July 6, 2011 -- Reducing salt intake in the diet produces a small decline in blood pressure, according to a new review of research. But the evidence is not conclusive on whether salt reduction has an effect on getting cardiovascular disease or dying from it, the researchers say.
The findings are not a call to eat salt with abandon, warns researcher Rod Taylor, PhD, MSc, professor of health services research at the University of Exeter in the U.K.
The review evaluated nearly 6,500 people and is published online in the American Journal of Hypertension and the Cochrane Database ofSystematic Reviews 2011.
Taylor suspects he found no strong evidence that salt reduction lowered heart disease risk and death because the numbers studied were too small. And those studied may have lowered salt intake at first but then slid back into old habits, he says.
In the short term, up to two years after study participants were advised to reduce salt, he found a trend of reduced deaths, Taylor tells WebMD. "In the longer term, out about 10 years, that benefit disappeared. And we believe that is because people were not able to maintain that behavior."
"What this says is, giving people advice to reduce their dietary salt is not enough on its own," Taylor says.
What is needed is a multi-pronged approach, he says, including better labeling, at least in the U.K., and government help, along with more research studies looking at the link.
www.webmd.com
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