Humans generally consume too much salt – Fact Check

Your body needs a small amount of sodium to work properly, but too much sodium is bad for your health. Americans consume more than 3,300 milligrams (mg) of sodium per day, on average.

Sodium plays a central role in volume and blood pressure homeostasis, and the positive correlation between sodium intake and blood pressure has been extensively researched. Despite the fact that the average of global daily salt consumption exceeds recommendations of international associations, ...

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Yet, since as long ago as 1988, and more recently in eight articles published in the European Heart Journal in 2020 and 2021, some researchers have propagated a myth that reducing sodium does not consistently reduce CVD but rather that lower sodium might increase the risk of CVD.

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Results In 2010, global mean sodium intake was 3.95 g/day (95% uncertainty interval: 3.89 to 4.01). This was nearly twice the WHO recommended limit of 2 g/day and equivalent to 10.06 (9.88–10.21) g/day of salt. Intake in men was ∼10% higher than in women; differences by age were small.

S1 in the Supplementary Appendix).16 Overall, 181 of 187 countries — 99.2% of the adult population in the world — had estimated mean levels of sodium intake exceeding the World Health Organization recommendation of 2.0 g per day, and 119 ...

In contrast, we have a solid base of knowledge from animal experiments about the controls of salt intake as a biological homeostatic system—we can halt salt intake when it is crucially required, and we can boost it when it is not, both acutely and for the duration of the animal’s life. However, the animal system has primarily evolved to prevent and repair sodium deficit—not to cope with persistent and chronic excess. Analogous arguments have been applied to the obesity epidemic as a failure to regulate ingestion with homeostatic controls evolved to contend with famine rather than feast; however, there is an important difference between salt and food with crucial implications for control—the results of excess caloric intake are visible and persistently troubling even if its long-term implications are not, whereas those of excess sodium are not.