In 1994 a report by the government’s Committee on Medical Aspects of Food and Nutrition Policy recommended a significant reduction in the consumption of sugar and fat, and insisted that average daily salt intake be reduced by a third across the British population. The government’s chief medical officer accepted the majority of the report’s findings, but refused to endorse any of its recommendations pertaining to salt.
When this news reached Graham MacGregor, then a professor of cardiovascular medicine at St George’s Hospital Medical School, he was appalled. The chief medical officer’s exclusion was not simply misguided; it seemed to prove that the government had succumbed to pressure from food industry lobbyists.
This was not without precedent. Ten years earlier, a Sunday Times exposé revealed that the Department of Health had suppressed a similar report on the unhealthiness of the average British diet. This too recommended big reductions of salt intake but was never officially published. “The food industry walks all over us,” MacGregor protested. “It is seen as untouchable.”
In response to the government verdict on the 1994 report, MacGregor launched Consensus Action on Salt and Health (later Action on Salt), a research and advocacy charity with a goal of reducing the country’s average personal salt intake from nine grams a day to six. The potential benefits of such a change were, in MacGregor’s view, obvious. Hypertension, or high blood pressure, remains a leading cause of death, precipitating strokes, heart attacks, renal disease and a host of other conditions, but — as MacGregor became accustomed to explaining — it can be reduced simply by limiting salt intake. “We’ve got all the epidemiology, migration studies, treatment trials, mortality trials and now outcome trials,” MacGregor told The Guardian. “If you look at the totality of the evidence on salt, it is much stronger than for sugar or saturated fat.”
