1 in 10 U.S. Deaths Blamed on Salt
Baku, March 27 (AZERTAC). The new study, by the same Harvard research team, linked excessive salt consumption to nearly 2.3 million cardiovascular deaths worldwide in 2010. One in 10 Americans dies from eating too much salt, the researchers found.
“The burden of sodium is much higher than the burden of sugar-sweetened beverages,” said Dr. Dariush Mozaffarian, an epidemiologist at the Harvard School of Public Health and author of both the salt and sugary drink studies. “That’s because sugar-sweetened beverages are just one type of food that people can avoid, whereas sodium is in everything.”
Mozaffarian and colleagues used data from 247 surveys on sodium intake and 107 clinical trials that measured how salt affects blood pressure, and how blood pressure contributes to cardiovascular disease like heart attacks and stroke.
“From that we could determine the health effects of sodium,” he said, adding that one out of three deaths due to excessive sodium occurred before age 70. “It’s really affecting younger adults, not just the elderly.”
The study, presented today at the American Heart Association’s annual meeting in New Orleans, adds to mounting evidence that packaged and processed foods containing high levels of salt for flavor and shelf life can take a heavy toll on cardiovascular health.
“It’s really amazing how pervasive it is,” Mozaffarian said of salt. “For the average person, it’s very hard to avoid salt - you have to be incredibly motivated, incredibly educated, have access to a range of foods and do all the cooking yourself.”
But not everything is easy to whip up at home, Mozaffarian added. Bread and cheese are the top two sources of sodium in the U.S.
“It’s everywhere,” he said.
For the study, the researchers set the ideal level of salt consumption at 1,000 milligrams per day - less than half of the upper limit recommended by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and less than a third of the average American intake.
The Salt Institute took issue with the unrealistic threshold.
“This misleading study did not measure any actual cardiovascular deaths related to salt intake, since, by the authors’ own admission, no country anywhere in the world consumes the low levels of salt they recommend,” Morton Satin, vice president of science and research for the Virginia-based institute said in a statement.
Satin also stressed that Mozaffarian’s research is yet to be published in a peer-reviewed journal, and said it “reveals an agenda far more rooted in sensationalist politics than in science.”
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