Boynton Beach, Fla Dr. Goldfinger photo. (When I was in practice, everybody called me “Dr. G.” except the overhead pager at the hospital. Then half the visitors would think of a proctology joke.)
The Los Angeles Times (2/12, Healy, 692K) “Booster Shots” blog reports that a new study published Tuesday in the American Heart Association’s journal Hypertension found that “steadily reducing sodium in the foods we buy and eat could save a half-million Americans from dying premature deaths over a decade.”
The estimates come from three separate teams from the University of California-San Francisco, Harvard University’s School of Public Health, and Canada’s Simon Fraser University “crunching the numbers” and reaching “estimates independently.” Americans consume over 3,600 milligrams of sodium daily, and the teams agreed if this were to be reduced to 1,500, “as many as 1.2 million premature deaths could be averted over the course of a decade.”
Blogfinger Medical Commentary by Paul Goldfinger, MD, FACC
On Feb 5, 2013, we ran a post about the definition of controlled hypertension: click here
And here is a link to our prior article on how much salt to eat: click here
The AMA article above focuses on therapy and prevention through reducing dietary salt. The mortality statistics are astonishing.
A brief introduction to salt chemistry may be helpful. Salt is composed of sodium and chloride, i.e. salt is sodium chloride (NaCl). Each molecule contains one part sodium and one part chloride. The sodium is the important component in terms of salt/health issues.
One gram of salt contains 1,000 mg (milligrams) of sodium chloride (salt). About half of that (500 mg.) is sodium.
So if you are on a low salt diet, and your doctor suggests 4 grams of salt per day, it means that you would consume 2 grams (ie 2,000 mg) of sodium each day.
You need to understand this in order to read food labels. ( see our link about salt above) It’s best to avoid confusion by focusing on sodium, since that is how most labels are written.
You must be careful, because one can of soup might contain up to 1,000 mg. of sodium. Most of our dietary sodium comes from packaged processed foods.
If you have hypertension in your family, you should reduce sodium intake to at least 2,000 mg. per day. If you have hypertension, your sodium intake should be even lower. Discuss the details with your physician.
Avoid processed foods with high salt intake and learn not to add salt at the table. You can adjust to that, even if you were raised with a lot of salt in your food.
Reducing salt for everyone in your family is a good prevention idea.