Personally, I find staying away from salt a straw-man for lower BP and heart health.
More important is eliminating added sugars and keeping daily carb intake low.
I now add salt, plenty of it, and drink caffeinated tea daily, with a resulting average to low BP.
I have been drinking coffee ever since I was 5 years old.
I am now 70.
It would probably kill me if I stopped now...............
Carbs and processed foods are the culprits and if you can resist the temptation you will be better off for it. Just a couple of weeks of discipline from them will be felt, if you can manage it. Carbs in the form of sugars alone are in everything that comes from a box, they are all but unavoidable if you buy anything in a box or wrapper. If you just keep a tally through the day of the % of daily recommended allowance you will notice a positive change. It does not come naturally for me and is not an easy habit to stay with.
I go sparing on salt unless I sweat a lot in the summer and I am losing fluid by the bucket. Somehow the body knows what to do. I make up for salt with pepper though.
My coffee drinking went from probably 20 cups a day in my misspent youth to about 2 medium size mugs over the morning hours now 50 years later. Probably much better and my BP is well managed but not so much my sugar. Carbs are the culprit and they are hard to resist. My cats can’t even resist and will eat dry food even when offered good canned food in the case of a few of them and all of them munch dry food all day.
“More important is eliminating added sugars “
^^^THIS. I love sugary stuff but it’s inflammatory as hell. After hundreds of thousands of years as hunter-gatherers eating meats, berries and nuts, our bodies just can’t “mainline” massive quantities of purified glucose/fructose.
“Personally, I find staying away from salt a straw-man for lower BP and heart health. More important is eliminating added sugars and keeping daily carb intake low.”
People who actually studied salt found a classic “U-curve” in which the lowest death rates were at TWICE the level recommended by the ‘experts’ and going twice-again in level had only a minor effect on death rates. So, too much salt is simply one of many medical myths that won’t go away.
For carbs (including sugars), some were marginally healthy for our grandparents, now NONE are healthy thanks to all the modifications, so you’re on the right track there, look at them as a slow-acting poison, because they are.