Reducing salt in the American diet by as little as one-half teaspoon (or three grams) per day could prevent nearly 100,000 heart attacks and 92,000 deaths each year, according to a new study. Such benefits are on par with the benefits from reductions in smoking and could save the United States about $24 billion in health care costs, the researchers add.
A team from UC San Francisco, Stanford University Medical Center and Columbia University Medical Center conducted the study. The findings appear Jan. 20 in online publication by the New England Journal of Medicine and also will be reported in the Feb. 18 print issue of the journal.
The team’s results were derived from the Coronary Heart Disease Policy Model, a computer simulation of heart disease among U.S. adults that has been used by researchers to project benefits from public health interventions.
“A very modest decrease in the amount of salt, hardly detectable in the taste of food, can have dramatic health benefits for the U.S.,” said Kirsten Bibbins-Domingo, PhD, MD, lead author of the study, UCSF associate professor of medicine and epidemiology and the co-director of the UCSF Center for Vulnerable Populations at San Francisco General Hospital.
“It was a surprise to see the magnitude of the impact on the population, given the small reductions in salt that we were modeling,” Bibbins-Domingo added.
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