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Comment by ihsw | Hacker News Reader

Salt sensitivity is also far easier to manage, and its impact is limited to putting you over the top when shit hits the fan (eg: high-sodium diet can make or break you when you stray into heart-attack territory).

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There was a Finnish study where they had some people try to control salt intake and others just eat as much salt as they want. The "as much salt as they want" group actually had better health outcomes. Their conclusion was that for most people, the body's salt regulation is actually very good.

Link? Studies about salt are notoriously difficult, because hardly anyone actually adheres to a truly low-salt diet, so you get the equivalent of a study that tries to discern whether smoking 1.5 pack of cigarettes (which takes lots of restrain) is any better than 2. Personally, it took 2 months for my blood pressure to start coming down on a high-vegetable low-sodium diet, and I notice that many people already think they are not salt-sensitive if it doesn't work in 2 days. I'm still astonished when I take my blood pressure and it is 115/70 or so. It used to be consistently 150/90.

Here's my favorite summary of the science on salt: http://ije.oxfordjournals.org/content/31/2/311.full

During the Mars-500 experiment they ran a low-salt-diet test.

They found that the body cycle for salt is more complicated that thought before and "It is not only worthwhile reducing the amount of salt added to food for those who are ill - even the blood pressure in healthy individuals such as the Mars500 test subjects was reduced." [1]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MARS-500

[1] http://www.astrobio.net/pressrelease/4329/lessons-from-mars-...

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