Salt responsible for 2.3 million deaths worldwide, study suggests
http://www.foxnews.com/health/2013/03/22/salt-responsible-for-23-million-deaths-worldwide-study-suggests/
Personally I am far from convinced that the supposed association between high dietary salt and the manifold health concerns is causative (verses correlative). Certainly there are some medical conditions where high sodium (the component that is actually troublesome) can be dangerous, but salt is constantly lost via sweating, urinating, etc. and our body does a rather poor job (in comparisons to most other ‘savanna’ organisms) of retaining salt. Of course, as a species, our activity level has dropped so much (as we have porked up, causality or correlation?) that we sweat so much less that maybe, just maybe, this is an issue. However, it is critical to understand that for active people who sweat a lot curtailing salt intake can very quickly lead to death, not decades from now by some rather diffuse range of medical conditions but today, this very afternoon, when you drop dead from an electrolyte imbalance. Because of our infatuation with air conditioning most people who work out are not used to the heat and thus sweat more than they would had they been adapted. More sweat means you need more salt intake (among many other electrolytes! don’t focus only on sodium!), not less.
Now if you are an old fat white guy and sit around watching the tube in a conditioned house, you might want to cut back on the massive sodium intake. Since that is probably a significant portion of the population, perhaps these rather hysterical headlines have some validity after all, but if you are young and exercise regularly following these recommendations could put you in the hospital or even in the ground.
