High sodium intake is not bad for you (unless you have a few very specific and unusual health conditions.) Like most late 20th century nutritional guidance, turns out that idea was totally wrong.
Actually, blood pressure is the determiner of whether high intake of salt is bad for you.
High sodium intake is only associated with increased risk in people with high blood pressure. However, having too little sodium is associated with increased risk regardless of blood pressure. Source: https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6...
I'm going to make a bet the sodium intake is correlated with calorie consumption which is why these studies all find it so difficult to figure out why salt sometimes seems to cause similar issues to high calorie diets.
Let's be honest here, if you eat a bowl of food with no salt on it you will get bored and find the food hard to finish.
> Do we actually _need_ all the extra salt we’re consuming nowadays? Is it good/neutral/bad for us?
Of course we don't need it, and too much salt is indeed bad for us [1] [2] (hence all the campaigns about eating less salty).
According to the references I've quickly found, for instance, an American consumes on average 3,400mg of sodium per day when the body needs less than 500mg (obviously this may be higher if you sweat a lot for some reason).
Too much is quite a bit less dangerous than too little. In many cases excess sodium isn't dangerous at all, there are some high blood pressure conditions and kidney issues where you have to be careful there. Most people just urinate it out without any difficulty.
The Japanese are among the longest-lived people on the planet, and eat the most salt. There are a lot of confounds there, but it's at least suggestive.
The more important takeaway is that too little salt is bad news, even for otherwise healthy/young people.
It is generally thought that we eat way more salt than is considered healthy. Too much salt increases the risk of high blood pressure, cardiovascular diseases, and kidney failure.
The Dutch government — to cite just one example — states that 80% of people in the Netherlands eat too much salt¹; i.e., more than 6 grammes per day, and lists the health issues mentioned above.
Conversely, eating too little salt is quire rare nowadays due to the high amount of salt in store bought products.
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