Don’t pass the salt, please. If the average American scales back her sodium intake to 2,200 mg per day (that’s 40 percent less than the 3,600 mg currently consumed!), it could save between 280,000 and 500,000 American lives over a 10-year period, according to a new article published in the journal Hypertension.
The results come from findings of three separate studies on sodium intake and death rates. All three studies found that less sodium led to hundreds of thousands of fewer deaths from cardiovascular disease (CVD).
“Sodium is related to blood pressure and blood pressure is a major cause of heart disease and stroke,” says Pamela Coxson , PhD, mathematician with the Division of General and Internal Medicine at the University of California, San Francisco, and one of the study authors. “If you lower sodium intake, your blood pressure goes down.”
And consider these scary stats: Heart disease is more fatal to American women than any other disease—over 400,000 deaths in American women are caused by CVD each year, according to The National Coalition for Women with Heart Disease. And it’s no wonder, considering the average American consumes 3,600 mg of sodium each day, a whopping 2,100 mg more than the amount recommended by the CDC.
Want to slash your risk? Cut the salt to 2,200 mg per day. “The main thing that helps is to shift the balance of foods to fresh foods and away from processed foods,” says Coxson. “Eighty percent of sodium in our diet comes from processed foods.” And carb-lovers, beware: Bread in particular is the biggest source of sodium for the typical person in the US, she says.
Click here for 10 sinister sources of salt (plus, reduced-sodium suggestions for each).
And click here for the 25 saltiest foods in America.
Want to know your risk for heart disease? Click here to use the heart disease risk calculator from the Mayo Clinic.
More from WH:
Heart-Healthy Recipes
5 Steps to a Healthy Heart
Why You Should Crank Up Your Cardio
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