This eating habit could knock two years off your life
Adding extra salt to your food could be placing you at a higher risk of dying prematurely according to a recent study of more than 50,000 people.
Though seasoning food is a must for most of us, the study found that those who added salt to their food had a 28 percent greater risk of dying prematurely than those who never or rarely add salt.
With about 3 percent of people aged between 40-69 years old dying prematurely - defined as dying before the age of 75 - the findings suggest that adding salt could result in an extra one person in every hundred dying prematurely in this age group.
“To my knowledge, our study is the first to assess the relation between adding salt to foods and premature death,” said Professor Lu Qi, one of the lead researchers from Tulane University School of Public Health and Tropical Medicine in New Orleans.
The team also found that at the age of 50, those who always added salt to their food had between 1.5 to two years knocked off their life expectancy in comparison to those who rarely or never added any salt.
“It provides novel evidence to support recommendations to modify eating behaviours for improving health,” Professor Qi continued.
“Even a modest reduction in sodium intake, by adding less or no salt to food at the table, is likely to result in substantial health benefits, especially when it is achieved in the general population.”
When it came to determining sodium intake, the team chose to focus solely on whether people added salt to their food at the table, independent of whether they seasoned it while cooking.
This is because assessing how much sodium a person consumes is notoriously difficult, given that pre-prepared and processed foods are among many products where high levels of salt have been added before they reach the table. Plus, foods that are high in sodium are often accompanied by others that are rich in potassium, which protects against the risks of heart disease and metabolic diseases such as diabetes.
“Adding salt to foods at the table is a common eating behaviour that is directly related to an individual’s long-term preference for salty-tasting foods and habitual salt intake,” Professor Qi explained.
“In the Western diet, adding salt at the table accounts for 6-20 percent of total salt intake and provides a unique way to evaluate the association between habitual sodium intake and the risk of death.”
However, their study does have limitations. With no information about the amount of salt added, the possibility of a relationship between adding salt and total energy intake and consuming other foods, and the voluntary nature of the UK BioBank meaning that the results aren’t reflective of a general population, more studies will need to be done to validate their findings.
Professor Qi and his colleagues will be conducting additional studies on the relationship between adding salt to food and chronic diseases such as cardiovascular disease and diabetes, with the possibility of conducting clinical trials to test the effects of salt reduction.
In an editorial accompanying the study, Professor Annike Rosengren, a senior researcher and professor of medicine at the University of Gothenburg, Sweden, who wasn’t involved in the research, wrote that the net effect of drastic reduction in salt intake is still controversial for individuals.
“Given the various indications that a very low intake of sodium may not be beneficial, or even harmful, it is important to distinguish between recommendations on an individual basis and actions on a population level,” she writes.
With a greater net benefit likely to come from population-wide changes that have a small effect on individuals rather than targeted changes for high-risk people, Professor Rosengren argues that not adding extra salt “could contribute to strategies to lower population blood pressure levels”, including early detection and treatment of hypertension, as well as salt-reduction at a societal level.
Professor Qi’s study and Professor Rosengren’s editorial were published in the European Heart Journal.
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