It gives me no pleasure to bring you this week's Study That Flies in the Face of Conventional Wisdom. I get just as confused, not to mention aggravated, by these reports as everybody else does.

But when a large, government sponsored clinical trial concludes that a low-sodium diet may in fact do more cardiovascular harm than good, it shakes up a lot of our preconceptions about whether to reach for the salt shaker.

The study, conducted by researchers at Albert Einstein College of Medicine in the Bronx, found that healthy participants whose daily salt intake was restricted to less than 2,300 milligrams were 37 percent more likely to die of cardiovascular disease.

Dr. Hillel Cohen, the study's lead researcher, speculates that a low-sodium diet may in fact encourage insulin resistance, a precursor to diabetes. Cohen also theorizes that low-sodium diets may raise the level of renin, a protein found in the kidneys that increases blood pressure when sodium intake is low.

The study, reported in yesterday's American Journal of Medicine, immediately drew fire from the medical community. “This group has been publishing papers for a number of years, trying to show the usual advice is wrong,” said Dr. Jeffrey Cutler of the National Heart, Lung and Blood Institute. Dr. Cutler recommends sticking to the current government guidelines: restrict your daily salt intake to no more than 2,300 milligrams.

The researchers emphasized that the findings don't apply to those at high risk for hypertension, including the elderly, blacks, and people with heart problems. Some 50 million Americans suffer from high blood pressure, due, in part, to a high salt diet.

A certain amount (or should I say, an uncertain amount) of salt is, of course, essential for our bodies to function properly, and you'd be hard pressed to do any real cooking or baking without it, but the general consensus has long been that our diet is so full of high sodium foods that we don't need to add any more salt at the dinner table.

I'll stick with reduced-sodium soy sauce just because I think it tastes better. Matt, who takes his salt so seriously that he, along with President Bush, even read the definitive book on the subject, Mark Kurlansky's surprise best-seller Salt , keeps an array of hand harvested sea salts on hand. We use a dash here and there, “to taste,” as the recipes say.

What I'd really like to reduce is my intake of controversial studies, because all of this conflicting advice might just make my blood pressure rise. Should we take it with a grain of salt, or not?