Just recently I was invited down to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in the United States, where they're restructuring how they deal with their health system and they're looking at the major risks to health in their population and how feasible it is to deal with them.
Number one, increased blood pressure is the leading risk for death in the world. That's from complex analyses done by the World Health Organization, and it relates to the fact that blood vessels are everywhere in your body and that increased blood pressure damages them.
The leading causes of death in our country are stroke and heart disease, and high blood pressure accounts for about 66% of strokes and about half of heart disease. The increase in blood pressure that we experience in our society is not experienced in primitive societies where they eat unprocessed foods, are lean, and are physically active. When we look at the different reasons for increased blood pressure, we see they relate to a number of dietary factors--high caloric intake, saturated fats, low calcium, low magnesium, low fibre--but in a large proportion, high dietary sodium is one of those big contributors.
As I indicated earlier, about 30% of hypertension in Canada, the clinical diagnosis, would be associated with high dietary sodium. When it's examined how much you're going to pay for how much you're going to get out of it, again, international analyses have suggested the most cost-effective way to improve the health of the population is to reduce dietary sodium. This includes reduction in tobacco smoking, which is viewed as highly cost effective. But reducing dietary sodium will get you more bang for your buck. That's why there's a focus on it.
That's not to suggest that other health issues are not critically important and shouldn't be dealt with. We do have Canada's guide to healthy eating, which indicates what we should be eating. Perhaps we need an overarching strategy on how we can get the Canadian population to eat that way, as opposed to just putting it out as a nice handout.