'World Salt Awareness Week' is a global event to bring attention to salt intake and the risks to health it can bring. This year, the awareness week is being observed 4-10 March, 2019.
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Cochrane Nutrition Field's aim is to support and enable evidence-informed decision-making for nutrition policy and practice by advancing the preparation and use of high-quality, globally relevant nutrition-related Cochrane reviews. Cochrane Nutrition covers a wide spectrum of nutrition-related issues and questions, ranging from clinical to public health nutrition.
Although sodium is essential in the human diet, it is only required in small amounts. Salt or sodium chloride (NaCl) is the major dietary source of sodium (about 90%) and half a teaspoon of salt (2.5 grams) contains one gram of sodium. Sodium intake can be discretionary (added at the table or during cooking) or non-discretionary (occurs inherently in food or is added during food production, manufacture or processing). Most people eat too much salt— estimated at about 9 to 12 grams per day, or around twice the recommended maximum level of intake (5 grams of salt per person per day for adults, which is equivalent to less than 2000 milligrams of sodium per person per day).
To mark World Salt Awareness Week, we have collated a selection of Cochrane Reviews on salt intake:
Cardiovascular disease
- Advice to reduce dietary salt for prevention of cardiovascular disease
- Effect of longer‐term modest salt reduction on blood pressure
- Effects of low sodium diet versus high sodium diet on blood pressure, renin, aldosterone, catecholamines, cholesterol, and triglyceride
- Reduced dietary salt for the prevention of cardiovascular disease
Pregnancy
- Altered dietary salt for preventing pre‐eclampsia, and its complications
- Reduced salt intake compared to normal dietary salt, or high intake, in pregnancy
Kidney disease
- Altered dietary salt intake for people with chronic kidney disease
- Altered dietary salt intake for preventing and treating diabetic kidney disease
Public Health interventions
- Iodised salt for preventing iodine deficiency disorders
- Population-level interventions in government jurisdictions for dietary sodium reduction
Other
