We’ve purchased a number of Harvard Medical School’s short publications; as expected they’re excellent. I just was re-reading on on “living to 100.” Most of the concepts, e.g., don’t smoke, exercise regularly and eat a healthy diet, are well known to almost all of us but less commonly followed than I’d like to see. Some of the others, like take care of your teeth, establish a social network that lasts and kept your brain working hard, are also fairly obvious, but less well-publicized.
But then there was an idea that I really liked: keep an optimistic viewpoint on life. I tend to be cheerful, like puns (that’s a “two-fer,” optimism and brain play) and view the cup as mostly full, rather than partially empty.

My wife isn’t hiking this summer as one knee has been bothering her; she goes to the gym for Pilates and/or yoga two or three times a week and is still in her “Strong Women, Strong Bones” class twice a week. She has a group of friends who attend one class and sit and converse afterwards; she has a close friend in the Strong,Stong class and has a snack with her afterwards.

I’ve noticed her social network and thought I needed one myself. So this past weekend I went for a hike in the mountains with a close friend of ours. I’m ten weeks out from back surgery and have been walking, but not going to the gym. In the week before the hike I walked further, three and a half hours without pause one day (actually I stopped to pet a dog for a moment) and two hours up and down hills another day.

My legs weren’t as strong as usual going up the mountain to 11,440 feet and I had to stop twice, but made it to the summit. Then, on the way down, something extraordinary happened. We had seen a couple hiking up and later heard the man had stopped with Acute Mountain Sickness. Someone called 911 when they got to a point where they had cellphone reception and ten of us gathered around the couple and, in one way or another, contributed to getting the man down the slope.

The National Park medics arrived with oxygen and another group brought a stretcher with a single huge wheel. When my friend and I got to the trail-head I thought, “What a great day; exercise, a superb group effort and lots of positive approaches to solving a problem.”

Then to top thing off, our friend came back with me, and joined my wife and I in celebrating our anniversary. With days like that I may live to 100.

We’re finally catching up with reality, at least in one arena. In the past week I’ve read two local newspaper articles, one article in the Annals of Internal Medicine and an accompanying editorial in the same monthly journal from the American College of Physicians, all on our need to decrease our salt intake.

Those of us who’ve spent much of our medical careers dealing with the treatment and the consequences of high blood pressure, medically termed  hypertension, have been on a low-salt kick for years. Both of my parents and, eventually my older brother had hypertension, so I watched my blood pressure for years and, when it went up to high normal, cut way back on my salt intake. I also started to lose weight and to exercise more.

So two days ago I read an article titled ”Shaking the Salt Habit.” That was written for our Fort Collins paper and was followed by one today, from the Associated Press, titled “Too Much Salt: Report urges FDA to force rollback. Then there were the two medical pieces which came out in the April 20th edition of the  Annals. The editorial encapsulated the concept: “We Can reduce Dietary Sodium, Save Money, and Save Lives.

The bottom line is the American diet contains roughly twice as much salt as is optimal for health, nearly 4,000 milligrams vs. the maximum recommended of 2,300 mg. for young, healthy adults, and the 1,400 to 1,500 mg. that is the suggested maximum for people with high blood pressure, for African-Americans and for anyone older than 40. Much of the excess comes from processed foods.

Other countries have already made progress along the lines of cutting average salt intake (salt, of course, is sodium chloride, but I’m used to using either term). The UK started in 2003, and cut salt intake by an average of 9.5% The Annals article suggests if we were able to do the same, gradually perhaps so people didn’t think the taste of food was inferior and started salting things at the table, we’d save lots of lives.

The consequences of hypertension include heart attacks, strokes and kidney failure. That less than ten percent decrease in our dietary salt could prevent over a half million strokes and just under a half million heart attacks in our 40 to 80-year old group. That would save over $32 billion dollars in medical costs.

The UK plans further cuts in salt intake, up to a 40% decrease by 2012. Japan, Finland, Ireland, Australia and Canada plus other countries are also implementing similar programs.

We don’t cook with salt for ourselves, decrease the amounts specified in recipes when we cook for others, don’t add salt at the table and tend to avoid processed foods. I wondered if we were getting enough iodine, added to most or all salt you purchase, but the salt that goes into processed foods, according to the articles I read, doesn’t have idoine anyways. Plus our senior vitamins have the RDA (recommended daily allowance) for iodine anyway. So I quit worrying that we’d develop thyroid problems.

The bottom line is we Americans need to wean ourselves off our excess salt habit and doing so will both improve health and save a healthy chunk of change.