Salt tied to elevated blood pressure, even with healthy diet, says study

Agencies

March 7, 2018

People who eat lots of fruits, veggies, and whole grains may still have an increased risk of elevated blood pressure if they consume a lot of salt, a new study suggests.

Eating high-sodium foods has long been associated with raised blood pressure readings, but some evidence suggests that body weight and other nutrients in the diet may modify or offset the effects of sodium on blood pressure.

To see how diet might influence the connection between salt and blood pressure, researchers examined data from food surveys completed by 4,680 middle-aged adults, and determined the amount of 80 nutrients in each person’s diet.

With the exception of potassium, none of these nutrients appeared to weaken the connection between eating a high-sodium diet and having higher average blood pressure readings over 24 hours than people who ate the least sodium, researchers report in Hypertension.

“This matters because it indicates that the problem of excess salt intake and its adverse effects on blood pressure cannot be solved by augmenting the diet with other nutrients,” said lead study author Dr. Jeremiah Stamler of the Feinberg School of Medicine at Northwestern University in Chicago.

“The solution is reduction in salt intake,” Stamler said. “This is difficult since, as a result of commercial food processing, salt is almost everywhere in the food supply.”

Chronic high blood pressure is tied to an increased risk of heart disease, heart attack, stroke and heart failure.

To lower the risk of heart disease, adults should reduce sodium intake to less than 2 grams a day, or the equivalent of about one teaspoon of table salt, according to the World Health Organization (WHO).

Sodium is found not only in salt, but also in a variety of foods such as bread, milk, eggs, meat and shellfish as well as processed items like soup, pretzels, popcorn, soy sauce and bouillon cubes.

Extra sodium in the bloodstream can pull water into the blood vessels and boost blood pressure by increasing the amount of fluid the heart needs to pump through the body. Potassium can help remove excess sodium from the body.

In the current study, researchers examined data on sodium and potassium levels in urine, as well as blood pressure, height, weight and eating habits from adults aged 40 to 59 in Japan, China, the UK and the US

Higher sodium levels were associated with elevated blood pressure for both men and women at all ages in the study, regardless of race and ethnicity or socioeconomic status.

The connection between sodium and blood pressure was similarly strong for both normal weight and obese people in the study, although the connection was weaker for overweight individuals who weren’t obese.

Potassium appeared to weaken the connection between dietary salt and elevated blood pressure only for people who had low sodium levels in their urine, the researchers also found.

The study wasn’t a controlled experiment designed to prove whether or how dietary salt or other things people eat might directly alter blood pressure. Another limitation is that surveys used to assess eating habits can be unreliable snapshots of what people actually consume.

Even so, the results add to evidence that managing blood pressure requires paying attention to salt, said Cheryl Anderson, a researcher at the University of California San Diego School of Medicine who wasn’t involved in the study.

“Even though potassium can help lessen the blood pressure-raising effects of sodium, eating more potassium isn’t a license to eat more sodium,” Anderson said.

The American Heart Association recommends the Dietary Approaches to Stop Hypertension (DASH) diet or a Mediterranean-style diet to help prevent cardiovascular disease. Both diets emphasize cooking with vegetable oils with unsaturated fats, eating nuts, fruits, vegetables, low-fat dairy products, whole grains, fish and poultry, and limiting red meat and added sugars and salt.

“There is data showing that when the DASH dietary pattern is combined with sodium reduction there are substantial effects on blood pressure,” Anderson said. “This can be as powerful as taking a drug prescription for high blood pressure.”

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Middle-age people might be experiencing more stress compared to life in 90s: Study

Agencies

May 10,2020

Washington D.C., May 9: Do the middle age feel much stressful now, and seems to have changed over time, if compared to the life in the 90s? Well, this recent study indicates that it might be true.

The study has signalled to the fact that life may become more stressful majorly for middle-aged people than it was in the 1990s. The researchers reached this analysis even before the novel coronavirus started sweeping the globe.

A team of researchers led by Penn State found that across all ages, there was a slight increase in daily stress in the 2010s compared to the 1990s. But when researchers restricted the sample to people between the ages of 45 and 64, there was a sharp increase in daily stress.

"On average, people reported about 2 percent more stressors in the 2010s compared to people in the past," said David M. Almeida, professor of human development and family studies at Penn State.

"That's around an additional week of stress a year. But what really surprised us is that people at mid-life reported a lot more stressors, about 19 percent more stress in 2010 than in 1990. And that translates to 64 more days of stress a year."

Almeida said the findings were part of a larger project aiming to discover whether health during the middle of Americans' lives has been changing over time.

"Certainly, when you talk to people, they seem to think that daily life is more hectic and less certain these days," Almeida said.

For the study, the researchers collected data from 1,499 adults in 1995 and 782 different adults in 2012.

Almeida said the goal was to study two cohorts of people who were the same age at the time the data was collected but born in different decades. All study participants were interviewed daily for eight consecutive days.

During each daily interview, the researchers asked the participants about their stressful experiences throughout the previous 24 hours.

They asked questions related to arguments with family or friends or feeling overwhelmed at home or work, so and so. The participants were also asked how severe their stress was and whether those stressors were likely to impact other areas of their lives.

"We were able to estimate not only how frequently people experienced stress, but also what those stressors mean to them," Almeida said.

"For example, did this stress affect their finances or their plans for the future. And by having these two cohorts of people, we were able to compare daily stress processes in 1990 with daily stress processes in 2010," Almeida added.

After analyzing the data, the researchers found that participants reported significantly more daily stress and lower well-being in the 2010s compared to the 1990s.

Additionally, participants reported a 27 percent increase in the belief that stress would affect their finances and a 17 percent increase in the belief that stress would affect their future plans.

Almeida said he was surprised not that people were more stressed now than in the 90s, but at the age group that was mainly affected.

"We thought that with economic uncertainty, life might be more stressful for younger adults. But we didn't see that. We saw more stress for people at mid-life," Almeida said.

"And maybe that's because they have children who are facing an uncertain job market while also responsible for their own parents. So it's this generational squeeze that's making stress more prevalent for people at mid-life," he concluded.

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Smoking linked to higher risk of coronavirus, says WHO

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July 2,2020

London, Jul 2: The World Health Organisation says smoking is linked to a higher risk of severe illness and death from the coronavirus in hospitalised patients, although it was unable to specify exactly how much greater those risks might be.

In a scientific brief published this week, the U.N. health agency reviewed 34 published studies on the association between smoking and Covid-19, including the probability of infection, hospitalisation, severity of disease and death.

WHO noted that smokers represent up to 18% of hospitalised coronavirus patients and that there appeared to be a significant link between whether or not patients smoked and the severity of disease they suffered, the type of hospital interventions required and patients' risk of dying.

In April, French researchers released a small study suggesting smokers were at less risk of catching Covid-19 and planned to test nicotine patches on patients and health workers — but their findings were questioned by many scientists at the time who cited the lack of definitive data.

WHO says "the available evidence suggests that smoking is associated with increased severity of disease and death in hospitalized Covid-19 patients. It recommends that smokers quit.

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