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Sodium guidelines should be taken with a grain of salt

Nature Medicine volume 16, pages 961–962 (2010)Cite this article

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To the Editor:

Stephen Strauss's news feature1 on low-sodium alternatives to table salt is predicated on the notion that salt consumption is currently at unhealthy levels. But the clinical evidence supporting salt intake reduction to the most commonly recommended level of 1.5–2.3 grams of sodium per day is almost nonexistent. The only basis for these two figures that I have come across is in the Dietary Reference Intakes introduced by the US Institute of Medicine (IOM) to inform healthcare and nutritional guidelines, yet the same policy documents also state the average required level of sodium “could not be established because of inadequate data from dose-response studies”2.

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References

  1. Strauss, S. Nat. Med. 16, 841–843 (2010).

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  2. Institute of Medicine. Dietary Reference Intakes for Water, Potassium, Sodium, Chloride, and Sulfate (National Academies Press, Washington, DC, 2005).

  3. Hooper, L., Bartlett C., Davey Smith, G. & Ebrahim, S. Cochrane Database Syst. Rev. 1, CD003656 (2004).

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  4. Jürgens, G. & Graudal, N.A. Cochrane Database Syst. Rev. 1, CD004022 (2004).

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  5. German Institute for Quality and Efficiency in Health Care. < http://www.iqwig.de/download/A05-21B_Executive_Summary_Non-drug_treatment_strategies_for_hypertension-reduction_in_salt_intake.pdf> (2009).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Vice President of Science and Research, Salt Institute, Alexandria, Virginia, USA.,

    Morton Satin

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  1. Morton Satin
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Correspondence to Morton Satin.

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The author declares competing financial interests: details accompany the full-text HTML version of the paper at http://www.nature.com/naturemedicine/.

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Satin, M. Sodium guidelines should be taken with a grain of salt. Nat Med 16, 961–962 (2010). https://doi.org/10.1038/nm0910-961b

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