We’ve heard it before but now a study published in the Journal of the American College of Cardiology adds further weight to public messages about the heart health benefits of reducing added salt intake.
Reducing added salt, that is skipping the salt shaker at mealtimes, is associated with a reduced risk of heart disease, heart failure and ischaemic heart disease, according to the study.
This relates even to those who are already following a DASH-style diet – behavioural interventions to lessen salt consumption could further improve heart health.
“Overall, we found that people who don’t shake on a little additional salt to their foods very often had a much lower risk of heart disease events, regardless of lifestyle factors and pre-existing disease,” says Lu Qi, MD, PhD, HCA Regents Distinguished Chair and professor at the School of Public Health and Tropical Medicine at Tulane University in New Orleans.
“We also found that when patients combine a DASH diet with a low frequency of adding salt, they had the lowest heart disease risk. This is meaningful as reducing additional salt to food, not removing salt entirely, is an incredibly modifiable risk factor that we can hopefully encourage our patients to make without much sacrifice.”
In this study, the authors evaluated whether the frequency of adding salt to foods was linked with incident heart disease risk in 176,570 participants from the UK Biobank.
The study also examined the association between the frequency of adding salt to foods and the DASH diet as it relates to heart disease risk.
The DASH-style diet was developed to prevent hypertension by limiting the consumption of red and processed meats and focusing on vegetables, fruit, whole grains, low-fat dairy, nuts, and legumes.
While the DASH diet has yielded benefits in relation to reducing cardiovascular disease risk, a recent clinical trial found that combining the DASH diet with sodium (salt) reduction was more beneficial for certain cardiac biomarkers, including cardiac injury, strain, and inflammation.
According to Sara Ghoneim, MD, a gastroenterology fellow at the University of Nebraska Medical Center, this study is promising, builds on previous reports, and alludes to the potential impact of long-term salt preferences on total cardiovascular risk.
“A major limitation of the study is the self-reported frequency of adding salt to foods and the enrollment of participants only from the UK, limiting generalisability to other populations with different eating behaviours,” said Dr Ghoneim.
“The findings of the present study are encouraging and are poised to expand our understanding of salt-related behavioural interventions on cardiovascular health.”
