Salt intake, too much or too little may depend on how your body utilizes salt.

New evidence about the governments salt recommendations.
New evidence about the governments salt recommendations.

Salt intake, too much or too little may depend on how your body utilizes salt.

Too much salt for one person may be to little salt for another, says a new article in the NY Times.

For years, those who have high blood pressure have been told to avoid salt, because the effects can be bad for your heart, but what if your blood pressure is fine?   The problem is, there is growing evidence that one size does not fit all and that some of us not only tolerate higher salt intake, but thrive on it.

The governments recommendation for salt intake may make little sense for most of us, if internally, some of us tolerate salt less than others.

If there is one take away from all of this new information, it is that there is growing evidence that one size does not fit all with salt intake, and with many other things we have been advised about medically as well.

Why do some people tolerate salt better than others?   This will be determined in the future, and it may be a gut problem, or some other problem that is not yet fully understood by the research and medical communities.

As of now, most recommendations for high blood pressure revolve around restricting salt and lowering pressure.  Perhaps in the future, doctors may no longer be satisfied with their one size fits all solutions which are now proving to actually be harmful to some of us.  The problem with high blood pressure may not be the blood pressure at all, as doctors of the future may look deeper into the systems of the body that actually creates the condition. Some of us are at higher risk than others for high blood pressure and managing the condition with medications that are simply modifying body chemistry, is not the same as understanding what is causing your pressure to be high, which may be the reason people with high blood pressure also have other conditions that are concurrent with the high blood pressure. While we do know that many of us who are overweight and have other metabolic conditions that are part of a high blood pressure profile, others meanwhile may have high blood pressure without being overweight, which shows that medically, our understanding of the condition is quite crude, with only the limited understanding of high blood pressure needs to be lowered, and low blood pressure needs to be raised.

Perhaps, our future understanding of the metabolic adaptations and genetic predispositions may change our thought processes of hypertension completely, where the hypertension is not treated, but the mechanism that causes it is.   While this is my chiropractic mind thinking, treating symptoms is alot like putting your finger in a leaky wall, while another leak develops, while the real problem is perhaps the barrier behind the wall.  Treating symptoms is simply not cost effective and if you are wondering if that is true, how come health care is so expensive, which is a conversation for another day.

Check out this article here

Take Low-Salt Advice With a Grain of You Know What

Aaron E. Carroll MAY 26, 2016

I”™ve written before that while consuming too much salt is bad, so is consuming too little. A new study is making news all over the world that adds to this discussion, and in the interest of being good Bayesians, we should update our prior assumptions based on these results.

This new study was a meta-analysis that examined how salt intake is associated with heart attacks, strokes and death, but it added to the discussion by including high blood pressure. It looked at how salt intake affected those people with high blood pressure versus those with normal blood pressure.

This is important because, as I”™ve discussed before, we”™ve gone from recommending that people with high blood pressure drastically restrict salt in their diets to advocating that all Americans get to very low levels.

There seems to be pretty good evidence that people with high blood pressure who consume an excessive amount of salt should cut back. That”™s where doctors started back in the day, and that concept holds up. But the evidence doesn”™t support the idea that increased salt consumption by people with normal blood pressure makes that much of a difference.

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