Professor Graham MacGregor, authority on heart health who pressed the food industry to cut salt

Professor Graham MacGregor, who has died aged 84, took the food industry and governments to task for not doing enough to curb levels of salt in processed foods and drinks.

Beginning in 1996, MacGregor, an authority on cardiovascular medicine, led a campaign to persuade the government to agree strictly-monitored salt-reduction targets with the industry. The approach was taken up by the Food Standards Agency (FSA) and helped reduce average daily UK salt intakes by an estimated 11 per cent between 2005 and 2014.

He was, however, scathing about the “Responsibility Deal” launched in 2010 by the then Health Secretary Andrew Lansley, who declared: “No government campaign or programme can force people to make healthy choices. We want to free business from the burden of regulation.”

The new policy replaced the FSA’s regulatory role with a voluntary model – and progress stalled. Before the changes were introduced, salt intake was steadily falling every year by 0.2g for men and 0.12g a day for women. When the regulations were relaxed, this slowed to a decline of 0.11g a day for men and 0.07g for women.

MacGregor branded the deal as a “tragedy for public health” which had cost 6,000 lives because it delayed progress on the FSA’s previously successful programme. The policy was abandoned in 2015.

MacGregor’s research focused on hypertension (high blood pressure) and the role of diet, salt and potassium in cardiovascular health: “Salt draws water out of the body’s cells,” he explained in 2018. “So the more salt you eat, the more water is taken into the bloodstream, swelling the volume and increasing your blood pressure.

“Think of salt as you think of tobacco – except that salt is a bigger killer. Smoking kills seven million people globally every year, but high blood pressure kills 30 million… If you look at traditional communities that eat hardly any salt, they get no blood- pressure rise at all with age.”

In 2020 MacGregor co-wrote a review of the evidence that salty diets have many other consequences too, concluding that there was “clear evidence” that high salt intake is associated with conditions including kidney disease, kidney stones, stomach cancer and osteoporosis – even dementia.

MacGregor admitted that getting the message across was tricky because “salt is seen as a normal part of our diet … Every time you turn on the television there’s a chef adding salt – of course, they’re all salt addicts, they probably have high blood pressure. A lot of chefs have strokes.”

Graham Alexander MacGregor was born in St Albans on April 1 1941 to Alexander MacGregor and Sybil, née Hawkey. From Trinity Hall, Cambridge he trained in medicine and surgery at the Middlesex Hospital Medical School and later at Charing Cross Hospital where he was taught by the nephrologist Professor Hugh de Wardener.

MacGregor went on to become professor of cardiovascular medicine at St George’s, University of London in 1989, before appointment as professor of cardiovascular medicine at the Wolfson Institute at Queen Mary, University of London, in 2009.

In 1996 he founded Consensus Action on Salt and Health (now Action on Salt) and, in 2005, the international network World Action on Salt and Health. The salt-target approach he spearheaded in the UK provided a model for many other countries and he went on to extend his campaigning to sugar, founding Action on Sugar in 2014.

A founder member of the British Hypertension Society, in 2001 MacGregor set up Blood Pressure UK to improve information available to people living with hypertension, emphasising the need for regular blood pressure checks with a “Know Your Numbers” campaign.

As well as more than 500 scientific papers MacGregor published several low-salt cookbooks.

He was appointed CBE in 2019 and is survived by his wife Christiane and by two daughters and a son.

Professor Graham MacGregor, born April 1 1941, died September 1 2025

[Source: Daily Telegraph]