This law lowered blood pressure levels

People have been resisting doing this for decades.

Even if it’s pretty clear that it causes high blood pressure.

So South Africa just put it into law.

And people’s blood pressure free-fell, as reported in a new study in JAMA Cardiology.

Now there’s no doubt… so you can freely do this without being forced by a law.

We’ve all heard that eating too much salt is bad for us.

It raises blood pressure, which can lead to heart attacks, strokes, kidney problems, and even dementia.

But getting people to eat less salt is tricky, especially when much of it is hidden in everyday packaged foods like bread, margarine, processed meats, and snacks.

South Africa decided to do something about it.

Instead of just telling people to eat less salt, the government passed a law back in 2013 that forced food manufacturers to lower the sodium levels in 13 common processed food categories, including bread, chips, soups, sauces, cereals, and processed meats.

To find out whether this policy worked, researchers from Wits University and Harvard followed over 5,000 adults aged 40 and older in a rural area of South Africa’s Mpumalanga Province.

They began by testing participants’ urine in 2014 to estimate how much sodium they were eating before the sodium laws were fully in effect.

Then they tested again in 2018 and again in 2021, all while checking blood pressure levels too.

Here is what happened over the seven years:

1. Average sodium intake dropped by around 10%, going from 3.08 grams per day to around 2.86 grams.

2. Blood pressure dropped too. For every gram of sodium people cut out, systolic blood pressure (the top number) fell by 1.3 mm Hg.

3. The number of people eating under the ideal sodium limit of two grams per day more than doubled, from 7% to 17%.

4. These changes were consistent across multiple testing years, suggesting it wasn’t just a short-term effect.

That might sound like a small change, but according to experts, even a one mm Hg drop in blood pressure could translate into tens of thousands of fewer deaths from heart disease and stroke globally each year.

But cutting salt a little will probably not bring your blood pressure down to a healthy level.

But the easy blood pressure exercise (found here) will. In fact, it could bring your blood pressure below 120/80 in as little as nine minutes – starting right now…

And if high cholesterol is your concern, learn how cutting out one ingredient (you didn’t even know existed) can normalize your cholesterol levels within days…