Is lowering salt consumption important for health?

Many medical organizations say yes, though there's still room for disagreement.

Earlier this month, the American Medical Association urged the government to develop regulations to limit salt -- or sodium -- in processed and restaurant foods, noting that excess sodium can increase blood pressure.

A 2004 report by the Institute of Medicine, a branch of the National Academy of Sciences, said that healthy adults should keep their salt consumption under 2,300 milligrams a day. Most Americans consume far more than that, in part because the food industry laces so many products with salt.

Lowering salt consumption can reduce blood pressure, said Dr. Lawrence Appel , a professor of medicine at Johns Hopkins Medical Institutions. ``Elevated blood pressure is a powerful risk factor for cardiovascular disease and is extremely modifiable by lifestyle changes including sodium reduction," he said. ``Reducing salt is even easier for most people than losing weight or making other dietary changes," he said.

While the American Heart Association and the federal government recommended sodium reduction, a review by the Cochrane Collaboration, an international not-for-profit research group, showed that reducing salt intake is linked to reductions in blood pressure of only a few points.

Moreover, lowering blood pressure by salt reduction may not translate to a survival advantage. A study published in February in the American Journal of Medicine by Hillel Cohen , an associate professor of epidemiology and population health at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine, concluded that people who reduced salt actually had a 37 percent greater risk of death than those who didn't. Salt reduction studies, he said, present ``a very mixed picture."

One of Cohen's co-authors, Dr. Michael H. Alderman , president of the International Society of Hypertension, has been a consultant -- albeit unpaid -- to the Salt Institute, an industry group based in Alexandria, Va. The Salt Institute did not pay for the study.

Bottom line? Take all the advice about salt, including this, with a grain thereof.

JUDY FOREMAN

E-mail health questions to Foreman@globe.com.