Sodium Intake Vs. Health

Sodium Intake vs. Health

Yaoyao Meng

Oakland University

Abstract^[a]

This paper talks about how high sodium intake is negatively affecting people’s health. Many scientific researches and ^[b]reports show that high sodium intake is one of the main reasons of high blood pressure, heart attack, stroke, etc. According to previous research and 105 students and alumni who participated in a survey and interview at Oakland University’s campus in Rochester, Michigan, people and their family^[c] who often eat fast food and eat out have a higher chance to get high blood pressure, heart attack, and a stroke disease. Sodium is very important in peoples’ daily lives, thus, high sodium intake is one of the biggest problems in today’s society.

Keywords^[d]: Sodium intake, health, diseases, research.

                                                         Sodium Intake vs. Health

Health is a popular topic discussed throughout the world; everyone looks for a healthier lifestyle. In today’s society, when people are concerned about their health, many will automatically think about their body weight. There are tons of scientific lab reports that have proven sodium intake influences people’s weight, so sodium intake becomes one of the important components in people’s meals. Ultimately, the high amount of sodium intake in today's average diet is negatively affecting people's health.^[e]

What are many kinds of foods that contain high amounts of sodium in daily life? In America, fast food is one of the foods that contain the highest amounts of sodium. For instance, McDonald’s bacon clubhouse crispy chicken sandwich contains 1720mg of sodium, and a cup of McDonald’s chicken noodle soup contains about 800mg of sodium (McNeil, 2015). However, many people just cannot stop eating these things. Based on the data from Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (2014),

The Dietary Guidelines for Americans, 2010 recommended that everyone age 2 and up should consume less than 2,300 milligrams (mg) of sodium each day. Some groups of people should further limit sodium intake to 1,500 mg per day, such as adults age 51 or older, all African Americans, and anyone who has high blood pressure, diabetes, or chronic kidney diseases.

If one person has the chicken sandwich and a cup of chicken noodle soup for lunch, then the amount of sodium intake for his or her lunch is around 2520mg. 2520mg of sodium is already higher than the normal person’s recommended dietary 2300mg of sodium intake for a whole day. And this 2520mg is only for their lunch. What if he or she eats three meals per day? The number of the amount of sodium intake would be unbelievable after eating three meals a day in the present day.

There are many kinds of diseases that are caused by taking in high amounts of sodium, and the human body has its own system to deal with sodium. In most people, the kidneys have trouble keeping up with the excess of sodium in the bloodstream. The higher amount of sodium that a person takes into his or her body, the higher amount of water is needed to balance and dilute the sodium. This directly causes the volume of fluid to increase in the bloodstream. After a long time, the pressure of blood vessels will lead to high blood pressure, heart attack, stroke, etc. And many of those kinds of diseases will lead to heart failure in the future.

High sodium intake is one of the factors that lead to death from cardiovascular disease. In 2010, a group of medical professionals researched a huge amount of samples from regions all over the world to see the effect of taking high amounts of sodium. The result showed that there were around 1.65 million people who died of cardiovascular disease every year, due to taking more than 2g of sodium into their body per day (Mozaffarian et al., 2010). Even though sodium is one of the tiniest ingredients in food, if one person takes an extra 1g of it per day, after a year, he or she will take an extra 365g of sodium into his or her body. 365g is similar to eating a bowl of sodium instead of a bowl of rice. The person has to take many cups of water in order to dilute the 365g of sodium. Therefore, his or her blood vessels will be stressed. This obviously will lead to heart failure and cardiovascular disease in the future.

High sodium cannot only lead to a higher risk of cardiovascular disease, but also stroke. In 2009, Pasquale et al. showed another amazing research result about the influence of people’s dietary sodium intakes. These researchers collected their data from 177,025 participants over many different, but related events, and followed up with those people for 3.5 to 19 years. Finally, the researchers found out that there is a significant connection between high sodium intake and the chance of stroke: the higher amount of sodium intake will lead to a higher chance of stroke (Pasquale et al., 2009). Once people have a stroke, their blood flow in his or her brain will decrease day by day, until, one day, they reach a point where the brain cannot get enough oxygen. In other words, a stroke is a very harmful disease to the human brain, especially for people who are 45 years old or older. Many stroke cases could also possibly lead to deat^[f]h.