Link Between Salt and High Blood Pressure 'Overstated'

An anonymous reader writes: Diagnosed with high blood pressure? If so, you were probably told to moderate or avoid the use salt in your food. Well, a new study (abstract found that salt is not associated with systolic blood pressure after controlling for other factors. The study found that BMI, age, and alcohol consumption all strongly influenced blood pressure, and concluded that maintaining a healthy body weight was the best way to counteract it. The publication of this research follows a CDC report from Tuesday decrying the amount of salt in children's diets — a report that lists high blood pressure as one of its main concerns. The debate on this issue is far from over, and it'll take years to sort out all the contradictory evidence.

Comments

CDC guilty of correlation == causation

[Anonymous Coward]

CDC: "A vast majority of scientific research confirms that as sodium is reduced, so is blood pressure."

Which does not mean that salt *causes* blood pressure to increase.

Eat shitty food, which happens to contain a lot of salt, and you will have high blood pressure.

Eat good food, and add a ton of salt to it, and you will have normal blood pressure.

Anyone who has taken the time to experiment with their diet can see the results themselves (like I have).

Re:CDC guilty of correlation == causation

[Curunir_wolf]

The same can be said of cholesterol, statin drugs and heart disease but they're still a good idea.

No, they are not. Cholesterol has been labeled a boogeyman, along with saturated fats, but it's all based on erroneous or over-hyped information. That has given us margarine (plastic for your body), high carbohydrate diets loaded with wheat gluten, and the result is massive obesity - and all the concomitant health issues.

You NEED a good amount of cholesterol for a healthy nervous system, and avoiding eggs and cholesterol containing foods in general is thought to be responsible for the increase in Alzheimer's disease, among other issues.

I can simply ignore all health and diet advice

[scsirob]

Just about everything that is bad for you today is being negated a few years later. Can't find the link today, but at one point "research" showed that jeans were responsible for higher risk of cancer. So I will just continue to live my life and enjoy it to the fullest. If something kills me, at least I had a good time.

Re: I can simply ignore all health and diet advice

[kamapuaa]

Cigarettes are undeniably bad. So are trans-fats, alcohol overconsumption, and too much stress.

The issue is that health publications yry to extend everything into being undeniably bad, on the scale of smoking, when in fact the food or habit may only be bad in certsin cases. One current theory on salt is that diabetics, the overweight, and blacks are higher risk groups for salt being linked to blood pressure, but for the large majority of people there is no association. Of course that's boring health advice, people like to hear something strong like "quit now and live longer," so health claims get wildly exaggerated.

Stress?

[zifn4b]

I can tell you from personal experience having been a physical fitness health nut and also having gone through prolong periods of enormous stress that the two are undeniably linked. When you're under stress, you have fight or flight response. Several chemicals such as cortisol and adrenaline are produced in your body. When you're under chronic stress, you have this type of constant sense of this. It depletes resources in your body differently than when you're relaxed. It also causes you to store more body fat because when we were in the wild the environment stress response could be associated with food scarcity.

The time in my life when I was in the best shape of my life was when I was under the least amount of stress. I had low blood pressure, cholesterol, LDL/HDL, triglycerides, everything. My GP was cheering me on.

Get your stress under control and focus on having a healthy lifestyle and everything else will sort itself out. The problem in America is that we are a culture that pushes inordinate amounts of stress on our citizens. Where UK citizens would take a month long holiday every year because of the generous vacation time afforded by most European countries, the United States doesn't guarantee any paid vacation or sick time. And then we wonder why compared to other countries our citizens are significantly more tired, burnt out and less healthy.

Re:Stress?

[Lumpy]

The problem is the only way to reduce stress is to tell the boss to stuff the job up his rear end, and go live on a homestead in the woods.

Although my stress went way down by simply no longer reading or listening to the news.

Re:Obviously.

[schitso]

Uh, infant mortality? Predators actually being an issue? Disease? Constant strife? No, go ahead and just ignore those.

Eat real foods, mostly veg, not too much

[Moof123]

Way too many fad conclusions come and go in science, and especially with food. Eggs are bad, eggs are good, fat is bad, fat is good, carbs are good, carbs are bad, resveritol cures all, resveritol no better than placebo, Dr. Oz is a genius, Dr. Oz is a pocklining schill....

In the end it seems that if you wait about 10 years almost every headline on health gets contradicted, then thar contradiction gets at least qualified another 10 years after that.

Nothing so far has done better than simply trying to aim for eating plenty of real food with moderation on the highly processed stuff, and moderation on the calorie dense stuff.

The one thing about salt is that it does make stuff tasty, often the highly processed stuff, making it easy to overdo it. Avoiding salt sort of automatically helps one to cut out the heavily processed foods.