How Many People Die From Eating Too Much Salt?
Too much salt is linked to around 1.9 million deaths a year, about 5,200 a day, mostly from heart attacks and strokes. Where the salt hides and what to do.
Picture a perfectly ordinary weekday of food. Toast and butter for breakfast. A ham sandwich and a packet of crisps at lunch. A ready-made pasta sauce for dinner, with some cheese grated on top and a slice of garlic bread on the side. Nothing in that list feels salty. Nobody reached for the salt shaker once.
And yet by bedtime, that day of eating could easily contain around 9 or 10 grams of salt, close to double what the World Health Organization recommends. Most of it was baked into the bread, cured into the ham, stirred into the sauce and sprinkled over the crisps long before the food reached the plate.
Salt does not kill quickly, and it never appears on a death certificate. But over decades, it pushes up blood pressure, and high blood pressure is the biggest single risk factor for death on earth.
The headline number
The World Health Organization's first global report on sodium intake, published in 2023, estimated that high sodium consumption is associated with around 1.89 million deaths every year. That works out to roughly 5,180 deaths a day, or more than three every minute. You can see how that fits into the roughly 62 million deaths a year worldwide on our live death counter.
| Time period | Deaths linked to high salt intake (approx.) |
|---|---|
| Per minute | 3.6 |
| Per hour | 216 |
| Per day | 5,180 |
| Per week | 36,300 |
| Per month | 157,500 |
| Per year | 1,890,000 |
Some estimates go higher. The Global Burden of Disease diet study, published in The Lancet in 2019, put deaths linked to high sodium at around 3 million a year, making it the single biggest dietary risk factor in the world, ahead of low wholegrain intake and low fruit intake. The two numbers differ because they use slightly different methods and data, but they agree on the main point: salt is one of the deadliest things in the modern diet.
How salt kills
Salt is sodium chloride, and our bodies need a small amount of sodium to work. The problem is the amount most of us eat.
When you eat too much sodium, your body holds on to extra water to dilute it. That extra fluid increases the volume of blood in your arteries, and over years it raises your blood pressure. High blood pressure strains and damages the walls of your arteries, your heart, your kidneys and your brain.
| What high salt does | What it can lead to |
|---|---|
| Raises blood pressure | Heart attack, heart failure |
| Damages small blood vessels in the brain | Stroke, vascular dementia |
| Strains the kidneys | Chronic kidney disease |
| Irritates the stomach lining | Higher risk of stomach cancer |
| Makes the heart work harder | Thickened heart muscle, irregular rhythms |
Almost all salt deaths are really cardiovascular deaths: heart attacks and strokes that would have happened later, or not at all, at a lower blood pressure. That is why cardiovascular disease, which kills around 18.6 million people a year, dominates every list of the world's biggest killers. We explain why in why cardiovascular disease kills more than everything else, and look at its main driver in how many people die from high blood pressure every day.
How much salt we eat versus how much we should
WHO recommends that adults eat less than 5 grams of salt a day, which is just under a level teaspoon. The UK's recommendation is a little higher, at no more than 6 grams.
Almost nobody manages that.
| Population | Average salt intake per day | Source |
|---|---|---|
| World average | ~10.8 g | WHO global sodium report (2023) |
| WHO recommended maximum | Under 5 g | WHO |
| UK recommended maximum | 6 g | NHS |
| Adults in England | ~8.4 g | National Diet and Nutrition Survey |
| Adults in China | Among the highest in the world, often above 10 g | Multiple national surveys |
| Adults in Japan | ~10 g | Japanese national nutrition surveys |
The world as a whole eats more than double the recommended amount. WHO's 2023 report found that the global target of cutting average intake by 30% by 2025 was badly off track, and that only a small handful of countries had a comprehensive set of policies to reduce salt in food.
Where the salt actually comes from
Most people think of salt as something they add. In practice, in countries like the UK and the US, around three quarters of the salt we eat is already in the food when we buy it.
| Food (typical UK serving) | Approx. salt |
|---|---|
| Two slices of bread | 0.8 to 1.0 g |
| One bowl of cornflakes | 0.4 to 0.6 g |
| Two rashers of bacon | 1.5 to 2.5 g |
| A ham sandwich | 2.0 to 3.0 g |
| A ready meal | 2.0 to 4.0 g |
| A takeaway pizza (whole) | 5.0 to 8.0 g |
| A tablespoon of soy sauce | 2.5 to 3.0 g |
| A packet of ready salted crisps | 0.3 to 0.5 g |
These are rough ranges; brands vary widely. Bread is one of the biggest single sources in the British diet, not because it is especially salty, but because we eat so much of it. Processed meat, cheese, sauces, soups and takeaway food make up most of the rest.
In East Asia the picture is different. In China and Japan, a much larger share of salt comes from what is added during cooking and at the table, especially soy sauce, pickles, fish sauce and salted condiments. That difference matters, because it means the solutions are different too. A rule on bread recipes will help a lot in Britain. A low-sodium salt substitute in the kitchen will help a lot more in rural China.
The countries that cut salt, and what happened
The most encouraging part of this story is that salt reduction works, and it works at the scale of entire countries.
The UK was one of the first to try. From 2003, the Food Standards Agency ran a public awareness campaign and set voluntary salt reduction targets for food manufacturers across dozens of product categories. Bread, breakfast cereals, sauces and ready meals were slowly reformulated. Most people never noticed, because taste buds adapt when salt is reduced gradually.
| UK salt reduction programme | Result |
|---|---|
| Average salt intake, 2003 | ~9.5 g a day |
| Average salt intake, 2011 | ~8.1 g a day |
| Fall in intake | ~15% |
| Change in average blood pressure | Fell over the same period |
| Stroke and heart disease deaths | Fell by around 40% over the period (many causes, salt a significant contributor) |
A study published in BMJ Open in 2014 linked the fall in salt intake to part of the large drop in stroke and heart disease deaths in England over that decade, alongside falling smoking rates and better treatment. Progress has since stalled, as the voluntary targets lost momentum, which is why health researchers have called for them to be made mandatory.
Finland went further, earlier. From the late 1970s, it combined public campaigns, mandatory warning labels on high-salt foods and close work with food companies. Salt intake dropped by roughly a third, and Finland saw some of the largest falls in heart disease and stroke deaths ever recorded in any country, although smoking cuts and dietary changes played a big part too.
Japan offers an older lesson. In the 1960s, northern Japan had some of the highest salt intakes and stroke death rates in the world. A national campaign to cut salt, especially in pickled and preserved foods, helped bring both down sharply, and was part of the story behind Japan's remarkable lifespans, which we look at in Japan's secret to living past 100.
The salt substitute trial
One of the most important pieces of evidence in recent years came from rural China. The Salt Substitute and Stroke Study, published in the New England Journal of Medicine in 2021, gave around 21,000 people in 600 villages either regular salt or a substitute made of 75% sodium chloride and 25% potassium chloride, which tastes almost the same.
| Outcome over around 5 years | Effect of switching to salt substitute |
|---|---|
| Stroke | About 14% lower |
| Major heart events | About 13% lower |
| Death from any cause | About 12% lower |
That is an enormous effect from something as simple as changing what is in the salt pot, and the substitute was cheap. WHO has since recommended lower-sodium salt substitutes for adults, although people with kidney disease or on certain medicines should check with a doctor first, because extra potassium can be dangerous for them.
Who is most at risk
Everyone benefits from eating less salt, but some people are more sensitive to it than others.
| Group | Why salt matters more |
|---|---|
| People with high blood pressure | Salt has a bigger effect on their readings |
| Older adults | Blood pressure becomes more salt-sensitive with age |
| People of Black African and Caribbean descent | Higher average salt sensitivity and higher rates of high blood pressure |
| People with kidney disease | Kidneys struggle to clear excess sodium |
| People with type 2 diabetes | Higher cardiovascular risk overall |
The deaths themselves fall mostly in middle and later life, in the 50 to 69 and 70 to 84 age groups, but the damage builds up over decades. A child who grows up eating salty food is likely to keep doing so as an adult.
How to eat less salt without noticing
You do not need to give up flavour. Small swaps add up surprisingly fast.
- Check the label. In the UK, more than 1.5 g of salt per 100 g counts as high; 0.3 g or less counts as low. Traffic light labels make this easy.
- Cook from scratch a bit more often. Ready meals and takeaways are among the biggest sources.
- Taste before you add salt. Many people salt food out of habit.
- Use herbs, spices, garlic, lemon and black pepper for flavour instead.
- Go easy on processed meat, cheese and stock cubes. They are dense sources of salt.
- Give your taste buds time. After a few weeks of eating less salt, food that once tasted normal starts to taste too salty.
If you want to see how diet and other habits stack up against each other, read the habits that add the most years to your life and ultra-processed food and death, or plug your own habits into the risk calculator.
While you were reading this
You have spent about 12 minutes with this article. In that time, roughly 62 deaths around the world have been linked to eating too much salt. Almost all of them were heart attacks and strokes, and almost none of them will ever be recorded as a salt death. The salt that contributed to them was mostly invisible: baked into bread, cured into meat and stirred into sauces years and decades earlier.
You can watch the full picture of global deaths on our live death counter and see the biggest killers on the deaths today page. Few risks on this site are as quiet as salt, and few are as easy to turn down.
Data sources: World Health Organization (Global report on sodium intake reduction, 2023; WHO salt and sodium fact sheets; WHO guideline on lower-sodium salt substitutes), GBD 2017 Diet Collaborators (The Lancet, 2019), Neal et al. (New England Journal of Medicine, 2021), He et al. (BMJ Open, 2014), National Diet and Nutrition Survey, NHS. Figures are rounded and represent the most recent available estimates; daily and hourly figures are derived from annual totals. Food salt values are typical ranges and vary by brand. This article is for informational purposes only and does not constitute medical advice. If you have high blood pressure or kidney disease, speak to your doctor before changing your diet or using salt substitutes.
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