine analysis of “The (Political) Science of Salt” concluded: “After decades of intensive research, the apparent benefits of avoiding salt have only diminished.” The irony is that as better science increasingly clouds earlier certainty with regard to dietary salt, the news media seems determined to dredge up and publicize a worldview that science has left in its rear-view mirror. The salt issue used to be about blood pressure; now it’s about health outcomes and there is no evidence that low salt diets lower the risk of heart attacks or strokes.
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The citations supporting this statement can be examined at http://www.saltinstitute.org/28.html and http://www.saltinstitute.org/healthrisk.html.
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