Will reducing population salt intakes save the thousands of lives promised by public health agencies in the U.S. and the U.K.? The only country to achieve a significant reduction in salt intake is Finland and researchers Karppanen and Mervaala published the outcomes in the journal, Progress in Cardiovascular Diseases . Not only did they claim that the significant reduction in salt consumption led to a dramatic decrease in cardiovascular disease, but they went further and attributed the 4.5 year increase in longevity to it as well.
Since this was the first medical study to actually look at a broad-based national salt reduction with health outcomes over a 30 year period, I thought it would be worth comparing with other countries.
This comparison appears in our latest edition of the Salt and Health Newsletter . The Global Cardiovascular Infobase , makes possible a clear comparison of patterns of ischaemic heart disease (IHD) in all countries. As it turns out Finland, the only country to significantly reduce salt consumption, experienced the weakest reduction in Ischemic heart disease over the last 30 years. In fact, Canada, a country where no salt reduction took place, started at the same point as Finland, but ended up with double the heart disease reduction. That certainly doesn't say much about the positive impact of salt reduction, quite the contrary.
To check out the situation with life expectancy, I accessed the International Data Base of the US Census Bureau . Here again Finland, the only country to severely cut its salt intake, ended up with a rather small increase in logevity compared to the other countries.
Based on this Finnish study, we can say with confidence that despite an almost 50% reduction in the consumption of salt in Finland, there are no health benefits attributable to this intervention.
