Salt Awareness Week: March 14-20, 2022

11 Mar 2022

Diets that are high in sodium increase the risk of strokes, heart attacks and premature death. Reducing salt intake is an evidence-based, cost-effective strategy to improve population health and promote longer, healthier lives.

Join us in commemorating Salt Awareness Week from March 14-20, 2022, with a global call-to-action to "Shake the Salt Habit!".

This year's Salt Awareness Week reinforces the urgent need to enact sodium reduction policies targeting the food industry. Three quarters of salt consumption comes from packaged and prepared foods. Simply encouraging people to eat less salt won't solve the problem, since the food industry is largely responsible for the addition of salt to the foods we eat. Following are various tools and resources you may find helpful in supporting this advocacy effort:

• The SHAKE Technical Package for Salt Reduction from the World Health Organization (WHO) is designed to assist countries with developing, implementing and monitoring salt reduction strategies to reduce population salt intake.
• WHO's Sodium Country Score Card regularly tracks countries' progress on legislation and other measures to reduce sodium intake.
• "Global Sodium Reduction Strategies" course from Johns Hopkins University is a nine-module online course to help policymakers design, plan and implement global sodium-reduction interventions in low- and middle-income countries.
• Resolve to Save Lives' (RTSL) Sodium Reduction Frameworksummarizes the recommended components of a comprehensive sodium reduction program, with examples of select model initiatives and implementation tools.
• RTSL's Sodium Reduction Resource Library features case studies, annotated bibliographies, advocacy tools and key background on sodium-reduction interventions.
• Video from RTSL's China office: "Nutritionists' View on the Right Way to Eat for a Stable Blood Pressure: Part 1 and Part 2", which provide culturally-relevant advice on promoting a low-sodium diet. Video is in Chinese with English subtitles.
• RTSL's communication cards, "Reducing Cardiovascular Disease through Salt Reduction," feature six strategies for successful population sodium reduction, which are available in English, Spanish and Chinese.