Looking in all the wrong places….

As a cardiologist, I am once again embarrassed by the sodium obsession of the ACC/AHA and  other professional healthcare  organizations. A new study (Association of Estimated Sodium Intake With Adverse Cardiac Structure and Function From the HyperGEN Study;Senthil Selvaraj, Luc Djoussé, Frank G. Aguilar, Eva E. Martinez, Vincenzo B. Polsinelli, Marguerite R. Irvin, Donna K. Arnett, Sanjiv J. Shah; Journal of the American College of Cardiology
Volume 70, Issue 6, August 2017 DOI: 10.1016/j.jacc.2017.06.036)  just released sounds alarm bells that 1/2 of all adults in the US consume sodium levels that could cause echocardiographic abnormalities.
Now we’ll move right past the fact that these test abnormalities were never correlated with actual development of disease and the conclusions were reached on data modeling (not observation of disease in sick people) and “that systolic blood pressure and serum aldosterone explained a significant proportion of the indirect effects among ESI and several indices of strain and e′ velocity.”
What this study fails to acknowledge is that:
*After hundreds of studies; no reduction in in disease endpoints or mortality has ever been shown with dietary sodium reduction (if you’re about to quote the DASH Trial where the participants ate more fruit and veg (getting more potassium and their diet was different; basically Mediterranean) read on…
*The largest source of sodium in the Modern Western diet is processed food (about 75% of daily sodium intake) . Processed food constituents and now even the packaging (a study from down under just correlated blood levels of  phthalates found in food packaging with disease development and elevated markers of inflammation).
*We need to stop looking at sodium/salt and concentrate on the quality of the diet.
*It is about what we eat!
For those interested a detailed discussion of the sodium question is covered in The Fallacy of The Calorie (Koehler Pub)