(WebMD) If you’re still reeling from the news that low-fat diets don’t seem to protect against heart disease, you may want to sit down.

New research suggests that low-salt diets may actually increase your risk of dying from heart attack or stroke.

Over a 13-year period, people in the study who reported eating little salt were 37% more likely to die from cardiovascular causes (such as stroke and coronary heart disease) as people who ate more salt than is recommended by U.S. government guidelines.

Researchers were quick to point out that the findings fall far short of proving that restricting sodium is bad for your health.

But they say the proof that salt-restricted diets protect against death from heart and artery disease has also not emerged in the years since salt was targeted as public enemy No. 1 by heart experts.

Government nutrition guidelines now call for adults to limit their daily sodium intake to less than 2,300 milligrams a day -- the equivalent of about a teaspoon of table salt.

“It is increasingly evident that one size doesn’t fit all when it comes to diet,” researcher Hillel W. Cohen, MPH, Dr.PH, tells WebMD. “The certainty with which these [U.S. government] recommendations are being made is just not supported by the data.”

Questioning the Data

The salt study is being published exactly two weeks after the largest study ever to examine the issue suggested that restricting dietary fat may have little impact on heart disease and cancer risk.

Last week, findings from the same federally funded study, known as the Women’s Health Initiative (WHI), also questioned the benefit of calcium and vitamin D supplementation for preventing bone loss in older women.

Cardiovascular nutrition expert Alice Lichtenstein, PhD, says the WHI findings tell us more than the newly published salt study because the WHI is interventional rather than observational.

That means that the women in the WHI trial were randomly assigned to either eat low-fat diets or not, or to take calcium supplements or not.

In the salt study, researchers from the Albert Einstein College of Medicine looked back and analyzed data on the nutritional habits of people interviewed between 1976 and 1980. Information was based on people’s recall of their diet.

“Observational studies like this one are important for helping us frame the right questions to ask in clinical trials, but they don’t provide answers on their own,” Lichtenstein tells WebMD.

In the roughly 13 years after the nutritional information was collected, there were 1,343 deaths among the 7,154 people included in the analysis, including 541 deaths from cardiovascular disease.

By Salynn Boyles
Reviewed by Louise Chang, M.D.
© 2006, WebMD Inc. All rights reserved.

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