It's hard to imagine cutting out anything as small as a half-teaspoon of anything in your daily diet would make an impact on your health as great as reducing your risk of heart attack or even death. As we've observed time and again in this space, however, making the simplest changes -- like eating foods more slowly -- can have a huge impact on your health for the positive.

That's why we're far less skeptical than some of you may be about the impact of reducing your salt intake by just a half-teaspoon, based on the results culled from the Coronary Heart Disease Policy Model, a digital simulation of heart disease among adults used by scientists to predict the benefits derived from making changes to the collective diets of Americans.

Saving the lives of some 92,000 Americans and preventing nearly 100,000 heart attacks, merely by reducing one's salt intake by 3 grams isn't just the healthy thing to do (although it's comparable to the effect of quitting smoking). The projected savings to the nation's spiraling-out-of-control health care tab by reducing salt alone may save as much as $24 BILLION.

If you like to add salt liberally to your foods, this single change should be a fairly easy one to make. Making this change may be a bit tricky for some folks, however, who don't add salt to anything (that's me). For example, an average 14-ounce can of green beans contains nearly 1,300 mg of salt.

All the more reason for me and you to pay closer attention to nutritional labels, particularly the salt that hides in processed foods.

New England Journal of Medicine January 20, 2010 Free Full Text Study

EurekAlert January 20, 2010