The Truth about Salt

We’ve been told to fear the salt shaker—but what if the real problem isn’t your dinner? Recent research challenges blanket “low-salt for everyone” advice and hints that context—sleep, stress, and the kind of foods you eat—may matter far more than a simple milligram cap. Ready to rethink your sodium with nuance?

Key Takeaways

Stop Blaming Your Salt Shaker

Now, don’t get me wrong, if you’re consuming huge amounts of sodium from your salt shaker at every meal, you're not doing yourself any favors. But studies show the real villain in your health story isn't a pinch of salt but commercial food manufacturing.

Salt is in virtually all processed foods,  like the fare at fast food joints, or giant bags of potato chips or hot dogs and it's not good for you. However, the even greater danger to your health from those foods is the overdose of damaged fats, the questionable food additives, the lack of fiber, and the omission of phytochemicals from fruits and vegetables. Not the salt.

In fact, in some circumstances, reducing salt intake can cut back on your life expectancy.

Wait, Salt Can Help Your Health?

Consider an eye-opening study performed by researchers at the Medical College of Georgia in Augusta. In lab tests, these scientists found that as you grow older and have more trouble sleeping, or if you do shift work and have uneven sleep habits, a low-salt diet is linked to a shorter life.¹

The problem in these circumstances is that these lifestyle factors dangerously disturb the body’s circadian rhythms that keep you healthy. According to the researchers, this kind of out-of-sync daily schedule and off-balance sleep habits significantly bumps up your risk for high blood pressure, malfunctioning blood vessels, and serious heart problems.

Add in a low-salt diet, their study shows, and you make this combination of factors more likely to be deadly.

Your blood pressure has its own 24-hour cycle

Under normal circumstances, your blood pressure rises during the day when you are awake and falls (dips) at night as you sleep. But when you stay up too late, work at night, or wake up in the wee hours and can’t go back to sleep, this cycle falters.

The lab study in Georgia shows that eating a low-salt diet in combination with sleep interruptions leads to vessel disease that can block blood flow. The low-salt diet, says researcher Daniel Rudic, a vascular biologist, "actually causes this non-dipping blood pressure and vascular disease."

What's the right amount of salt?

One of the best studies we’ve seen so far about how much salt you should be eating was reported in the New England Journal of Medicine (NEJM). It found that eating too little salt is about as bad for your health as eating way too much.

In this research, the safest amount of salt to eat every day was found to be between 3,000 and 6,000 mg. Higher or lower than that amount was linked to an increased risk of an earlier death from heart disease.²

To put these amounts in perspective, you can figure that a teaspoon of salt contains about 2,300 mg of salt. So, going by this research, about a teaspoon and a quarter of salt a day, up to a little less than three teaspoons, should be perfectly fine for your health.

Unfortunately, the American Heart Association still says that everyone should take in less than 1,500 mg of salt daily (about half a teaspoon), even though the research, as you can see, doesn’t support this recommendation. Matter of fact, the study published in the NEJM implies that this small daily quantity of salt is -- for most people -- more dangerous to the cardiovascular system than twice that amount.

I’ll make one exception: I did see a study that suggested about one case of high blood pressure out of ten is the result of an unusual salt sensitivity.  If I had high blood pressure, I would go on a low-salt plan for a couple of months to see if it does any good. Chances are, for nine out of ten of us, it won’t.

Outside of that, if you feel the need to pour some salt on your food at dinner to make it taste better, go ahead. The best research says it won’t hurt your health at all. The most enthusiastic low-salt fanatics are mostly campaigning for the food companies to cut back on the salt they pour into their packaged products- and with that I agree. 

Many prepared, packaged, processed foods contain a very large amount of salt (sugar, too) – and if either of these two ingredients is among the first ones on the list, it’s a sign the product is probably unhealthy. But the little dribs coming out of your salt shaker are of no concern.

Summary

The article argues that universal low-salt guidance oversimplifies a complex issue. While heavy sodium from highly processed foods is unhelpful, modest discretionary salt added to whole foods may not be the villain it’s made out to be. Research discussed includes work suggesting that very low sodium—especially alongside circadian disruption (e.g., poor sleep or shift work)—can worsen blood-pressure patterns, and that cardiovascular risk appears lowest within a moderate sodium range rather than at extremes. Practical takeaway: focus on overall food quality and lifestyle (sleep, rhythm, fiber-rich plants, healthy fats), keep processed foods in check, and personalize sodium rather than following a one-size-fits-all rule.

Frequently Asked Questions

Is all salt bad?