I'm Dr. Norm Campbell, the president of Blood Pressure Canada. Blood Pressure Canada is a coalition of 29 national organizations dedicated to the prevention and control of hypertension in Canada.
My colleague, Dr. Kevin Willis, is with the Canadian Stroke Network. The Canadian Stroke Network is one of the more important partners of Blood Pressure Canada in the effort to reduce dietary sodium.
If one looks at World Health Organization reports, one will see that they believe elevated blood pressure is the leading risk for premature death in the world. Elevated blood pressure damages the blood vessels and causes strokes, heart attacks, heart failure, kidney failure, and other blood vessel damage such as dementia. In Canada, approximately one in four Canadian adults has hypertension and 90% of us are estimated to develop hypertension within our life spans.
Importantly, hypertension, or increased blood pressure, is preventable. One of the major factors in increasing blood pressure as we age is high dietary sodium. In Canada, it's estimated that Canadian adults are consuming around 3,500 milligrams of sodium per day. Most of this is added to our diets in the processing of foods.
We have done some analyses. About three in 10 Canadians with elevated blood pressure have high blood pressure because of high dietary sodium. This translates to between one million and two million Canadians with high blood pressure who would have normal blood pressure otherwise. That's estimated to contribute to about 10% of the cardiac and stroke events that occur in our country.
The cost savings of reducing dietary sodium from its current 3,500 milligrams today down to levels that are recommended, which is around 1,700 milligrams per day, would save the health care system about $400 million to $500 million per year in direct hypertension costs and about $2 billion per year if one takes into account the reduction in cardiovascular events that would occur.
From our organization's perspective, about 75% to 80% of the sodium in the diet is coming from the processing of foods. Therefore, we believe that strong government action and resources are required to address this issue, in particular by setting targets and timelines for food categories to reduce dietary sodium, with close government monitoring, such that Canadians are eating a healthy quantity of dietary sodium.
This should be supplemented by secondary activities such as regulations to facilitate reduction in dietary sodium that may enhance industry compliance, education of Canadians, and addressing certain research needs to evaluate the success of the program in particular, but also the challenges faced in reducing dietary sodium.
I'll end my comments at that. Thank you.