If your blood pressure is normal is there any reason to avoid sodium?
Salt OK if Blood Pressure is OK?
4.9/5 - (15 votes)
Fact or fiction: if your blood pressure is normal, salt is okay. Or to put it another way, unless you have high blood pressure, there’s no reason to specifically avoid sodium. Fact, or fiction?
Major fiction. Salt does all sorts of bad things to our arteries besides just raising blood pressure, contributing to the deaths of about 150,000 Americans every year. So try to keep sodium intake under about 1500mg a day, which means a single slice of bacon could take you over the top for the entire day.
Which has more sodium, though—more salt? A serving of beef, a serving of baked all-natural chicken, a large McDonald’s French fries, or a serving of salted pretzels?
It’s not the pretzels, or the fries, or the beef. Why does just plain chicken have so much salt in it? It’s because the poultry industry injects the carcasses with salt water to artificially inflate the weight, and they can still label it 100% natural.
Consumer Reports found some supermarket chicken so plumped with salt that it registered 840mg per serving. That’s off the charts, like a half a day’s sodium in half a chicken breast.
To see any graphs, charts, graphics, images, and quotes to which Dr. Greger may be referring, watch the above video. This is just an approximation of the audio contributed by veganmontreal.
Please consider volunteering to help out on the site.
Fact or fiction: if your blood pressure is normal, salt is okay. Or to put it another way, unless you have high blood pressure, there’s no reason to specifically avoid sodium. Fact, or fiction?
Major fiction. Salt does all sorts of bad things to our arteries besides just raising blood pressure, contributing to the deaths of about 150,000 Americans every year. So try to keep sodium intake under about 1500mg a day, which means a single slice of bacon could take you over the top for the entire day.
Which has more sodium, though—more salt? A serving of beef, a serving of baked all-natural chicken, a large McDonald’s French fries, or a serving of salted pretzels?
It’s not the pretzels, or the fries, or the beef. Why does just plain chicken have so much salt in it? It’s because the poultry industry injects the carcasses with salt water to artificially inflate the weight, and they can still label it 100% natural.
Consumer Reports found some supermarket chicken so plumped with salt that it registered 840mg per serving. That’s off the charts, like a half a day’s sodium in half a chicken breast.
To see any graphs, charts, graphics, images, and quotes to which Dr. Greger may be referring, watch the above video. This is just an approximation of the audio contributed by veganmontreal.
Please consider volunteering to help out on the site.
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Title
Salt OK if Blood Pressure is OK?
LicenseCreative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International (CC BY-NC 4.0)
Content URLDoctor's Note
Check out this video on another health risk of sodium:
Can Diet Protect Against Kidney Cancer?
And here’s a video on changing our taste buds to enjoy a reduced-sodium diet:
Changing Our Taste Buds
For more context, see my associated blog posts: Do Eden Beans Have Too Much Iodine? and Uric Acid From Meat and Sugar.
If you haven’t yet, you can subscribe to my videos for free by clicking here. Read our important information about translations here.
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