Despite general wide-spread knowledge that consuming too much
salt is unhealthy--and despite the plethora of low-salt
alternatives on supermarket shelves--new research finds
Americans still eat prodigious quantities of salt, enough to
easily be a cause of the national epidemic of hyper-tension
(abnormally high blood pressure.) Researchers from the Harvard
School of Public Health--including celebrity doc, Walter Willett
--took a simple approach. The study looked at multiple studies
detailing per-person 24 hour urinary excretion of sodium over a
46 year period in the U.S. Because 95% of daily dietary sodium
intake is excreted in the urine, the researchers were able to
reasonably estimate sodium intake from the data. And what they
found was an alarmingly large scale over-consumption of salt.
The Harvard group found that on average Americans have been
consuming more than twice the amount of sodium recommended for
maintaining health by the Institute of Medicine. The recommended
daily intake of sodium is just over h