The latest news reports about salt are enough to make a parent ponder a household ban on pizza and cold cuts. A study published last week in Pediatrics found
that children eat, on average, 3.4 grams of sodium daily—more than
twice the amount recommended for adults by the Institute of Medicine
(IOM). News outlets, including the Associated Press and USA Today,
explained that, according to the study, the quarter of American kids
who eat the most sodium are twice to three times as likely to develop
high blood pressure as the quarter who eat the least. The take-home
message from these stories is clear: kids need to cut down on salt or
they will suffer serious health consequences.
It's a compelling argument. Problem is, it may be wrong.
The study that these articles reference, which was published by researchers at the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), did not actually find a statistically significant association between salt intake and blood pressure in kids. And the doubling or tripling of risk described by some outlets isn't an accurate portrayal of the findings either. As lead author Quanhe Yang explained to Scientific American in an interview, high salt intake doubles the odds that kids have hypertension or pre-hypertension (and again, this doubling is not statistically significant), but odds and risk are two very different things. "I am not sure the best way to convert this odds ratio into a risk ratio," Yang says, but if he had to guess, the risk would probably be lower than the odds.
Read more: http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=what-science-on-hypertension-really-shows
It's a compelling argument. Problem is, it may be wrong.
The study that these articles reference, which was published by researchers at the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), did not actually find a statistically significant association between salt intake and blood pressure in kids. And the doubling or tripling of risk described by some outlets isn't an accurate portrayal of the findings either. As lead author Quanhe Yang explained to Scientific American in an interview, high salt intake doubles the odds that kids have hypertension or pre-hypertension (and again, this doubling is not statistically significant), but odds and risk are two very different things. "I am not sure the best way to convert this odds ratio into a risk ratio," Yang says, but if he had to guess, the risk would probably be lower than the odds.
Read more: http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=what-science-on-hypertension-really-shows
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