Using less salt in your food may seem boring, but the payoffs could be as big as a lowered risk of death, new research has found.

Using a salt substitute when cooking was linked with a lower risk of dying early from any cause or from cardiovascular disease in a new study published Monday in the journal Annals of Internal Medicine.

“We are excited to be able to provide evidence that salt substitutions are effective for improving cardiovascular outcomes when used long-term, up to 10 years,” said the study’s senior author Dr. Loai Albarqouni, an assistant professor at the Institute for Evidence-Based Healthcare at Bond University in Australia. “Previous synthesis tended to focus on short-term outcomes, lasting only two weeks.”