Cutting on this ingredient could reduce your risk of early death, says a new study.

New research shows that people who regularly salt their food have a 28 percent higher risk of dying prematurely.

A new study has found that adding more salt to your food makes you more likely to die, no matter what the cause is.

The study looked at any link between adding salt to food and early deaths, but not cooking salt.

The results of the study were published online in the European Heart Journal.

Avoid being so salty

Scientists have long argued over the exact impact that eating salt has on one’s health.

Recent research demonstrating that sodium intake (which is linked to salt, also known as sodium chloride) is associated with an increased risk of death has reignited this topic, but earlier results have been inconclusive.

This is partially caused by inaccurate sodium measurements. This is due to the fact that daily variations in sodium intake are common.

This, in turn, was due to the method used to study salt consumption, which was either a dietary survey or a single urine sample from a single day, neither of which is adequate to accurately assess it.

Furthermore, based on current methodologies, there is still uncertainty around the research on salt and potassium intake.

So how can salt intake be accurately researched? The solution appears to be salt added to food.

What scientists do know is that adding extra salt to meals is highly common, affects a person’s affinity for salty flavors, and can greatly increase the amount of salt they consume.

According to scientists, the majority of the salt consumed in Western diets—between 6 and 20 percent—comes from salting food.

The main salt used, table salt, however, has the advantage of being almost totally (97 percent to 99 percent) sodium chloride. This means that it is much easier to figure out how much sodium you are taking in and not get confused with other nutrients like potassium.

However, only a small number of research have examined the impact of salt on death rates when added to the diet.

New Research on Salt Consumption

The scientists used information from the UK Biobank which included more than 500,000 people to assess this data.

On a touch-screen questionnaire, these people were asked if they add salt to their food, not including salt used for cooking. They could choose one of five answers: never or rarely, sometimes, usually, always, or prefer not to answer, which was recorded as a missing value.

The participants were also asked if they had made any significant dietary adjustments in the previous five years, with the options being no, yes due to illness, yes due to other reasons, or choose not to answer.

Additionally, the researchers took urine samples, which were used to calculate salt and potassium levels.

The next question was how to tell if someone was more likely to die. How can one tell whether or not life expectancy was affected?

Scientists had to examine death certificates from the UK’s National Health Services to accomplish this. From there, it became a question of when a death is considered to have come too soon.

It was discovered that passing away before the age of 75 was regarded as premature by looking at the dates of death and other relevant data.

But what does this have to do with salt?

Investigators used a life table to track how often people added salt to their food. This is a reference to a statistical table that displays the likelihood that a person will pass away at each age.

The age range covered by the tables utilized in this investigation was 45 to 100.

To figure out how likely it was that someone would live, the researchers used three estimates: the UK Office for National Statistics’ data on death rates by gender and age, the hazard ratios of death in each group based on how often they put salt on their food, and the prevalence of each frequency of adding salt for each gender.

This means that the frequency with which salt is added can be approximated as the disparity in life expectancy between each group and the normative data.

Outcomes

After analyzing all of the data, the researchers came to the conclusion that persons who regularly salt their food had a 28 percent higher risk of dying.

Consider that around three out of every 100 people in the general population between the ages of 40 and 69 will pass away before their time. Now, if you take into account the fact that people always add salt to their food, that number will go up to 4 out of every 100 people in this age group dying young.

Women who consistently added salt to their food at the age of 50 effectively lost 1.5 years of life, whereas males who did the same lost 2.28 years.

However, eating a lot of fruits and vegetables may help minimize hazards, at least in part, even though the effect this might have wasn’t shown to be statistically significant.

This can aid in changing eating habits to promote health, which, in the opinion of lead researcher Prof. Lu Qi of Tulane University School of Public Health and Tropical Medicine, New Orleans, is the most significant result. Even a small reduction in salt intake can be good for your health.

“It provides novel evidence to support recommendations to modify eating behaviors for improving health. Even a modest reduction in sodium intake, by adding less or no salt to food at the table,” according to lead researcher Prof. Lu Qi, “is likely to result in substantial health benefits, especially when it is achieved in the general population.”

So, the next time you go out to eat, try to cut back on the salt.

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