Unsurprisingly, a research team from Vanderbilt University that published a research paper in JACC: Advances found something that we’ve always known but didn’t quite understand its extent: excessive salt is bad. Too much of it can lead straight to heart failure. The problem is that we lacked a definition for what constitutes “too much” salt. The Vanderbilt team set out to define it, to finally determine just how much salt is too much, to the point where your heart starts to fall apart.

The study followed more than 25,000 adults in the southeastern United States over nearly a decade, using data from the Southern Community Cohort Study. None of the participants had heart failure when tracking began. By the end, about 27 percent did.

Sodium intake was a common thread.

Maybe Don’t Consume Double the Recommended Amount of Salt

Participants consumed an average of about 4,269 milligrams of sodium per day, well above the recommended 2,300 milligrams. That level of intake was linked to a 15 percent higher risk of developing heart failure. Every additional 1,000 milligrams of sodium increased the risk by another 8 percent, regardless of other factors like cholesterol, calorie intake, or physical activity.

It’s around here that the guidance would be to just take some personal responsibility and monitor your sodium intake. But as is often the case with these “pick yourself up by your bootstraps” kind of philosophies, that stern folksy advice doesn’t really survive contact with reality.

But It’s Not Necessarily Your Fault If You Do

Over 70 percent of sodium intake comes from prepackaged and prepared foods, not the home salt shaker. The problem is systemic and baked into the convenience economy most people rely on to just barely stay afloat in a world that is increasingly pricing them out of the healthier options on the menu.

Many of the study participants were living in lower-income communities, which often have limited access to fresh food and don’t have any realistic alternatives to their high-sodium diets. Telling people to just cut back ignores the nuances of their lives and how little control they have over what’s available and, maybe more importantly, what’s affordable.

You can’t eat healthily if the option to eat healthily just does not exist for you.

Still, the researchers found the tiniest silver lining: even modest reductions in sodium intake made a difference. Dropping the average intake slightly, from 4,200 milligrams to 4,000 milligrams per day, could prevent 6.6 percent of new heart failure cases over 10 years. Again, it’s a very thin silver lining, but still significant even if the advice might be difficult to follow given the economic and societal factors at play.