Does salt affect blood pressure?

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I have a great study for you today — after reading it, I knew we didn’t have to cut salt out of our diets anymore.

No more tasteless food because we’re watching our salt.

This is a study that shows how much salt you should probably be eating to live a long time.

It finally answers the question, “Does salt affect blood pressure?”

And it shows that you can and should eat salt… and how it won’t cause you to have high blood pressure or heart attacks.

It shows that there are even benefits of salt in the diet that help you live longer!

Studies like this are why I really like to dig into every study I come across.

You have to be prepared to dig deep into any study you read to find the gems.

I often have to see past the titles of the study and read the entire thing to analyze it and see if there is gold.

When I dig in like this, I’m occasionally rewarded with goldmines of information that change how I think about certain things.

Today’s study is one of these goldmines!

It clearly disproves the current “medical” theory about salt causing high blood pressure.

Doctors think that the effect of salt on blood pressure is to raise it.

They think that high salt intake makes blood pressure worse and they caution their patients to “watch the salt.”

This popular notion has caused a lot of bland diets for patients with high blood pressure.

However, the truth about salt is much different than they think!

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If you look at the data in this study instead of its subject, you’ll find that golden nugget of truth about salt.

But before we get into it, I should tell you that this is my least favorite kind of study.

It’s something called a meta-analysis — a pooled analysis of other studies.

There are benefits to analyzing studies together to look for trends and conclusions that aren’t clear in smaller studies.

But there are a lot of shenanigans that can be played, either on purpose or accidentally.

But in the case of this study, I think the data is compelling.

And the study is brand-new, so I think it’s important to look at it.

So the first thing that makes this interesting is that they are monitoring sodium excretion.

That means that the researchers are measuring how much salt we are excreting in our urine.

People sometimes fail to tell the truth about how much salt they are eating.

They may feel guilty and lie — or they may simply not realize how much salt was in something they ate — or they even just forget something.

But the amount of salt that’s in their urine can be measured objectively.

So despite what they claim in the conclusion of the study, the data is very clear.

So as you can see, the far-left column shows people who consumed less than 3 g of salt per day.

That’s not much salt, and those people have a 6% chance of death within the scope of the study.

But if you look at the farthest right column where they ate more salt, all cause mortality is 4%.

That’s one-third lower on a relative risk basis than those eating less salt!

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What makes this even more significant is that this study included a total population of 133,118 people.

And the larger a study population, the more likely a finding is true for the rest of the population.

The researchers found that the results are pretty much dose-dependent — the more salt you have, the longer you will live.

This is totally contradictory to what the doctors have been telling us.

But if you read the study, it makes some very interesting points.

Increased sodium intake was associated with greater increases in systolic blood pressure in individuals with hypertension (2·08 mm Hg change per gram sodium increase).

So let’s translate this into English.

If you have 3 g versus 6 g of salt, then you are going to have a 6 mm Hg difference in blood pressure on average.

That means that instead of being 150/90, you would be 144/90.

It’s not much of a difference.

The difference is barely significant at all.

But the salt health effects of that difference on your lifespan are dramatic.

Your chances of all-cause mortality are going to skyrocket by minimizing your salt.

So obviously, lowering salt is not good if you want to live a long time.

Some of the longest-lived cultures are already seeing these results.

The study points out that many cultures consume over 7 g of salt per day.

In fact about 22% of the people living on the planet consume more than 7 g a day of salt — many of these people never have high blood pressure, EVER.

It’s clear to see that the whole “low-salt versus high-salt” high blood pressure theory has been thoroughly and utterly debunked.

In fact, you want to make sure you’re getting plenty of salt.

If you have high blood pressure, you may want to eat a lot more than 7 g.

Why do you want a lot more salt?

People who have high blood pressure often also have a low thyroid.

And people with low thyroid sometimes can’t hold onto their salt.

They need a lot more salt than most people do.

Of course, the study didn’t look individually at people and their thyroid function.

But the connection between blood pressure and thyroid has been known for years.