Adults should eat no more than 6g of salt a day
“Salt is good for us”. According to newspapers states “controversial new study suggests that salt in the diet can lessen your chances of suffering heart disease and strokes”.
It means that should be taken with a large pinch of salt, as the study doesn't suggest that eating high levels of salt is good for us. In white people with normal blood pressure, a low-salt diet only slightly reduced blood pressure but led to small increases in substances such as cholesterol.
This study designed to pool and analyses the results of previous studies to determine how low-salt and high-salt diets affected blood pressure and a range of substances in the blood. Crucially though, many of the studies included in the review lasted only a few weeks and none were designed to look at the effect of salt reduction on longer-term health outcomes such as heart disease and stroke. Salt reduction is often intended to be a long-term measure, and therefore results looking at the practice over longer periods would be preferable.
It is important to note that the result does not change the current advice, which is that all adults should eat no more than 6g of salt a day. The National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence says that reducing the maximum average intake of salt per adult to 6g a day, and then to 3g by 2025, would result in 15,000-20,000 fewer deaths from heart disease and stroke annually in the UK.
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