Researchers have found that too much salty diet weakens the immune
system and makes combating bacterial infections more difficult for your body. The study team fed mice with a high-salt diet and found more serious bacterial infections for the results, published in the journal Science Translational Medicine. There were also marked immune deficiencies among human volunteers who ate an additional six grams of salt per day. The amount matches the salt content of two fast-food meals, the study said. Five grams a day, no more: This is the average amount of salt that should be eaten by adults according to World Health Organization (WHO) guidelines.
It corresponds roughly to a teaspoon point.
“For the first time now we have been able to prove that excessive salt consumption often significantly
weakens an essential arm of the immune system,” said study researcher Christian Kurts of Bonn University in Germany.
This result is surprising according to the researchers, as some studies point in the opposite direction.
“We have been able to demonstrate this with a listeria infection in mice,” said study lead author Katarzyna Jobin of the University of Würzburg.
“We had previously placed some of them on a high salt diet. We counted 100 to
1,000 times the amount of disease-causing pathogens in the spleen and liver of these animals,”