Using less salt in your food may seem boring, but the payoffs could be as big as a lowered risk of death, new Australian research has found.
Using a salt substitute when cooking was linked with a lower risk of dying early from any cause or from cardiovascular disease in a new study published Monday in the journal Annals of Internal Medicine.
“We are excited to be able to provide evidence that salt substitutions are effective for improving cardiovascular outcomes when used long-term, up to 10 years,” the study’s senior author Dr. Loai Albarqouni, an assistant professor at the Institute for Evidence-Based Healthcare at Queensland’s Bond University, said.
“Previous synthesis tended to focus on short-term outcomes, lasting only two weeks.”
The study is a systematic review of 16 randomised controlled trials that were published before August 23, 2023, and totaled 35,251 participants who were around age 64 on average and had a higher-than-average risk for cardiovascular disease.
The trials were mainly in China, with the rest in the United Kingdom, Taiwan, Peru, the Netherlands and Norway.
With two-thirds of the findings coming from China, the authors “were surprised at how little salt substitution research has been conducted outside Asian countries,” Albarqouni said.
“This is partially why we have graded the evidence as ‘low to very low certainty’ for Western populations — there simply isn’t enough evidence to verify that salt substitutes would be as effective in the Western context.
9 news
