We all know we should we consume every day – it’s a piece of health advice we’ve heard for years. A diet low in added salt can help normalise blood pressure and prevent heart attacks, strokes and coronary heart disease.
It’s just that reducing your salt intake through abstinence alone feels quite hard to do.
“Firstly, you need to stop buying salt and adding salt to the meals you make at home,” the executive director of Professor Bruce Neal, tells SBS.
“You've also got to choose to eat a whole different set of foods. That requires you to fundamentally change the way that you cook and the way that you eat. That’s a really difficult thing to do.”
The good news is that there is a middle ground. Just as you can use a sugar substitute (natural or artificial sweetener) as a dietary strategy to reduce your sugar intake, you can also use a salt substitute to reduce your dietary salt intake.
There is no doubt that salt substitutes are safe. They are also hugely beneficial to your health.
What are salt substitutes?
Salt substitutes (otherwise known as potassium-enriched salts) are products that look and taste similar to salt – sodium chloride – but they have one big difference. A significant proportion of sodium chloride is replaced with potassium chloride, which is known to help lower blood pressure.
Salt substitutes have been around for decades. Recently, however, in determining whether or not they actually work.
This month, new , published in the journal showed that using salt substitutes instead of salt can lower the risk of heart attack, stroke, and death from all causes and cardiovascular disease.
“If you use salt substitutes you don’t have to change the way you cook,” says Prof Neal. “All you have to do is use a salt substitute in exactly the same way you would salt. You just have to buy a different product that looks the same, behaves the same and tastes the same as salt.
“That’s why switching to a salt substitute can be an easy way to reduce your dietary salt intake and risk of heart disease.”
Given that is Australia’s biggest killer of people aged 45–64 and 75–84, and the for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples, the study’s findings are important.
“There is no doubt that salt substitutes are safe. They are also hugely beneficial to your health.”
Prof Neal says the large-scale study's findings are applicable to people of all cultures. The research pooled the results of 21 relevant international clinical trials involving nearly 30,000 people, carried out in Europe, the Western Pacific Region, the Americas, and South-East Asia.
The analysis showed that salt substitutes lowered the risks of early death from any cause by 11 per cent, from cardiovascular disease by 13 per cent, and the risks of heart attack or stroke by 11 per cent.
“Salt substitutes are likely to be very beneficial in better managing the dietary salt intake of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders, and other culturally and linguistically diverse groups.”
The only caveat here, Prof Neal explains, is that salt substitutes are not recommended for people with kidney disease or any other illness that require a reduction of dietary potassium.
“If you've got kidney disease, you shouldn’t be adding salt to your food anyway. So you shouldn’t be switching salt for a salt substitute [that’s salt-reduced].”
How to source salt substitutes
Salt substitutes are now available at most major supermarkets. “Maybe not at the smaller metro stores but at most, larger retailers,” he adds. “They are marked as ‘low salt’ or ‘light salt’ products.”
If you’re unsure whether you’re buying the right thing, just check the label for the inclusion of potassium chloride in the ingredients list.
As an evidence-based guide, look for similar ratios in your salt substitute as the ones used in the study. The proportion of sodium chloride in the salt substitutes studied varied from 33 per cent to 75 per cent. The proportion of potassium ranged from 25 per cent to 65 per cent.
We want people to buy potassium-rich salt to use it in their cooking at home, but we also want food manufacturers to make their products with it.
While salt substitutes are an effective way to reduce your dietary intake of salt home, one major problem remains.
“In Australia, a major source of dietary salt comes in the form of processed and packaged foods. This is why we want the supermarkets to put potassium-enriched salts in their products rather than using regular salt.
"We want people to buy potassium-rich salt to use it in their cooking at home, but we also want food manufacturers to make their products with it.”
Until that happens though, if you’re trying to reduce your salt intake, there’s no quick fix when ordering a takeaway meal. Cutting back on consuming highly processed and packaged foods is still what the experts recommend.
