It won’t give you a heart attack – while having too little will make you fat and ruin your sex life
Low salt intake has several side-effects that magnify our risk of heart disease, such as increased heart rate, compromised kidney function, underactive thyroid glands, heightened insulin levels — a risk factor for diabetes — as well as heightened cholesterol
- Eating too little salt can cause insulin resistance and may even increase risk of diabetes, says leading cardiovascular research scientist
- Dangerous myth that salt raises blood pressure began more than 100 years ago
- Current daily guidelines limit you to 2.4g of sodium
- Average Korean, for instance, eats over 4g of sodium a day – yet they have some of world’s lowest rates for hypertension and coronary heart disease
For more than 40 years, we’ve been told eating too much salt is killing us. Doctors say it’s as bad for our health as smoking or not exercising, and government guidelines limit us to just under a teaspoon a day.
We’re told not to cook with it and not to sprinkle it on our meals. The white stuff is not just addictive, goes the message — it’s deadly. Too much of it causes high blood pressure, which in turn damages our hearts. We must learn to live — joylessly, flavourlessly but healthily — without it.
Well, I’m here to tell you that all of that is wrong. As a leading cardiovascular research scientist — based at Saint Luke’s Mid-America Heart Institute, Missouri — I’ve contributed extensively to health policy and medical literature.
In my work, I’ve examined data from more than 500 medical papers and studies about salt. And this is what I’ve learned: there was never any sound scientific evidence to support this low salt idea. What’s more, as I explain in my new book, eating too little of it can cause insulin resistance, increased fat storage and may even increase the risk of diabetes — not to mention decreasing our sex drive.
Yet salt is an essential nutrient that our bodies depend on to live. And those limits go against all our natural instincts. When people are allowed as much salt as they fancy, they tend to settle at about a teaspoon-and-a-half a day. This is true all over the world, across all cultures, climates and social backgrounds.
Read the entire article here.