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Salt Study Hits Wall Of Criticism

Wendy Lin Newsday

For a moment it sounded as if anxiety about salt was behind us. A study published in the Journal of the American Medical Association in May concluded that while people with high blood pressure should limit their salt intake, those with normal blood pressure didn’t have to. One of the researchers went so far as to say: “We feel people can probably stop worrying about salt.”

In September, the Salt Institute, made up of major salt producers, cited the study when it petitioned the Food and Drug Administration to rescind the government-approved health claim linking low-sodium diets to a reduction in blood pressure.

Not so fast, health authorities replied. Although the FDA has six months to respond, other government agencies acted swiftly to indicate that no change is forthcoming.

The National Institutes of Health, the National Heart, Lung and Blood Institute and the American Heart Association reiterated the longstanding recommendation that Americans consume no more than 2,400 milligrams of sodium a day - much lower than the 3,900 milligrams the average American ingests daily.

Dr. Alexander Logan, a high-blood-pressure specialist at the University of Toronto who wrote the journal article, and his colleagues reviewed 56 previous studies on low-salt diets and hypertension, representing 3,505 subjects and concluded that it has not been proven that a low-salt diet helps people with normal blood pressure.

“From a public-health standpoint, we felt that time and effort should be spent instead on the major problem in North America, which is obesity,” Logan said in an interview.

The study was criticized by health experts and consumer groups. Bonnie Liebman of the Center for Science in the Public Interest noted that the research included studies less than two weeks in duration and studies on children.

Liebman said the salt industry “refuses to acknowledge the overwhelming evidence that a high-salt diet is a cause of high blood pressure.”

She said there are other reasons to eat less salt, among them evidence that salt increases the body’s excretion of calcium, raising the risk of osteoporosis.