Salt Secrets: Come Find Out Here!
Salt is a lot more complicated that you can think, even though its just two simple elements put together. NPR recently published an article discussing the topic. I have summed up the main points in this blog post. 
Since the 1970s, most major nutrition and health guidelines have cautioned against eating too much sodium, citing associations with high blood pressure that could lead to heart attack and stroke. Recommendations put forth from the Institute of Medicine— now called the National Academy of Medicine — and jointly by the Department of Health and Human Services and the Department of Agriculture in particular have consistently urged us to restrict sodium intake to 2.3 grams per day, equivalent to about 1 teaspoon of salt. Some recommendations even go as low as 1.5 grams for certain people.
Yet on average, Americans eat 3.4 grams per day, mostly cloaked by the fine print on processed food.
“In people with normal blood pressure, there doesn’t seem to be much of an association between salt intake increases in blood pressure,” says lead study author Andrew Mente, a nutritional epidemiologist at McMaster University in Hamilton, Ontario.
“The bottom line is that there is not a shred of evidence whatsoever that low sodium, 2.5 grams per day or lower, is better than average sodium, around 3.5 grams per day, in reducing cardiovascular events or mortality,” he says.
Mente, who eats around 3.5 grams of sodium a day himself, also believes that the relationship of sodium to potassium and one’s general diet is probably key to understanding salt health and that until doctors better understand the link, medical societies should refrain from lowering sodium limits to levels that virtually no populations in the world eat, save a few hunter-gatherer societies.
“We need to look at other physiological factors. We need to look at the renin-angiotensin system,” Mente says. “We need to look at potassium. There’s a lot we need to look for.”
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