Can you please elaborate? Is it harmful to eat less that twice the recommended amount?
“Can you please elaborate? Is it harmful to eat less that twice the recommended amount?”
It’s definitely harmful to eat less than the recommended amount of sodium. This study is one of many showing it. The ‘recommended’ amount of sodium is 2300 milligrams, the study here shows that the all-cause mortality at 2300 mg is definitely on the upside, and that less is worse.
As to twice the recommendation, the curve is pretty much flat, and still far better than 2300 mg, and only slightly worse than the minimum, around 3500 mg (higher for older people).
Keep in mind that this is “All-Cause Mortality”, meaning they don’t care how you died, but only that you died. This is in contrast to generally accepted health markers, like blood pressure, which will go up if you have a lot of salt, but you’ll still longer because other processes (likely some we don’t even know) improve.
It’s very similar, in my opinion, to the claim that eggs and fat kill you...well because people who die often have cholesterol in their arteries and excess fat in their bodies. After 50 years of ignoring studies that could never prove these associations, even the medical community is waking up and grudgingly admitting that they had it all wrong, and that NEITHER are harmful in their own right, but rather carbs are the main culprit. It’s very, very, hard to change “Accepted Science”, even when it’s totally wrong.
https://bmcpublichealth.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s12889-023-17582-8