Joel Tan🔸 comments on Deep Report on Hypertension

[Joel Tan🔸]

The thing is that potassium salt (or mixed sodium/​potassium salts) are available in rich country; it’s really just a matter of uptake. Consumers might not know or think much about the health aspects of things; they might not be price sensitivity; and even “double” is an off the cuff estimate by the expert, and it probably depends on country and location (e.g. f I check Walmart’s e-commerce website, Morton’s potassium salt is 10x as expensive as normal salt).

So it goes back to policy, and whether governments should just regulate sodium content even in salt—we didn’t really explore this, given the higher evidence base and cheapness of salt policies.

[Mart_Korz]

That makes a lot of sense!

Consumers might not know or think much about the health aspects of things

This describes me quite well in many of my health choices, and unfortunately this is apparently really common.

potassium salt is 10x as expensive as normal salt

In my case, I also did not find salt that is pre-mixed at a price that makes sense to me—I bought a pharma-grade bag of KCl and mixed it with usual table salt myself^[1], which resulted in a net-price that is 3x of the usual sodium salt.

So it goes back to policy, and whether governments should just regulate sodium content even in salt—we didn’t really explore this, given the higher evidence base and cheapness of salt policies.

That sounds very reasonable—I’ll be looking forward to hearing about updates in the future!

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1. ↩︎

   with the hope that diluting by ¹⁄₃ will not be too much for the anti-hygroscopic components of the store-bought table salt