I'll take the liberty of going first, since that's how we've made the arrangements.
Thank you for inviting us. I'm a practising pediatric gastroenterologist at the Hospital for Sick Children, University of Toronto. My colleague Dr. Liu is an adult cardiologist at the University Health Network, University of Toronto. We are co-leading, together with multiple institutes of the Canadian Institutes of Health Research, a research agenda to support sodium reduction in Canada, which includes a workshop.
You all have the slides with you, so I'll just go through them.
We are holding a low-sodium workshop to look at this initiative during the third week in January in Toronto, to identify strengths, gaps, and opportunities in research capacity in Canada related to sodium reduction in the thematic areas of health, food science, knowledge to action, and evaluation and monitoring of any policy change in sodium content in foods.
We are identifying a research agenda for sodium reduction to support Health Canada's working group on sodium reduction, and we are identifying opportunities for international and global collaborations in this context, as well as engaging potential research funders to support this research agenda on sodium reduction.
The next slide shows a list of partners we've already engaged, including Health Canada, the Public Health Agency of Canada, Blood Pressure Canada, the Heart and Stroke Foundation of Canada, the Canadian Hypertension Education Program, the Kidney Foundation of Canada, and two national centres of excellence, including the Canadian Stroke Network and the Advanced Food and Materials Network.
As you know, there is a Sodium Working Group that is tasked with developing and implementing a program of lowering sodium content, with a three-pronged approach of education, voluntary reduction in sodium levels, and research. It's in the research aspect that Peter and I are involved.
As you know, and the next slide reinforces what you've already heard, most of the salt in Canadians' diet is actually in processed foods. The next slide shows factors associated with increased salt sensitivity, and these are populations of vulnerability. The next slide shows adverse effects of excess sodium intake, including heart disease, blood pressure, effects on bones, and an increased risk of cancer.
The next slide, which is titled “Excess salt stored in the skin stimulates, via macrophages, neolymphatics”, is to show to all of you that there are new advances in the control of sodium intake. Understanding basic biologic principles will have a major impact on the sodium in one's diet and on its impact on health, including blood pressure and cardiovascular disease. This fundamental advance was actually published in a medical journal in May 2009. So we know lots about sodium, but not everything that needs to be known.
On the next slide, it's important to note that sodium is involved in a variety of conditions, including stomach cancer, and there's strong mechanistic evidence that salt is a probable cause of stomach cancer.
I'm going to turn it over now to my colleague Dr. Liu.