Month: September 2012

American children eat too much salt, and those who eat the most have higher blood pressure, a new study finds. The study came from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Researchers looked at data on 6,200 children who took part in recent national health surveys. The children were ages 8 through 18. Children were asked twice over several days to list all foods they had eaten the day before. Researchers estimated how much sodium they ate. Salt is the biggest source of sodium in food. On average, children ate 3,300 milligrams daily. That’s 1,000 milligrams above the recommended amount. Overall, 15% of children had either prehypertension or high blood pressure. Prehypertension is blood pressure that is above normal but not as high as in high blood pressure. Children who ate the most salt were twice as likely to have one of these conditions as children who ate the least.