Browse evidence-based analysis of health-related claims and assertions
Eating too much salt compared to potassium might be worse for your heart over time than just looking at salt or potassium by itself.
Taking electrolytes like sodium helps you perform better and stay safer during long workouts—like marathons or cycling races—that last over four hours, especially when it's hot outside.
Most athletes don’t need to take extra sodium every day — there’s no strong proof it helps with performance or health, and supplement makers often make claims that aren’t backed by science.
If you're already eating a normal amount of salt, drinking one serving of electrolyte supplements could add enough extra sodium to raise your risk of heart problems.
Our bodies evolved to handle very little salt because our ancestors, like hunter-gatherers, didn’t eat much of it—usually less than a gram a day.
When people exercise a lot, they can get low sodium because they drink too much water, not because they aren’t taking in or losing too much salt.
When athletes sweat a lot during tough workouts in the heat, they can lose a surprising amount of salt—up to more than a teaspoon of salt every hour.
Eating more salt raises your blood pressure in a straight-line way because it makes your body hold onto more water, which increases the amount of fluid in your blood vessels.
People around the world tend to eat more salt than doctors recommend—usually 3 to 5 grams a day instead of the suggested 2 to 2.4 grams—because we naturally like the taste of salt, so we keep eating it even when we know we shouldn't.
Taking electrolyte supplements might hurt your heart and won’t help you perform better if you're just doing normal daily stuff.
Eating more salt is linked to heart disease risk — and this link stays about the same no matter how old you are, whether you're a man or woman, how long studies look at people, or how good the studies are.
Eating more salt is linked to a higher risk of heart disease, and this seems to be true whether scientists measure salt intake from what people remember eating or from their urine tests.
The more salt you eat, the higher your risk of heart disease — and this keeps going up steadily, with no safe lower limit or point where it stops getting worse.
If you eat one more gram of salt every day, your risk of heart disease goes up by 6%, and this risk keeps rising the more salt you eat.
Eating more salt might increase your chances of heart problems as you get older — one big analysis found people who eat a lot of salt have about a 19% higher risk than those who eat less.
Your body’s ratio of sodium to potassium in urine might be a better clue for heart disease risk than looking at either one alone — and the numbers suggest this ratio really does track with higher risk.
When scientists look at both salt and potassium levels in pee, they see that more salt might raise heart disease risk, while more potassium might lower it — and checking both together gives a clearer picture.
For people with slightly high blood pressure between 30 and 54 years old, how much salt they eat — measured by what shows up in their urine — doesn’t seem to clearly raise their risk of heart disease when looked at on its own.
If you're a middle-aged adult with slightly high blood pressure, peeing out more potassium might mean you have a lower chance of heart disease — one study found a 36% lower risk for those with the highest levels, but the result wasn't strong enough to be sure it wasn't just by chance.
If you're a middle-aged adult with slightly high blood pressure, having more sodium than potassium in your body may raise your chances of heart disease by 24% for every unit increase in the balance — and this combo predicts heart problems better than either mineral alone.
Measuring salt intake just once might make us think it's more or less harmful than it really is—using multiple measurements over time shows the risk could be very different, by as much as 85%.
Even though people's salt levels can vary a lot from one test to the next, the average salt level across a whole group of people stays about the same over 15 years.
If you measure salt intake in healthy adults using multiple urine tests over many years instead of just one, you might get a very different picture of how much salt people eat — and that can change what we think about how salt affects heart and kidney health over time.
To keep nutrition science honest and trustworthy, experts need to fix problems in how salt studies are done, including bias from food companies and weak methods.