A pinch of salt for heart disease- remove it.

As many as one billion people around the world have uncontrolled high blood pressure and that number only continues to grow.

Cardiovascular disease (CVD) remains the world’s number one killer, resulting in 18.6 million deaths a year. It has many causes: from smoking, diabetes, high blood pressure and obesity, to air pollution, and less common conditions such as Chagas disease and cardiac amyloidosis.


So what does research say
Replacing salt with a modified substitute has a beneficial impact on cardiovascular outcomes, according to a large, prospective trials across the world are showing .

So what are the substitutes- salt substitutes with less sodium and more potassium .

How does this help.
Reducing salt intake reduces blood pressure, which is a primary contributor to disease and death from heart attack or stroke.

What does the study show
A-salt substitute that includes less sodium reduced rates of stroke and heart attack in rural China, according to a trial published in the New England Journal of Medicine.

These salt substitutes are a promising intervention in areas where most salt intake comes from home cooking, according to Darwin Labarthe, MD, PhD, MPH, professor of Preventive Medicine in the Division of Epidemiology and a co-author of the study.

Salt substitutes — in this study, a salt made of a mix of sodium chloride and potassium chloride — have been shown to reduce blood pressure, but their impact on downstream cardiac events had previously not been determined.

In the current study, conducted in 600 villages in Northeastern China, investigators recruited more than 20,000 individuals with a history of high blood pressure or stroke. Study villages were randomized either to receive the salt substitute or to continue using regular salt in home cooking.
Outcome
Investigators followed participants for an average of nearly five years, finding that rates of stroke, major cardiovascular events and death were all lower in participants using salt substitutes when compared to participants using regular salt.
https://www.news-medical.net/news/20210928/Salt-substitutes-are-effective-in-reducing-stroke-major-cardiovascular-events.aspx