yeah, thats kinda where I am. I don't think I'm salt sensitive, I think I just have bad genes. And the bp meds are managing it rather well. I'm still trying not to go overboard with the salt (I think cutting out fast food was the biggest part of losing weight, beyond the carbs), but I don't worry as much about it. I have also read studies that show too little salt (in the one I read, < 3000mg / day) was just as bad as too much (>8000 / day)
Those studies are usually not very good. They often fail to recognize that people who are on a low-sodium diet are very sick, for example (just like those studies that say that a low BMI is very dangerous but fail to control for the fact that very ill people are thin). I just think it would be really strange if humans had such a high need for salt, because until a few hundred years ago people did not add salt to their diet, getting only the naturally occurring sodium from food, and people did just fine.
It looks like I had my high end off, it was actually > 7000mg / day.
> Another study, published in 2011, followed 28,800 subjects with high blood pressure ages 55 and older for 4.7 years and analyzed their sodium consumption by urinalysis. The researchers reported that the risks of heart attacks, strokes, congestive heart failure and death from heart disease increased significantly for those consuming more than 7,000 milligrams of sodium a day and for those consuming fewer than 3,000 milligrams of sodium a day.
In general, I would advice to not get your health advice from the NY Times. This is a response from Harvard's Nutritionsource: http://www.hsph.harvard.edu/nutritionsource/2013/05/17/the-n... who calls it "highly misleading".
Nutrition research is difficult, like I said, population studies often fail to account for the fact that in western countries practically the only people who are on a very low sodium diet are people who are already very sick.
