Exercise May Reduce The Affect Of A High Salt Diet

Online, March 28, 2011 (Newswire.com) - A new study suggests that exercise can help to keep blood pressure unaffected by a high salt diet. It is believed that frequent exercise will keep blood pressure from rising if a person is consuming a lot of salt in their diet.

This is yet another big benefit of exercise and physical activity, unlike the ridiculous article that was published last week claiming people who exercise were raising their heart attack risk.

Here are a few snippets from the article on usatoday.com:

Physical activity may diminish the negative impact of a high-salt diet on blood pressure, a new study suggests.
Researchers found that the more people exercise, the less their blood pressure will rise in response to a high-salt diet.

"For those with low physical activity, their blood pressure will increase more if they increase their sodium intake," said study co-author Dr. Jiang He, chair of the department of epidemiology at the Tulane University School of Public Health and Tropical Medicine in New Orleans.

"It's a little bit of a surprise," He added. "But this is the first study to look at this particular association between physical activity and salt sensitivity and blood pressure. But after thinking it over it makes sense, because we already know that physical activity will reduce blood pressure."

He and his colleagues are slated to present their findings Wednesday at the American Heart Association's meeting on nutrition, physical activity and cardiovascular disease, held in Atlanta.

High blood pressure, or hypertension, is a leading cause of stroke. Because of salt's association with high blood pressure, the American Heart Association recommends consuming less than 1,500 milligrams (mg) of sodium per day.

To explore a potential association between exercise and the hypertensive role of dietary salt, the authors focused on roughly 1,900 men and women (average age 38) living in a rural region in northern China. None took blood pressure medication during the study.

For one week all of the participants consumed 3,000 mg of sodium a day in their diet; for another week, they were placed on a high-sodium diet - 18,000 mg per day.

Nine blood pressure readings were taken each week, and questionnaires were completed to assess routine levels of physical activity, ranging from "very active" to "quite sedentary."

When switching from the lower-sodium to a high-sodium diet, those who experienced a 5% or greater boost in their systolic blood pressure (the heart contraction measure represented by the top figure of a blood pressure reading) were deemed "high salt-sensitive."

Those reporting the most physical activity had a 38% lower risk of being highly salt-sensitive than the least active group. This group was the least likely to see a 5% or greater rise in their blood pressure in response to a high-salt diet.

Compared with the most sedentary group, those in the next-to-highest activity group had a 17% lower risk of salt-sensitivity, and those in the next-to-lowest activity group had a 10% lower risk.

The team concluded that engaging in physical activity has a "significant," independent and progressively healthful impact on the degree to which salt sensitivity relates to blood pressure.

The authors acknowledged that the study needs to be repeated. Also, experts note that research presented at meetings has not been subjected to the same type of rigorous scrutiny given to research published in peer-reviewed medical journals.

Read More: usatoday.com

Don't make the mistake of believing that because the study was performed on people from a different culture that the results don't apply. Obvioulsy there should be further study on this subject in order to find more conclusive data. The bottomline is that if you exercise you have a much better chance of experiencing good health than if you don't.