Salt is widely used as a seasoning in our everyday food. It is sometimes used to preserve food. The American Heart Association advises eating less than 2,300 milligrams of salt daily. Eating salt in moderation is good for the muscles and the nerves.
However, eating too much salt is linked to several diseases, such as obesity, high blood pressure, and kidney damage. High salt consumption can also lower your energy production.
The human gut is home to trillions of microorganisms: bacteria, fungi and viruses that together form a complex community known as gut microbiota (also sometimes called the microbiome). Your gut microbiota helps keep your immune system healthy and improves food digestion.
What you may not know is that eating too much salt can rearrange the bacteria living in your gut, which can negatively affect your food digestion and overall health. Our research team recently found that a high-salt diet can throw off the balance and lower the microbial diversity—the different kinds of microorganisms in your digestive tract—that keeps you healthy.
Most of your gut bacteria have different pumps on the surface of their cells that perform multiple functions. One of the pumps is responsible for taking up sugar into the cell of the bacteria to produce energy. We found that eating too much salt lowers the presence of sugar uptake pump in the gut bacteria. When this happens, the bacteria cannot gather the sugar into their cells to generate energy. As a result, they no longer function well. Turning off the sugar uptake pump could also cause your gut bacteria to produce “bad” chemicals called byproducts, which can make you sick. For example, if the sugar pump in certain gut bacteria is turned off, these microbes make fewer short-chain fatty acids (compounds that calm the immune system). Without enough of these fatty acids, the immune system can go into overdrive, increasing blood pressure and even triggering gut inflammation.
So, the next time you start to salt your food, think about the bacteria in your gut. And maybe put down the salt shaker.
Wisdom Ahlidja is a PhD candidate in the Molecular Medicine track at the Department of Physiology and Pharmacology at the University of Toledo. His research focuses on the role of gut microbiota in the regulation of hypertension.
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That’s a wonderful piece
It’s surprising how something as common as excess salt can disrupt the balance of our gut microbiome, reduce beneficial bacteria, and even affect digestion, inflammation, and immune health. Definitely makes me think twice before adding extra salt to my meals