It’s that age old problem. You don’t have a lot of money to spend on medicine, but you do have a lot of often maligned meat preservatives with a reputation for being bad for your health. What are you going to do? In the past, all you could do would be to skip the medicine and preserve the meat.

But now, scientists have another solution: use the meat preservatives as your medicine.

Headline Washington Times: Nitrite examined as cheap treatment

Could the salt that preserves hot dogs also preserve your health?

Scientists at the National Institutes of Health think so. They have begun infusing sodium nitrite into volunteers in hopes that it could prove a cheap but potent treatment for sickle cell anemia, heart attacks, brain aneurysms, even an illness that suffocates babies.

Those ailments have something in common: They hinge on problems with low oxygen, problems the government’s research suggests nitrite can ease.

Beyond repairing the reputation of this often maligned meat preservative, the work promises to rewrite scientific dogma about how blood flows, and how the body tries to protect itself when that flow is blocked. Indeed, nitrite seems to guard tissues — in the heart, the lungs, the brain — against cellular death when they become starved of oxygen.