Although consuming too much salt can wreck the heart health of some people, research shows that in many cases salt can help protect the body against disease.
A study at Universitätsklinikum Regensburg and Universität Regensburg in Germany, as well as at Vanderbilt University, shows that the salt in your food helps the immune system fight off invasive pathogens that can make you sick. Lab tests there show that after you eat salt, it can collect in skin cells and keep them from getting infected.
“Up to now, salt has been regarded as a detrimental dietary factor; it is clearly known to be detrimental for cardiovascular diseases, and recent studies have implicated a role in worsening autoimmune diseases,” says researcher Jonathan Jantsch, a microbiologist. “Our current study challenges this one-sided view and suggests that increasing salt accumulation at the site of infections might be an ancient strategy to ward off infections, long before antibiotics were invented.”
So, although eating voluminous amounts of salt in fast food can lead to sodium stored in the skin that increases your chances of high blood pressure (especially if you are a senior), a moderate amount of dietary salt seems to help fight off microbial infections.
“Despite the overwhelming evidence linking dietary salt to disease in humans, the potential evolutionary advantage of storing so much salt in the body has not been clear,” says researcher Jens Titze, who performs research on sodium at the Vanderbilt University School of Medicine.
Despite the newly discovered benefits of salt, these researchers still urge caution when deciding about how much salt to eat. “Due to the overwhelming clinical studies demonstrating that high dietary salt is detrimental to hypertension and cardiovascular diseases, we feel that at present our data does not justify recommendations on high dietary salt in the general population,” Jantsch says. “Nevertheless, in situations where endogenous accumulation of salt to sites of infection is insufficient, supplementation of salt might be a therapeutic option. But this needs to be addressed in further studies.”
