Author: Ivan Red Jr.
Time for reading: ~1
minutes
Last Updated:
August 08, 2022
A team of Harvard epidemiologists announced their results at the annual meeting of the American Heart Association in New Orleans.
A new study has shown that salty foods , not sugary drinks, are the most insidious enemy of health, especially in the under-70 age group.
Harvard researchers estimate that one in 10 Americans dies from salt overdoses - nearly 250,000 a year - ten times the death toll from sugary sodas.
According to Dr. Dariusz Mozararian, an epidemiologist at the Harvard School of Public Health and author of the study, the burden of sodium is much heavier than that of sugar. According to him, the main reason for this is that sweet drinks can be easily limited or avoided, while salt is in everything and everywhere.
The results were obtained after analyzing data from 247 sociological studies measuring salt consumption, as well as 107 clinical studies examining the effects of salt on blood pressure and cardiovascular disease. It is particularly worrying that the group of middle-aged people is most affected.
The data were presented at the annual meeting of the American Heart Association in New Orleans. They also show that many semi-finished products contain dangerously high levels of salt. Dr. Mozararyan explains that he was amazed at how easy it is to overdo salt when eating semi-finished products. According to him, the only way to prevent this is to cook every dish from scratch, for which most people do not find time.
Dr. Mozararyan seems to be quite extreme on the issue of salt intake - he sets the upper limit of one gram per day, which is twice lower than the recommendations of the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. According to the Center's experts, the current study does not measure the actual mortality resulting from salt consumption, as nowhere in the world is the intake as low as Dr. Mozararian and his colleagues recommend.
Mozararian's results are yet to be published in the scientific literature, following an evaluation by independent experts. For now, he responds to his critics by saying that his work objectively examines the effects of salt on human health and longevity.