When I was a midwife, I had the hardest time convincing women it was not only okay to have salt when you were pregnant, it was necessary to process the additional fluid load on your kidneys. I don’t think people realize how much of standard medical practices are grounded in little more than mythology:
This week a meta-analysis of seven studies involving a total of 6,250 subjects in theAmerican Journal of Hypertension found no strong evidence that cutting salt intake reduces the risk for heart attacks, strokes or death in people with normal or high blood pressure. 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.
As someone with ideopathic edema (a known syndrome of fluid retention, but with no known causes) since my early 20’s, I just wish manufacturers would put less salt in foods so that we could decide how much to add.
Manufacturers keeps saying they’re going to decrease salt in food, but somehow it doesn’t seem to show up on the food labels.
(And I wish I’d planted tomatoes so I could can my own low sodium tomatoes…)