Medicine has been cautioning us from enjoying too much salt for a long time now. Sodium, salt's main elemental component, raises our blood pressure, and opens us up to any number of ailments attendant upon hypertension.

So if a high sodium diet was bad, a low sodium diet had to be good. Or so it seemed to us and the hundreds of creators of “lo-salt” diets and foodstuffs.

But now the results of a study from the Population Health Research Institute (PHRI) of McMaster University and Hamilton Health Sciences in Hamilton, Ontario has not only proven us wrong, it's proven us dangerously wrong!

Not only is a low salt diet not beneficial, it may actually increase the risk of cardiovascular disease and death compared to average salt consumption. The only people who need to reduce their salt intake are those with hypertension, and who already consume too much sodium. 

The researchers showed that regardless of whether people have high blood pressure, low-sodium intake is associated with more heart attacks, strokes, and deaths compared to average intake.

“These are extremely important findings for those who are suffering from high blood pressure,” said Andrew Mente, lead author of the study, a principal investigator of PHRI and an associate professor of clinical epidemiology and biostatistics at McMaster’s Michael G. DeGroote School of Medicine.

So how low is too low? You are risking heart disease if you consume less than 3 grams of sodium a day. High sodium consumption is more than six grams per day, but only about 10 percent of the population in the global study had both hypertension and high sodium consumption. That is to say, only 10 percent really needed to lower their sodium levels.

“Low sodium intake reduces blood pressure modestly, compared to average intake, but low sodium intake also has other effects, including adverse elevations of certain hormones which may outweigh any benefits,” Mente wrote.  He added that what is now generally recommended as a healthy daily ceiling for sodium consumption appears to be set too low, regardless of a person’s blood pressure level.