Despite the fact that a Harvard study shows 180,000 people worldwide die every year from the effects of high-sugar drinks, the real food killer in America is salt. The Harvard School of Public Health in Boston said that one in 10 Americans, 250,000 every year, die from too much salt, which is ten times the rate of death caused by high-sugar drinks.

Dr. Dariush Mozaffarian, an epidemiologist at the Harvard School of Public Health, the author of both the salt and sugary drink studies, said, 'The burden of sodium is much higher than the burden of sugar-sweetened beverages.That’s because sugar-sweetened beverages are just one type of food that people can avoid, whereas sodium is in everything. It’s really affecting younger adults, not just the elderly.”

Mozaffarian recommended that the average salt intake daily should not exceed 1000 milligrams, which is half the upper limit recommended by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Morton Satin, vice president of science and research for the Salt Institute did not agree: 'This misleading study did not measure any actual cardiovascular deaths related to salt intake, since, by the authors’ own admission, no country anywhere in the world consumes the low levels of salt they recommend.”

But Mozaffarian defended his study, saying, “This is not sensational. The point is to objectively look at the impact of salt using the best possible science, and that’s what we have done.”