Excessive consumption of salt can harm your health in many ways
We know that eating too much salt can raise blood pressure and increase risk for cardiovascular disease (CVD). But high sodium consumption could also adversely impact your immune system, according to a new study by an international research team.
The study published in Cell Metabolism reported that salt can disrupt the functioning of key immune regulators called regulatory T cells by impairing their energy metabolism. Also called Tregs, these cells ensure that your immune responses happen in a controlled way. When you eat too much salt, energy supply to these cells gets disrupted, which renders them dysfunctional for a while, they explained.
The research team, including scientists at the VIB Center for Inflammation Research and Hasselt University in Belgium and the Max Delbr ck Center in Germany, the findings may help in understanding the development for autoimmune and cardiovascular diseases.
In their previous study, the groups have found that a diet high in salt can disrupt the metabolism and energy balance in certain types of innate immune cells called monocytes and macrophages and prevent them from functioning properly. Additionally, they discovered that salt causes malfunctions in the mitochondria, the power plants of our cells.
These findings made the researchers wonder if excessive salt intake might elicit a similar problem in adaptive immune cells like regulatory T cells.
Regulatory T cells are important immune regulators that help keep the balance between normal function and unwanted excessive inflammation. Hence, they are also sometimes referred to as the "immune police." The deregulation of these cells has been linked to the development of autoimmune diseases like multiple sclerosis.
Now, they have discovered that too much salt also interferes with mitochondrial function of regulatory T cells. They believe that this may be a factor that leads to Treg dysfunction, which is linked to diseases such as cancer or cardiovascular disease.
However, they underscored the need to confirm this link in further studies.
Excessive consumption of salt can harm your health in many ways. For example,
How much salt you should consume daily? Not more than 5g, as per WHO recommendation. But most of us consume twice more than the recommended amount.
