Why You Shouldn’t Sprinkle Extra Salt at Dinner

A major study shows that sprinkling a few dashes of salt on your food can land you in an early grave.

Researchers tracked more than 500,000 Britons for nearly a decade.

The results showed that people who always added extra salt to their diet were 28 percent more likely to die before the age of 75, compared to those who never or rarely added it.

Excess salt in your system leads to water retention in the blood, putting pressure on your blood vessels, raising your blood pressure. This can, later on, increase the risk of heart attack or stroke.

Heart disease and stroke are among the biggest killers, killing about 160,000 people per year, with nearly five times the number of American deaths.

NHS guidelines say adults should eat no more than 6 grams of salt a day. Children should have even less.

However, experts say the ‘hidden’ salt in our diet means many Britons are eating more salt than they realize.

Chloe MacArthur of the British Heart Foundation said: ‘We need some salt in our diet.

‘But eating too much can lead to high blood pressure, which in turn increases the risk of heart attack and stroke.

‘While it’s always important for people to be mindful about adding too much salt to food, the majority of salt comes from before we eat, meaning we’re consuming more than we realize.

The researchers decided to consider adding salt to the table because it is difficult to assess overall salt intake due to the high levels of salt in the daily diet.

Sodium is added to flavor everything from prepared foods to instant soups such as pasta sauce.

Salt can also extend their shelf life and is added to products such as sliced ​​ham and other cured meats.

Healthy salt substitutes, which contain added potassium and less sodium, are already available on UK supermarket shelves.

Experts from Tulane University analyzed data from 501,379 people from the UK Biobank.

In the beginning, people were asked how often they sprinkled salt on their food – with the option of never/sometimes, sometimes, usually or always.

During an average follow-up of nine years, about 18,474 premature deaths (under 75 years of age) were recorded.

About three out of every 100 people aged 40-69 in the general population die prematurely.

New calculations for the study, published in the European Heart Journal, suggest that an extra person in every 100 who adds salt to their diet may be young.

Professor Lu Qi and team also calculated how many years the salt-lovers lasted longer than those who did not.

At the age of 50, the life expectancy of women and men who added salt to their diets ended at about 1.5 years and 2.3 years, respectively.

The scientists found that people who ate the most fruits and vegetables had a slightly reduced risk of early death.

Professor Qi wrote: ‘Even a modest reduction in sodium intake, adding little or no salt to the food on the table, is likely to have substantial health benefits.

‘Adding salt to foods at the table is a common eating behavior that is directly related to a person’s long-term preference for salty-tasting foods and habitual salt intake.

‘In the Western diet, table salt accounts for 6 to 20 percent of total salt intake.

‘And [it] Provides a unique way of evaluating the association between habitual sodium intake and risk of death.’

But Professor Qi said: ‘Further study is needed to validate the findings before making recommendations.’

Heart disease and stroke account for a quarter, or 160,000 deaths per year, in the UK, which equates to about one death every three minutes.

More than 877,500 Americans die from heart disease, stroke, or other cardiovascular diseases each year in the United States.