Low-sodium diet offers big benefits when it comes to blood pressure: Study

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If you want to lower your blood pressure, cutting back on salt in your diet would help, according to a recent study.

New research said that for many people, cutting back on salt is as effective as taking a common blood pressure medication.

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The study, published Saturday in JAMA, found that lowering salt levels lowered blood pressure in the majority of participants.

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Researchers monitored 213 participants aged 50 to 75 on their usual diets, as well as high- and low-sodium diets.

The high-sodium diets had about 2,200 mg of added sodium daily and low-sodium diets contained about 500 mg of sodium daily.

After one week of a low-sodium diet, they saw an average 8-mmHg reduction in systolic blood pressure compared to a high-sodium diet and a 6-mmHg reduction compared to a normal diet.

The researchers said that’s comparable to the average benefits of a commonly prescribed drug for high blood pressure.

The low-sodium diet involved reducing salt intake by about 1 tsp per day.

“The low-sodium diet lowered systolic blood pressure in nearly 75% of individuals compared with the high-sodium diet,” the authors wrote.

“High blood pressure, also called hypertension, is known as a silent killer and can increase a person’s risk of heart attack, stroke, chronic kidney disease and other serious conditions.”

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Hypertension contributed to more than 691,000 deaths in the United States in 2021, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Nearly half of adults have hypertension, according to the CDC — defined as a systolic blood pressure greater than 130 or a diastolic blood pressure greater than 80. And only about one in four adults with hypertension have it under control, the agency estimated.

However, salt isn’t the only thing in our diets that may have an effect on blood pressure.

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