Salt Restriction and Heart Disease – Are The Facts Being Hidden?

This morning (December 29, 2015) I received an alert on my computer home page regarding increased mortality in heart failure patients when their salt intake is restricted. Three hours later, it was gone!  I couldn’t find it anywhere!  However, I did locate this article on the National Institutes of Health website discussing the inadvisability of overly restricting salt intake in congestive heart failure (CHF) patients.

Reasons cited include the way the lack of salt messes up the blood flow to the kidney and disrupts the kidney hormones needed to maintain vascular volume and regularize blood pressure. The same article also mentions the importance of micro-nutrients to these people’s health and well-being.  Of course, they damn the findings with faint praise, since vitamins and minerals are not part of the medical model.

I also found a second article from 2013 that highlights the fact that salt restriction results in worsening of cardiovascular disease, as well as increased mortality.  This article was published in the American Journal of Medicine, but has still to find its way into current medical practice.  The gold standard is still excessive salt restriction for all heart disease patients.

So much for the canard “More research is needed.” It’s clear that if the medical profession doesn’t agree with the research findings, it simply buries them; and, then, ignores them!

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