Will eating too much salt affect intelligence?

A friend told me: It is not good to eat too much salt, it will affect intelligence and make people more and more silly!

The basis for his persuasion came from a piece of news: American scientists published a mouse study from Weill Cornell School of Medicine in the British journal "Nature Neuroscience" on January 14, 2018. The study shows that a high-salt diet can cause cognitive deficits in the brain.

In the study, scientists fed mice with food containing 4% or 8% salt (equivalent to 8 to 16 times more salt than a normal healthy diet), and subsequently tested the mice with a maze, and concluded that a high-salt diet would affect brain health. It is because the intestine and the brain can communicate through the brain-gut axis, and regulate the development of the brain and change the behavior of the host.

Scientists have proved that it is justified and well-founded and absolutely credible. But the little friends don’t have to panic. First of all, the subject of this experiment is a white mouse, which has not been specifically studied in humans. Therefore, it is difficult to say how much salt the human body takes in order to cause unresponsiveness and mental retardation. Moreover, the amount of salt used in the experiment is 8 to 16 times more salt than a normal healthy diet. People who have multiple mouths in their lives will probably not consume so much salt.

However, it is true that long-term consumption of large amounts of salt affects health, mainly due to these hazards:

1. Excessive consumption of salt can easily lead to increased blood volume and increased lateral pressure on the blood vessel wall, leading to increased blood pressure and hardening of the blood vessels.

2. It can cause edema, eating too much salt, and making people feel thirsty. You need to drink a lot of water to relieve it. Long-term intake of a large amount of salt will cause swelling of the body and increase the burden on the kidneys.

3. Throat damage. After eating foods with high salt content, many people can obviously feel increased mucus in the throat and slurred throat.

4. When the skin is damaged and salt is consumed too much, due to the effect of osmotic pressure, the water content of the body tissues will decrease, and the water discharged from the body will increase, which is not conducive to the water retention of the skin.

5. Promoting gastric cancer. Compared with food with less salt, food with too much salt will reduce the viscosity of the protective mucus in the stomach, making it less protective of the stomach wall, and various harmful factors in the food are more likely to act on the stomach wall. , Which will promote the occurrence of a variety of stomach diseases.

6. Loss of calcium When the intake of sodium is too much, the body will work hard to excrete sodium, but at the same time it will increase the excretion of urinary calcium. For Chinese people whose calcium intake is already severely low, this is simply worsening the situation. Therefore, it is wise to follow the saying "Eating less salt equals more calcium" is often said by osteoporosis treatment doctors.

So friends who have a heavy taste, remember not to continue to consume high salt!