That's not to say that's a good thing, sodium intake is a U-shaped curve. Too little is as bad as too much. Here [1, check figure 1] is a study comparing heart disease, stroke, etc. vs sodium excretion (as a proxy for sodium intake). The standard dietary recommendation is 2300mg, which is well below the minimum point in the graph.
And the 'high sodium diet' (3400mg) of average person is also below it, most people should probably be eating more salt, especially if they are sweating more from exercise or live in a hot climate.
[1]: https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jama/fullarticle/1105553
That's a very dangerous advice to give loosely based on one paper and against the advice of about all health organisations worldwide...
It's the usual suspects really. Food/beverages are made to be sold at a profit so choice and proportion of ingredients usually comes down to either cost reduction or increased sales.
To put it plainly, people who consume abnormally low amounts of salt don't do it out of choice - nobody enjoys eating their food without salt. They do it because the doctor tells them that it's either that, or a heart attack.
It makes sense of course that cardiovascular events will be more prevalent in this group than any other group.
Studies like the one you link to control for pre-existing cardiovascular disease, but having CV disease doesn't mean you cut down on salt.
The same methodological flaw has previously caused studies to report that very low alcohol consumption is better than moderate alcohol consumption for the heart, for example. I have a link somewhere if you want.
Btw, the study you linked to used the data from two studies comparing two anti-hypertensive drugs to each other or to placebo, so we know that basically everyone in the study already had some kind of underlying disease. Additionally, the study data included a one-time measurement, which significantly reduces its statistical power, despite its large population (you gotta take multiple measurements to minimise sampling error).
Many of our biggest civilizations have access to the ocean or river deltas. They would have had access to salt. From what I understand, predators get their entire salt intake from the animals they eat (blood, in particular?), and when we ate the entire animal that probably would have worked for us as well.
If you're trying to get salt from plants it's because you don't or won't have other options. There was a time that discovering salt deposits within your kingdom had huge political implications.
For inland communities, meat and salt licks. For coastal communities, seawater.
> There’s the argument that goes “people never ate salt in modern quantities so evolutionary speaking this is a new shock to the system”.
These arguments are indistinguishable from those suffering from the naturalistic fallacy [1] (EDIT: appeal to nature). One can construct an argument in its form for and against virtually any behavior, depending on what evidence one considers (e.g. which populations one samples), assumptions one makes (interpolating the archaeological evidence) and how far back one looks (early civilization, early humans, early hominids, et cetera).
Many of the modern differences in environment from earlier humans would be considered "good" by most people. Extra salt is probably "bad" in most cases, but it is definitely different.
It's not. But neither is a senior person living healthily and happily into their late years something evolution considered. We're trying our biology in ways evolution doesn't care for, aiming for goals it never considered.
Rhetorically, I can construct arguments for (coastal communities being historically healthy and consuming more salt) and against (ancient civilizations were chronically salt starved) modern salt consumption with this form of argument. There are too many degrees of freedom amidst sparse evidence in a diverse, heterogenous archaeological record.
> modern differences in environment from earlier humans would be considered "good" by most people
Those people tend to consider the nutrient-rich versions of plants we've bred for millennia while disregarding the toxins, pathogens and general wear-and-tear a Paleolithic human would have been subjected to.
People living into their late years was not uncommon historically. The huge changes to life expectancy in modern times are largely explained by so many fewer dying in childhood and child birth.
https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20181002-how-long-did-anc...
So far as I can tell, it seems like you are talking about something closer to "appeal to nature", and your own link even has a line urging people not to confuse one for the other.
>The naturalistic fallacy should not be confused with the appeal to nature fallacy, which is exemplified by forms of reasoning such as "Something is natural; therefore, it is morally acceptable" or "This property is unnatural; therefore, this property is undesirable."
Of course we don't need it, and too much salt is indeed bad for us [1] [2] (hence all the campaigns about eating less salty).
According to the references I've quickly found, for instance, an American consumes on average 3,400mg of sodium per day when the body needs less than 500mg (obviously this may be higher if you sweat a lot for some reason).
[1] https://www.fda.gov/food/nutrition-education-resources-mater...
[2] https://www.heart.org/en/healthy-living/healthy-eating/eat-s...
https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6...
Your point seems only about how much really is too much and the article you linked to is suggesting that the WHO recommendation is very conservative. However, I'm not really clear why you think any of my previous comment or references were misleading: I don't think it is under debate that we do not need all the sodium we eat and that too much of it is indeed bad for health.
The point being in general we do eat much more sodium than we need (which, to re-centre things, was the original question).