salt and hypertension

Chloride in food salt found critical to reducing hypertension mortality

by The Salt Institute - October 1, 2013

Chloride in food salt found critical to reducing hypertension mortality
The latest scientific research confirms the critical role of everyday table salt in our diets.
For years now, we have seen mounting evidence demonstrating that reducing salt consumption in out diet leads to increased sickness and death. Ignoring such a strong body of evidence that contradicts the current recommendations for salt points to the political nature of the ongoing salt debate. Since the scientific evidence keeps coming in, always pointing to an increased health risks associated with reduced salt consumption, it becomes folly to continue pretending this association doesn’t exist.
The latest evidence confirming this relationship between reduced salt consumption and increased sickness and death, comes at us from an entirely different direction. Writing in the September 2013 edition of the journal Hypertension, authors McCallum, Jeemon, Hastie et al., studying an enormous group of 13,000 hypertensive patients show that the chloride portion of salt (sodium chloride) can also be an independent predictor of risk.
Referring to chloride, one of the authors, Dr. Sandosh Padmanabhan states , “….. our study has put the spotlight on this under-studied part of salt to reveal an association between low levels of chloride serum in the blood and a higher mortality rate……It is likely that chloride plays an important part in the physiology of the body and we need to investigate this further.”
The full study can be found in Hypertension.