Next time your doctor says “cut back on the salt, or else” ask him one question.

Or else what?

He’ll tell you how all that salt is responsible for the high blood pressure that leads to heart disease. But if you’ve tried to cut back on salt, then you already know how well it works — not at all.

It’s not just you.

A low-salt diet is actually scientifically proven to have little to no impact on your BP levels, and a new study confirms it: Researchers in Europe say cutting back on sodium trims just 1 percent off a healthy person’s BP levels, and 3.5 percent off those of someone battling hypertension.

And in exchange for those meaningless dips in blood pressure, patients who stuck to the low-salt lifestyle saw a 7 percent surge in deadly triglycerides and a 2.5 percent overall boost in cholesterol levels.

In other words, if your BP spikes a little and your doc tells you to stick to a low-salt diet to avoid hypertension meds, he’ll almost certainly end up giving you those meds anyway — and a statin to boot.

Consider that a bonus.

If this was the first study of its kind, it would be easy to be a little skeptical — and there’s absolutely nothing wrong with being skeptical. But it’s not — and it’s not the second or third study either.

In fact, it’s the fourth study just this year to find no benefit to a low-salt diet — not to mention the dozens of other studies that have reached the same conclusion over the years.

If you’re concerned about blood pressure, forget about salt. Cut back on sugar instead — because the research on this has been remarkably consistent: People who consume the most sugar have the highest blood pressure levels.

That’s why one of the most immediate benefits of a low-carb diet is a swift reduction in blood pressure.

Once you get the sugar out, don’t focus on salt so much as your salt-to-potassium ratio. Thanks to processed foods, most people get more salt than potassium. In reality, you should get about three times as much potassium as salt.

Make those two changes, and you can hit the saltshaker to your heart’s content — and never have to worry about your BP levels again.

Pfizer is getting ready to take a multibillion-dollar loss this fall when it loses patent protection on the best-selling drug of all time. But don’t expect them to sit back and watch Lipitor’s $11 billion a year in sales go down the drain. The Wall Street Journal says the company is hatching a plan to have its cholesterol-lowering drug sold over the counter.

And if they get their way, you can bet it won’t just be sold in pharmacies anymore. I’m thinking 7-11, McDonald’s, and Dunkin Donuts, for starters, where Lipitor can be billed as the antidote to cholesterol-laden convenience foods.

That’s not nearly as far-fetched as it sounds. Some researchers have already proposed doing exactly that. (Read about it here.)

But if there’s anything as bad for you as a fast food meal on your plate, it’s a statin in your body. I don’t care what you’ve been told. These drugs are bad news.

Along with the notorious risk of muscle weakness and debilitating pain, statins have also been linked to kidney failure, liver damage, cataracts, joint and tendon problems, sexual issues, and even an increased risk of diabetes.

That’s right… a drug that’s supposed to keep a supposed risk factor for diabetes in check — cholesterol — can actually help bring the disease on.

Here’s a better plan: Skip the fast food and skip the statins. Basic lifestyle changes can do a much better job of keeping cholesterol levels under control anyway.

The one bit of good news here is that Big Pharma is 0-for-2 when it comes to getting statins approved for over-the-counter sales. Merck’s plan for OTC Mevacor was rejected by the feds at least three times, along with Bristol-Myers Squibb’s bid for nonprescription Pravachol.

Normally, I spend a lot of time ripping FDA decisions — and, let’s face it, there’s a lot to rip. But in this case, the agency has managed to get it right — and they’ve already put Pfizer on notice that the bar for over-the-counter Lipitor has been set pretty high.

“They would have to provide data to show that consumers understand the treatment and recognize that cholesterol-monitoring is required,” FDA spokeswoman Shelly Burgess told Bloomberg News.

That’s not going to be easy, because Burgess quickly added that previous studies have shown that patients don’t get it.

“Most study participants made mistakes and chose to take the proposed over-the-counter statin when they should not have done that,” she was quoted as saying.

On the other hand, statins such as Zocor are already available over the counter in the U.K. — so maybe it’s only a matter of time before the FDA follows suit.

The U.S. government’s dietary guidelines released last year allow people to get as much as 25 percent of their calories from added sugars. If it’s not immediately obvious why that’s a bad idea, a new study spells it out.

All that sugar is the fastest way to put yourself at risk for heart disease — and you can see the damage in just two weeks.

Forty-eight volunteers between the ages of 18 and 40 were asked to spend five weeks limiting added sugars to a single eight-ounce cup of fruit juice a day, bringing them all down to an equal level, sugar-wise.

Then, they were divided into three groups and given 25 percent of their daily calories from one of three types of sugar: glucose, fructose, or high-fructose corn syrup.

For the HFCS group, that’s the equivalent of 3.7 cans of soda a day for women and 4.4 cans for men — a lot of soda (and a lot of sugar), but still less than what you’ll find in a “Double Gulp” at your local 7-11.

After two weeks on this government-approved sugar high, the volunteers who had been getting their calories from fructose and high-fructose corn syrup had significant bumps in their levels of deadly triglycerides as well as a rise in LDL cholesterol.

They even had more apolipoprotein-B, a protein linked to plaque in the arteries, according to the study that will appear this fall in the Journal of Clinical Endocrinology & Metabolism.

If that’s what two weeks of all that sugar will do to you, imagine what’ll happen to your body in two months, two years or two decades — if you even make it that far.

The study also offers more proof that you don’t have to eat fat to send your cholesterol levels through the roof. Sugar will do that for you all by itself. Natural fats, on the other hand, can actually help keep cholesterol levels under control as well as lower your blood pressure and blood sugar levels.

Yet the same government that wants you to eat more sugar is constantly urging you to avoid fat — putting you on a collision course with diabetes, heart disease, and a premature demise.

The lesson here: No matter what Uncle Sam says, no amount of added sugars are an acceptable part of the diet.

I know, you can’t always avoid them… and everyone is going to indulge here and there.

But as a daily ration? Forget it.

Well whaddaya know — it turns out small changes in your diet can lead to small changes in your health.

Go figure.

Researchers asked diabetics to replace a little of their daily carbs with either more carbs or nuts… and found that those who went nuts had slight improvements in blood sugar and cholesterol levels.

The 117 diabetics were assigned to replace some carbs with either a whole wheat muffin, half a cup of mixed nuts, or a little bit of a muffin and a little bit of nuts.

After three months, those who got the full nut treatment had a small dip in average hemoglobin A1C levels — but not quite enough to be considered clinically significant.

The nutters also saw an average drop in LDL cholesterol from 97 milligrams per deciliter to 89 mg/dL.

And all I can say is: big deal.

The answer to diabetes isn’t in replacing a small amount of carbs with healthier foods — it’s in sticking to a strict low-carb diet.

Studies have proven time and again that a low-carb lifestyle can lead to real changes in blood sugar, blood pressure, waistline and more — to the point where many diabetics can even forget they have the disease and start to live a normal life again.

And if you love nuts, don’t worry — they can be an important part of this lifestyle. Nuts are packed with healthy fats like omega-3 fatty acids and essential nutrients such as vitamin E.

One study found that in addition to drops in LDL cholesterol, a daily serving of nuts can improve the ratio of good to bad cholesterol by 8.3 percent and slash deadly triglycerides by 10.2 percent. (Read about it here.)

Another found that in addition to lowering LDL levels, pecans can actually prevent the this form of cholesterol from oxidizing — robbing it of the ability to hurt you.

They’re so good for you that even the FDA had no choice but to grudgingly approve a health claim for nuts, allowing packages to state that “evidence suggests” they can lower the risk of heart disease.

So whether you’re diabetic or not, get more nuts.

And do yourself a favor: Skip the muffins of all flavors, unless you want a muffin shape yourself.