WSC 2025 | The effectiveness of potassium-enriched salt in reducing blood pressure and lowering stroke risk

So the adverse effects of too much sodium from salt on blood pressure and risk of stroke have been known for many, many years. And there’s been a global program for decades that has tried to get people to reduce the amount of salt they eat and therefore decrease their amount of sodium with the view that this will lower blood pressure and decrease stroke risk. The problem has been that if you try to get people to take salt out of their diet, whether they’re individuals or companies, they sort of won’t do it because it makes food taste less salty. People don’t like that and it’s commercially not viable. So there’s been a lot of work done on these products called salt substitutes and basically what they are is an alternative to regular salt where some of the sodium chloride that makes up regular salt has been taken out and replaced with potassium chloride and if you do that you get a dual benefit. You get less sodium so you get blood pressure lowering but you get more potassium too so that you also get additional blood pressure lowering. There was a very large trial done about three years ago, published in the New England Journal of Medicine, which showed that if you get people to switch from regular salt to potassium-enriched salt, you reduce the risk of stroke, you reduce the risk of total major cardiovascular events, and you also reduce the risk of premature death. So really strong evidence that switching to potassium-enriched salt would be a very effective way of preventing both first and recurrent stroke.

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