Another Side of a Low-Salt Diet: Reductions in the Salinity of Drinking Water May Lower Blood Pressure
Abstract
High sodium intake has been strongly associated with increased risk of hypertension. In some coastal areas, highly saline drinking water adds to people’s sodium intake. In this issue of Environmental Health Perspectives, scientists report that lower blood pressure and risk of hypertension among coastal Bangladeshi communities were associated with declines in salinity of drinking water sources. There are several causes of the salinity in Bangladesh and other low-lying deltas. For instance, in some coastal areas, groundwater is being overpumped to sustain shrimp farms, pulling deep, salty groundwater into shallower aquifers. Overextraction of both groundwater and fossil fuels allows seawater to penetrate porous deltaic sediments. Low-lying deltas, such as Bangladesh, are also vulnerable to sea level rise and storm surges that increase freshwater salinity, conditions that are expected to increase with a changing climate. “Our study suggests that millions of people in these areas are already consuming dangerous amounts of salt,” says first author Pauline Scheelbeek, an epidemiologist at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine. Scheelbeek’s research focused on three districts, or upazilas: Dacope, Batiaghata, and Paikghacca, all located on the southwestern coast of Bangladesh. The communities there live mostly in polders, which are low-lying tracts of land protected from the sea by raised embankments along the Bay of Bengal. For the current study, Scheelbeek’s team…
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