Regarding your low-salt diet may not be healthiest article...
I have essential hypertension (and I'm only in my 20's). My BP is 160/106 (untreated/no medication) From everything that I've learned, doctors don't know much about blood pressure and health...most of it is guess work. All the physiological mechanisms don't seem to reveal much when applied. Most people who have high blood pressure have primary or essential HTN (idiopathic).
The word "idiopathic" is used alot. The medical word "idiopathic" simply means "unknown origin" and that describes most of the common systemic diseases. Only a small percentage of the population of sick people actually have secondary disease (that is a disease caused by a known factor---which can be another disease, a drug or food, allergies, etc.)
But I must admit, even though my HTN is not the result of a high salt diet, my blood pressure is lower when I do maintain a salt intake of under 1000mg/day for about a 1 month period (RDI=2500mg/day). Of course, taking Ca++ channel blockers lower my BP more....but dietary restriction does help.
Most Americans have a horrible diet and is not seen in any other country in the world (except for maybe some parts of Europe where gluttony is common family practice)!!!
The average American consumes about 6 Grams NaCl/Day. That is far more than needed for the body. As long as kidney function is intact, you're okay. The problem is, alot of old people have bad kidney function, so alot of salt is retained which raises blood pressure which in turn damages the kidneys even more. Bad kidneys, a high cholesterol diet, and lots of occluded arteries increases blood pressure significantly.
Salt is a tasty thing....and lots of it is not beneficial. From a public health standpoint, a high salt diet will kill you when you're body can't get rid of it....this seems to happen quite a bit to old people who just can't kick the habit of gorging themselves (I've seen this quite frequently at Denny's), cuz they've been eating like that all their lives. One day, it just seems to catch up to you...that's partially why health care is so damn expensive in this country (I'm not complaining though!).
As for my HTN, its "primary", "essential", "idiopathic"....those damn researchers better get crackin' and find out what's up. In the meantime I have to take these damn drugs everyday.
-JW
The moral of my story is, high salt diet poorly correlates with heart disease, CHF/CHD, HTN, etc. but a low salt diet is helpful/good in some cases, whereas a high salt diet is never good for you and a small percentage of the time, a high salt diet is actually bad for you.
sorry to be off topic but I had to get my 50cents in there. |
