High-Salt Diet May Ward Off Infection and Invading Microbes

While too much salt may not be the best for your health, dietary salt could actually have some benefits. Scientists have discovered that dietary salt may be able to defend your body against invading microbes.

Eating too much salt in your diet can result in a higher risk of heart disease and stroke. In fact, large amounts of sodium stored in the skin, especially in order individuals, can lead to high blood pressure. In addition, a high-salt diet can also worsen autoimmune disease and even increase the risk of stomach cancer.

"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," said Jonathan Jantsch, first author of the new study, in a news release. "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."

In order to see whether salt could actually help ward off infection, the scientists turned to mice. The researchers noticed that there was an unusually high amount of sodium in the infected skin of mice that had been bitten by cage mates. Intrigued by this, the scientists examined the link between infection and salt accumulation in the skin.

The researchers found that infected areas in patients with bacterial skin infections also showed remarkably high salt accumulation. In addition, experiments in mice showed that a high-salt diet boosted the activity of immune cells called macrophages. That's not to say that you should switch to a high salt diet, though.

"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," said Jantsch. "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."

The findings are published in the journal Cell Metabolism.

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