Doctors have often stressed upon the fact that we should be consuming, if not too much, only a moderate amount of salt in our day. High salt intake not only results in hypertension but also causes problems like bloating and water retention and it is often quite difficult to track your sodium intake. From deceitful nutritional labels of processed foods and hidden sodium in our meals, it is understandable that salt and its potential effects on our body still remains a mystery to us, and while sodium is known to cause high blood pressure, does it have any effect on mortality rates? Does salt intake also has a similar relationship with cardiovascular diseases and death?
A new study done by the Brigham and Women’s Hospital confirms that it does. Nancy Cook, a biostatistician in the Department of Medicine at Brigham and Women’s Hospital said, “Sodium is notoriously hard to measure. Sodium is hidden — you often don’t know how much of it you’re eating, which makes it hard to estimate how much a person has consumed from a dietary questionnaire. Sodium excretions are the best measure, but there are many ways of collecting those. In our work, we used multiple measures to get a more accurate picture.” One way to measure the amount of salt one has consumed is to do a spot test of a person’s urine sample and see the amount of salt excreted in the urine, but sodium levels in the urine can be different during different times of the day. To get a perfect and accurate reading to track the salt intake, one should analyse a 24-hour sample and because day to day salt consumption might also vary, samples should be analysed on multiple days.
Previous researches have utilized the spot sample method but in a very limited way. The team instead chose to employ the same method in multiple ways. For the study, the team worked with about 3,000 people who suffered from pre-hypertension. The gold standard method, the method used by the team proved that there is indeed a direct linear relationship between sodium intake and death. The results of the study, which were published recently in the journal International Journal of Epidemiology reports that both low and high levels of sodium intake could put you at a risk of an early death.