the problem with most diet tips is, either they're hype and don't really work, or they are effective
but they require a lot of change and time. but there is one tweak that comes close to being
the perfect hack. this one change delivers a health improvement almost overnight, it
doesn't require any extra work, no sacrifice, you don't have to give up any of the foods you love
and it's completely science-based. i'm talking about potassium chloride, and in this video
we're going to look at exactly what it does, the science behind it, the benefits and where to get
it. 30 years ago, a team of scientists was looking for a way to measure the main causes of disease
and death throughout the world. that effort has now grown to an international collaboration
involving more than 7,000 researchers in over 150 countries. it's called the global burden of
disease. their latest report looked at dietary risk factors and found that an excess of sodium
(salt, basically) was among the top three causes of death and disease globally. the other two were low
intake of whole grains and fruit. so what is it about sodium, or salt, that makes it so problematic?
the more sodium in our bodies, the more our kidneys retain water, and that increases the volume inside
our blood vessels, which raises blood pressure, pressure on the artery walls, which means more
stress on the heart to pump blood. over time, this can raise risk of cardiovascular disease,
like heart attacks and strokes. and in fact, studies indicate that people who moderate their sodium
intake go on to have lower risk of cardiovascular disease. high sodium intake may also raise the risk
of kidney disease, osteoporosis and stomach cancer. okay, so that's easy, right? just tell people to go
easy on the salt! easier said than done, because eating salty food builds a habit over time
and increases our preference for it. this is known as desensitization: repeated exposure to a stimulus
leading to larger and larger stimuli being necessary to achieve the same sensation. our
society has essentially become a mega experiment in salt desensitization. now, fortunately this goes
both ways, reducing salt intensifies the taste of salt and we start preferring less salty foods. i've
experienced this first hand, but it does take some persistence at first, it takes a while, and most
people are just not into changing the taste of their food, so it's a big ask after 40 or 50 years
of eating a certain way. in a perfect world, we would just find something that makes food salty
but doesn't raise blood pressure. come on, scientists! turns out we have something
even better: potassium chloride. it tastes salty and not only does it not raise blood pressure,
it actually helps lower it. potassium helps the body excrete sodium and it can also relax the
blood vessel walls directly. alright, this seems a little too good to be true, does this really work? a
large randomized trial was just published last year looking at 21,000 people over five years
what they did was very ingenious: they replaced people's salt to be lower in sodium and higher
in potassium. they called it the Salt Substitute and Stroke Study, or SSaSS, because scientists
always have to try to be cute. people eating the salt lower in sodium had 14% less strokes
and less cardiovascular events in general and even 12% lower risk of dying, period. if
those numbers don't seem huge to you, consider this, only 25% of the sodium was replaced. the salt
in the intervention group, the ones that got their salt swapped, was 75% sodium chloride, normal salt
and 25% potassium chloride. and the control group just kept eating the run-of-the-mill salt with
100% sodium chloride. and they estimated the changes in intake of sodium and it was lower, there was a
significant reduction, but not huge, so this was a very partial change, and it was only a five-year
window in people's lives after decades of eating more sodium. if the salt was 50% sodium, or 0%
sodium, and if this was a very long-term change, maybe lifelong, potentially we could see
an even stronger effect. the other thing to bear in mind is, in this type of trial you usually look
at an older population with risk factors, in this case they were over 60 and had either high blood
pressure or a history of stroke, because if you start with healthy 25 year-olds and you follow
them for five years, you're basically going to have zero death and zero strokes so you're
not going to be able to see a relative benefit of anything, so it's good to bear in mind that context
and the population they're looking at. all of that said, i was pretty impressed with the results
because they don't change anything else about the diet, they didn't make them exercise more
or smoke less, they just swapped the type of salt, and it's still salty, and yet they reduced their
overall risk of death. that's pretty impressive in my book. and other results support this, for
example, looking at regular intake patterns across the US, people eating the most sodium tend to have
higher risk of dying, whereas higher potassium intake is associated with lower mortality. so
when i saw these results i got some potassium salt for my mother, because she has high blood pressure
every video now seems to be about my mom. i'm such a mama's boy. she actually reduced her intake of
salt drastically, because she ate very salty foods her whole life, but some foods are really hard
chloride at health stores and i also found a few on amazon, here's one, they have different prices
cheapest one i saw comes down to three bucks per unit, per package, if there's another one you like
or a cheaper one you know, please share in the comments. i also found different concentrations
for sale, this one is 50-50 sodium and potassium, and they charge 15 bucks for two packs which is
expensive, but somebody in the comments says it's two bucks a pack at walmart, so there you go, shop
around. and this one sounds like it's 25% sodium 75% potassium, so no lack of options. i also found
this salt substitute, which sounds like it's made with nutritional yeast extract and some vegetables
and herbs and it doesn't contain any sodium or potassium, so that's another option out there
now, it's good to know that fruits and vegetables are naturally high in potassium and low in sodium
so a diet rich in those and easy on processed foods is very effective at lowering blood pressure
and it gives you a bunch of additional benefits, but in this video we're focusing on the the hack,
getting benefits with no change, no effort, and that's the potassium salt. in terms of
flavor, i don't notice a difference to be honest, it just tastes salty to me, but i'm not that finicky
with food, so take it with a grain of salt. if you do notice a difference, and you don't like it,
you could try one of the mixes we looked at, the 50-50 or the 75-25, or you can buy the pure
potassium chloride and mix with regular salt in any proportion you like, that's another advantage
of this hack, it's completely fine-tunable to your needs, so if your blood pressure is really high, you
might want to go with pure potassium chloride and really slam it down, if your blood pressure
is golden, you have a lot more wiggle room. nothing like flexibility. now, is it possible to go too far
and get too little salt? having low sodium levels in our body is called hyponatremia, it's not common
in western countries because there's so much added salt to foods, and also a lot of foods contain
sodium naturally, but it can sometimes happen for example in the elderly with specific health
conditions. also, some athletes who sweat for hours a day can lose a lot of sodium through their sweat
that's why you see them drink those electrolyte drinks like gatorade. now, there's some controversy
online over whether getting too little salt in our diet can be sub-optimal, you may have heard about
this, we're actually working on a detailed video on that topic but that's going to require going over
a few dozen studies to really explain it well, but bottom line, let's make this very clear, for the
vast majority of westerners, the risk is too much salt, not too little, so our priority as a society
is to find ways to reduce it. another important thing to mention is that most of the salt in our
diet, about 77%, comes from processed foods and from eating out, so if you're trying to lower
your blood pressure and you cut back a little on the added salt at the table but your diet contains
a fair amount of processed foods, like crackers, frozen pizza, canned stuff, breads, chips, salty
snacks, you may not see a big difference just by moderating the added salt at the table, so that's
good to bear in mind. there are some ways to get around this, like breads with reduced salt or no
salt added for sale and unsalted nuts for snacks, for example. so that's the closest i've seen to a
real diet hack, a change many people might not even notice, and yet real health benefits, no
hype. here, why not try an experiment? swap the salt for somebody you live with and see if they notice
and definitely share the results with us. i'll catch you on the next one, stay healthy