Switch the salt to save your heart

Catalyst Partnership Grants

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Same taste. Better health.

Australians are eating too much salt, and it’s silently harming their hearts.

Potassium-enriched salt looks, tastes, and cooks the same, but helps lower blood pressure and protect heart health.

Switch the salt to save your heart

Switching the regular salt we eat for a potassium-enriched salt could help prevent thousands of heart attacks, strokes, and deaths every year.

What is potassium-enriched salt?

Eating too much salt raises blood pressure and shortens lives. Potassium-enriched salt is a practical, scalable approach to lowering blood pressure.

Problem

Australia’s health is in a salty state

Excess sodium intake (from salt) is one of the most significant and modifiable contributors to high blood pressure – Australia’s leading cause of death and disability. Around 1 in 3 adults in Australia has high blood pressure (hypertension).

Despite decades of public health interventions aimed at reducing population salt intake, most people in Australia continue to consume salt at consistently high levels. Most of our salt comes from processed foods, and efforts to cut salt have had limited impact. The food industry resists change that alters flavour, and consumers are reluctant to compromise on taste. Medicines for hypertension only reach a portion of those affected, and lifestyle advice alone hasn’t worked.

Current efforts have largely focused on reducing sodium intake through education and reformulation. However, these strategies have failed to produce meaningful, sustained change at a population level. A more practical, scalable, and acceptable solution is urgently needed.

Solution

Switching is better than cutting the salt

Strategies that rely on individuals or industry to reduce salt have repeatedly been proven ineffective. Instead, this initiative proposes a practical, scalable, and high-impact alternative: switching from regular salt to potassium-enriched salt.

Potassium-enriched salt is a heart-healthier alternative to regular salt. It tastes and looks the same but replaces some of the harmful sodium with beneficial potassium, a mineral most Australians don’t get enough of.

Potassium-enriched salt:

lowers blood pressure by both reducing sodium and increasing potassium
can be adopted across sectors – at home, in food manufacturing and restaurants
requires minimal changes to consumer behaviour
is already available in supermarkets across Australia and over 50 countries globally

This project aims to accelerate a national salt supply transformation, increasing the availability, affordability, awareness, and acceptability of potassium-enriched salt.

Impact

A simple switch with life-saving power

Switching Australia’s salt supply to potassium-enriched salt presents a rare opportunity to deliver substantial health and economic gains through a simple, population-wide intervention. This initiative is projected to prevent around 3,000 deaths and 9,000 cardiovascular events annually, while reducing health inequities and easing the burden on the healthcare system. By embedding this switch across homes, healthcare settings, and the food industry, the benefits will reach all people living in Australia regardless of age, background, and whether or not they’ve been diagnosed with hypertension.

Australia was a global leader in the successful transition to iodised salt – a move that prevented millions of cases of iodine deficiency worldwide. We now have the chance to lead another transformative public health shift, this time for heart health.

Backed by strong clinical evidence and consumer acceptability trials, this initiative has the potential to become Australia’s next major public health success – and a global model for cardiovascular disease prevention.