Let them eat salt: drug cuts sodium

YOU may one day be able to take a drug that decreases the amount of salt your body absorbs from food. Most people eat more salt than the 6 grams recommended per day. People with conditions such as kidney disease and heart failure are advised to aim for even lower levels. But this can be hard as salt is added to many foods. A drug called tenapanor blocks a molecule in intestinal cells that moves sodium from the gut into the body. In 60 healthy people, the drug cut sodium in urine by up to a third – a measure of how much the body absorbed. The leftover sodium was excreted in the faeces (Science Translational Medicine, doi.org/rw3). Such a reduction could help people with kidney disease who aren’t meant to eat more than 5 grams a day, says Dominique Charmot of the drug’s developers Ardelyx, based in California. Graham MacGregor of the Wolfson Institute of Preventative Medicine in London says the drug has potential but it makes more sense for people to change their diets: “Why eat all this salt and take a drug to block it?” Charmot counters it will help people comply with strict sodium targets.