Barbadians using too much salt!

Barbadians are consuming above the recommended amount of sodium.

President of the Heart and Stroke Foundation of Barbados, Dr. Kenneth Connell, shared this as he gave the Barbados Drug Service’s lecture on ‘Drilling Down the Numbers in 2018, Getting Hyped about Hypertension!’.

“Barbados’ salt studies suggest that we consume some 2.7 grammes of salt, which is way above the recommended 1.5 grammes of sodium, and you can argue that within our population, the aim should really be one gram of sodium or an even lower target…”

The lecturer in Clinical Pharmacology also made the point that “no salt is good for you” and urged the gathering at the Lloyd Erskine Sandiford Centre to avoid using it.

“Whether it is pink Himalayan salt, whether it is expensive salt that you purchased… whether it is salt that was somehow blessed and now has spiritual powers, it is still salt and therefore, your kidneys cannot tell the different between sodium. Regardless of where it is coming from, sodium is sodium [and] sodium kills. It is one of the main kinds of instrument used by the hypertensive criminal to kill you silently because salt tastes good,” he warned.

‘No cure’
Seeking to debunk some myths about hypertension during the lecture, Dr. Connell told persons that there is currently no cure for the condition. He therefore urged individuals to take their medication. He also discouraged them from the practice of stopping and restarting taking their medication.

“Hypertension has no cure. You don’t kind of get a touch of hypertension then next week you are going to be over it like flu. It is there and once it is diagnosed, then doctors make it more difficult for patients, I think, by saying things like, ‘Well, now you are cured’ when really they mean, ‘Well, now you are controlled’. So when your blood pressure readings are normal it is not that you are not hypertensive or a person with hypertension, you are just controlled on medication or on diet.”