High-Salt Diet May Boost Immune Response: Study
LONDON: High-salt diet is bad for health, say numerous studies, but a significant research now reveals that dietary salt could have a biological advantage -- defending the body against invading bacteria.
They found that a high-salt diet increased sodium accumulation in the skin of mice, thereby boosting their immune response to a skin-infecting parasite.
The findings suggest that dietary salt could have therapeutic potential to promote host defence against microbial infections.
Till now, high-salt is clearly known to be detrimental for cardiovascular diseases and stroke.
"Our 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," explained first study author Jonathan Jantsch, microbiologist at Universitatsklinikum Regensburg and Universitat Regensburg in Germany.
A clue to this mystery came when the team noticed an unusually high amount of sodium in the infected skin of mice that had been bitten by cage mates.
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