I will continue to the next slide, which is on global perspectives. It indicates that the actions we take today come from research knowledge to date. In regard to reducing salt intake in populations, there is strong evidence that salt consumption is linked with several chronic diseases—obviously hypertension and heart disease, as we heard earlier. Any intervention to reduce population-wide salt intake can actually be highly cost-effective, as illustrated in other countries. There's an urgency to implement the sodium reduction strategies here in Canada, and we need to look for opportunities to be innovative in this type of setting.
If we go to the next slide, in terms of international perspectives, I think this group already heard that the U.K. has aggressively pursued sodium reduction by setting targets through their publication and also setting up an agency to reduce sodium in the population. In 2008, the Institute of Medicine from the U.S. convened a committee on strategies to reduce sodium intake involving various partners, including food manufacturers, the government, and public health professionals. Most impressively, over the past 30 years in Finland, a one-third reduction in average salt intake was accompanied by a greater than 10-millimetre fall in terms of blood pressure in the population and a 75% decrease in stroke and heart mortality.
Indeed, the data to date on the next slide suggest that the relationship between sodium intake and blood pressure is a progressive and continuous one without an apparent threshold. The next slide shows the long-term effect of reducing sodium intake on cardiovascular disease, but I think this committee is familiar with some of this data, and that reducing sodium in the various contexts has been consistently able to reduce blood pressure. Indeed, each millimetre of blood pressure reduction translates into a 2% reduction in the death rate. This is very impressive.
In terms of supporting the effort in the sodium reduction policy working group, we also proposed in our workshop to monitor the effectiveness of sodium reduction as it is taking place. And the parameters that will need to be monitored included the effectiveness of public education programs in samples of the population, and in terms of a sodium content reduction in the various food categories over time, and also sampling of the total sodium intake in the population, and also sampling of urinary sodium excretion in samples, as we heard earlier.
With that, I'd like to thank the committee for the opportunity to present our research agenda to support sodium reduction efforts.