Eating less salt can reduce chance of heart disease by 25 per cent

The leader of the research team, Professor Nancy Cook, explains why the findings are significant.

"There have been a few studies that have looked at cardiovascular disease, but it's very difficult to measure sodium," she said.

"There are observational studies and some of them simply asked what people ate in the last 24 hours, that's not a very good measure of intake.

"What we've done is look at interventions which actually altered someone's sodium intake and see what impact that would have." SOURCE: © 2007 Australian Broadcasting Corporation