Study Questions Low-Salt Diet; Critics Call Research Unusable

A low-salt diet may not be so healthy after all. Defying a generation of health advice, a controversial new study concludes that the less salt people eat, the higher their risk of untimely death.

The report does not necessarily mean Americans should lunge for the saltshaker--but it does cast doubt on an item of standard dietary wisdom.

Some critics, however, said the study was flawed, making its results unusable.

The study, led by Dr. Michael Alderman, chairman of epidemiology at Albert Einstein School of Medicine in New York and president of the American Society of Hypertension, suggests that the U.S. government should consider suspending its recommendation that people restrict the amount of salt they eat.

“It is possible that the harm of a low-sodium diet may outweigh its benefit,” the study said.

The study, to be published tomorrow in the Lancet, suggests that there is no scientific support for a blanket recommendation regarding dietary sodium.

“The lower the sodium, the worse off you are,” Alderman said. “There’s an association. Is it the cause? I don’t know. Any way you slice it, that’s not an argument for eating a low-sodium diet.”

Alderman examined the relationship between sodium intake and death among 11,346 Americans evaluated in the 1970s by the U.S. government’s National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey.

By 1992, 3,923 of them had died. He found that there were 19 deaths for every 1,000 years of life in the people with the highest salt intake, compared with 23 in those who ate the least salt.

Overall, a 1,000-milligram increase in dietary salt was associated with a 10% reduction in mortality.

The study was denounced by some who said the salt consumption information in the government survey on which the research is based was too inaccurate because participants had underestimated the amount of salt they were eating.

“There are major methodological flaws which makes meaningful interpretation of this paper virtually impossible,” said Dr. Paul Elliott, an epidemiologist at London’s Imperial College.