HA! HA! Pour on the salt

I would say that the bigger problem is that science reporting is fad-ish. If you read the primary research papers for yourself, you will see that they are almost all set up to include these 5 sections: summary, introduction, methods, results, and conclusion.

In the conclusion, the author(s) will discuss what the results mean in the bigger context of the current research and knowledge - if it supports the current line of thinking or if it doesn't, for example. Authors will often speak as to what the limitations are to what those results can be interpreted to mean, and what questions this research may bring up that can be explored next.

If you look at media reporting of science results, you almost never see that in-depth big-picture analysis discussed. They just grab the individual paper's headline and run with it as if it's gospel (lest it become a "fad").

Now, in reading this story, I would caution jumping to the conclusion that this one study is gospel. Without having read the actual paper myself, I can only assume that these comments have some merit:

Dr. Elliot Antman, president of the American Heart Association, noted that the studies are observational and so can’t show cause and effect or rule out other factors that would affect the findings, like if people with poor health had already reduced their salt intake to less than 3,000 milligrams. They also are concerned about how sodium was measured — through a urine sample.

“We don’t know the diet the subjects who gave a urine specimen were eating and for how long they ate it after,” Antman said. “It was one point in time, and the researchers followed them for 3.7 years and try to draw a relationship between one-spot urine and events that occurred over the next 3.7 years.”

The study was too short to draw long-term conclusions, Antman said, because cardiovascular disease can take decades to develop.

The journal also published another study Wednesday that reached different conclusions. It used a modeling approach to combine results from a wide variety of studies, and estimates that 1.6 million deaths from cardiovascular causes in 2010 were linked to sodium consumption above 2,000 mg/day.

Antman called that finding important; Oparil said it included flawed data.

All the studies in the world aren't really needed to tell you what common sense already does: eat healthy, fresh fruits and raw vegetables are best, cook your meals from scratch, minimize pre-packaged foods with artificial additives and lots of extra salt, all things in moderation including meat, alcohol, salt, etc, and exercise in conjunction with a good diet.