Graham MacGregor: researcher and clinician whose dogged campaigning persuaded governments to lower salt levels in food

Graham MacGregor had three weapons in his campaign armoury: persistence, bloody mindedness, and charm, as he explained on the BBC Radio 4 programme The Life Scientific in 2017.

This three pronged strategy certainly paid off: MacGregor’s career long battle against salt (and later sugar) led to governments agreeing to limit levels in processed food and prevented thousands of people dying from strokes and heart disease.

Mark Caulfield, professor of clinical pharmacology at Queen Mary University of London and a close colleague, described MacGregor as a visionary. “Not that many clinicians are policy changers—for most researchers the metric is that we win grants and publish papers. Graham’s metric was how much he changed lives,” he said

MacGregor was working in the kidney unit at Charing Cross Hospital in the 1970s when he first noticed the association between salt consumption and blood pressure. But at a later high powered international meeting he was “incredibly surprised” when a Regis professor of medicine at Oxford University dismissed the idea that salt was harmful. He decided to conduct “a properly controlled study of modest salt restriction, because the previous studies had been with very severe salt reduction.”

“This was the first study that showed clearly that modest salt reduction—cutting it by half—had a big effect on lowering blood pressure,” MacGregor said.1

His findings were challenged …