This article discusses the dangers of salt and the difficulty of removing the overload from our diets. Most of us should drastically decrease the amount of salt we're consuming, but that would require preparing our meals ourselves to avoid the hidden quantities in processed and restaurant foods.
The Public Health Crisis Hiding in Our Food
IF you have high blood pressure, you’re in good company. Hypertension afflicts 67 million Americans, including nearly two-thirds of people over age 60. But it isn’t an inevitable part of the aging process. It’s better to think of it as chronic sodium intoxication. And, as an important new study from Britain shows, there’s a way to prevent the problem — and to save many, many lives.
A lifetime of consuming too much sodium (mostly in the form of sodium chloride, or table salt) raises blood pressure, and high blood pressure kills and disables people by triggering strokes and heart attacks. In the United States, according to best estimates, excess sodium is killing between 40,000 and 90,000 people and running up to $20 billion in medical costs a year.
Continue: The Public Health Crisis Hiding in Our Food – NYTimes.com.
