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Salt is essential not only to life, but to good health. The body’s salt:water ratio is critical to metabolism, and salt maintains the electrolyte balance inside and outside of cells. Even human blood contains salt, 0.9 percent — the same concentration as found in sodium chloride irrigant commonly used to cleanse wounds. Most of our salt comes from food, some from water. However, for people who are “salt sensitive,” too much salt in the daily diet can contribute to resistant high blood pressure, or hypertension — a type that doesn’t respond to medications. In a recent study, these patients were able to achieve significant reduction in blood pressure just by reducing their salt intake.
For the study, a team of researchers from the University of Alabama enrolled 13 patients with resistant high blood pressure who were taking at least three blood-pressure-lowing medications. The participants were randomly assigned to a high- or low-salt diet and then monitored using a recorder worn continuously for 24 hours. Researchers found that those on the low-salt diet saw a 22.6 mmHg drop in the systolic (top number representing pressure while the heart contracts) blood pressure, along with a 9.2 mmHg drop in their diastolic blood pressure (bottom number representing the pressure when the heart relaxes between beats), as compared to patients on the high-salt diet. The amount of sodium excreted in their urine was also markedly reduced. Overall, the patients on the low-salt diet reported a better health state than the others, with appropriate body weight and levels of thoracic fluid and brain natriuretic peptide, which are two parameters that indicate fluid retention in the body.
The study team concludes that these findings clearly demonstrate the harmful effects of a high-salt diet in people with stubborn hypertension, as well as the benefits of a low-salt diet. “The blood pressure reduction achieved with low-salt diet was higher than some antihypertensive drugs,” said lead researcher Dr. Eduardo Pimenta, now at the Department of Hypertension and Nephrology at the Dante Pazzanese Institute of Cardiology in Sao Paulo, Brazil. “We were expecting blood pressure reduction with low-salt diet but the reduction was larger than we expected.”
Dr. Gregg C. Fonarow, professor of cardiology at the University of California, Los Angeles, called the study “small, but interesting” and agreed that salt reduction could have a substantial impact on lowering blood pressure for patients with medication-resistant high blood pressure. “Excess sodium intake, above 2,300 milligrams daily, should be avoided in all patients with hypertension, and among those patients with medically resistant hypertension, a closely monitored low-salt diet (1,500 milligrams daily) should be considered,” he advised.
The American Heart Association (AHA) says simple dietary changes to reduce salt consumption will only help in averting high blood pressure, but also its adverse effects like heart disease. The AHA recommends 2,300 milligrams (mg) of salt per day (which equates to about one teaspoon), or 2,000 mg for people suffering from high blood pressure or congestive heart failure. Recent studies have also shown that blood pressure can be lowered by following the Dietary Approaches to Stop Hypertension (DASH) eating plan, which offer a week of menus as well as recipes for two levels of daily sodium consumption—2,300 and 1,500 milligrams per day. Twenty-three hundred milligrams is the highest level considered acceptable by the National High Blood Pressure Education Program and also the highest amount recommended for healthy Americans by the 2005 “U.S. Dietary Guidelines for Americans.”
High blood pressure is clearly a major public health problem. According to recent estimates, approximately one in three adults in the United States as well as two million American teens and children has high blood pressure, but because there are often no symptoms, nearly one-third of people are unaware they have it. The only certain way to tell if you have high blood pressure is to have your pressure checked. Most people can control high blood pressure if they maintain a healthy weight, be moderately physically active on most days of the week, follow a healthy eating plan that includes foods lower in sodium, avoid alcoholic beverages or consume then in moderation, and take blood-pressure-lowering medications as directed.
The details of the study were presented at the American Heart Association’s Fall Conference of the Council for High Blood Pressure Research.
Source: healthnews.com