How can sodium affect your health

In May European researchers publishing in the Journal of the American Medical Association reported that the less sodium that study subjects excreted in their urine—an excellent measure of prior consumption—the greater their risk was of dying from heart disease.

These findings call into question the common wisdom that excess salt is bad for you, but the evidence linking salt to heart disease has always been tenuous. Fears over salt first surfaced more than a century ago. In French doctors reported that six of their subjects who had high blood pressure—a known risk factor for heart disease—were salt fiends. Worries escalated in the s when Brookhaven National Laboratory's Lewis Dahl claimed that he had "unequivocal" evidence that salt causes hypertension: he induced high blood pressure in rats by feeding them the human equivalent of grams of sodium a day.

Today the average American consumes 3. Dahl also discovered population trends that continue to be cited as strong evidence of a link between salt intake and high blood pressure. People living in countries with a high salt consumption—such as Japan—also tend to have high blood pressure and more strokes.

But as a paper pointed out several years later in the American Journal of Hypertension, scientists had little luck finding such associations when they compared sodium intakes within populations, which suggested that genetics or other cultural factors might be the culprit. Nevertheless, in the U. Scientific tools have become much more precise since then, but the correlation between salt intake and poor health has remained tenuous. Intersalt, a large study published in , compared sodium intake with blood pressure in subjects from 52 international research centers and found no relationship between sodium intake and the prevalence of hypertension.

In fact, the population that ate the most salt, about 14 grams a day, had a lower median blood pressure than the population that ate the least, about 7. In the Cochrane Collaboration, an international, independent, not-for-profit health care research organization funded in part by the U. Department of Health and Human Services, published a review of 11 salt-reduction trials.

Over the long-term, low-salt diets, compared to normal diets, decreased systolic blood pressure the top number in the blood pressure ratio in healthy people by 1.

The review concluded that "intensive interventions, unsuited to primary care or population prevention programs, provide only minimal reductions in blood pressure during long-term trials. Studies that have explored the direct relationship between salt and heart disease have not fared much better.

Avoid buying processed foods in the supermarket, and if you have to, check nutrition labels carefully. When you do opt for packaged foods, choose products that are sodium free or low in sodium.

If you do choose to eat out, select dishes carefully. Do your homework—ask if there are any lower-sodium dishes on the menu and that salt not be added to your food. Get dressings and sauces on the side so you can add only as much as you need. We will speak to the men and women of our community who are educated, knowledgeable and determined to live a complete and healthy lifestyle for the rest of their lives.

Our readers know that investing in their health is not an option, but a must. Amanda Roland. The amount of sodium in the extracellular fluid helps determine the amount of water your body retains. If your sodium intake is high, your kidneys cut back on releasing water into your urine so you can balance out the excess sodium surrounding your cells. This results in an increased blood volume due to water retention.

Symptoms include edema, or swelling, in various parts of your body. Water retention can occur with high sodium intake when you are well hydrated; if you are not, however, or if you have a disorder or take medication that causes you to excrete too much water into your urine, you may experience dehydration.

In this case, the extra sodium you consume still needs water to balance it out, but without sufficient water in your diet, your body may pull water from within your cells. You may then experience extreme thirst, nausea, dizziness, stomach cramps, vomiting and diarrhea as your system is unable to rid itself of excess sodium. Related to its role in maintaining blood volume, sodium can also affect blood pressure.