The Secret Behind Salt and Hypertension
If you’re one of millions who scour the ingredient list of every item in the grocery aisles for the salt content before purchasing, science has uncovered a major clue behind the million dollar mystery of how salt raises our blood pressure and increases risk of heart attack and stroke.
For years many of us have trusted medical professionals when they’ve told us to avoid salt, especially if we have high blood pressure or hypertension. Have you, like me, secretly been wondering why salt is so dangerous? How could something as seemingly harmless as table salt lead to something as deadly as a heart attack?
Science is getting close to unraveling the mysterious connection between salt, hypertension and autoimmune disease — and it all lies right under our noses. That’s right, in our gut. It turns out salt can affect our immune system by changing the composition of the beneficial bacteria in our intestines, also termed our collective gut microbiome.
How Does Salt Alter Our Gut Bacteria?
Professor Dominik Müller of the Berlin Experimental and Clinical Research Center (ECRC) and the Berlin Institute of Health (BIH), is one of the first to study the effect salt has on our gut bacteria. He discovered standard table salt reduces the number of lactic acid bacteria, lactobacilli, a beneficial bacteria responsible for helping us break down food, absorb nutrients, and fight off “unfriendly” organisms that might cause disease.
Our immune system is very active in our gut. The billions of microbes in our gut are vital to us, not only to digest our food, but also protecting us from any harmful pathogens that we might come in contact with.
What’s the connection between our gut bacteria and hypertension and autoimmune disease? When our beneficial flora is weakened, in this case specifically the strain lactobaccilli, Professor Müller’s study showed this impacts our immune cells, specifically our Th 17 helper cells which play a major role in autoimmune diseases.
In a separate pilot study, 12 human test subjects were given six extra grams of salt every day for two weeks — roughly double their usual intake of salt. By the end of the two weeks, most of the lactobaccilli were no longer detectable! The salt had killed off a massive number of these vital beneficial flora in their gut. Their blood pressure had risen and the number of Th17 helper cells had increased.
What Can We Do To Protect Our Gut Flora?
In all the studies examining the harmful effects of salt they tested standard table salt — so this should be avoided. However, none of the studies looked at naturally sourced mineral sea salt compared to conventional table salt. Our microflora love minerals. Given the lower acid level of mineral sea salt, and the mineral content, this likely means it would be much safer and gentler on our delicate gut microbes.
In Müller study, lactobacilli were found to offset the harmful effects of table salt. Probiotics containing lactobacillus alleviated the symptoms of elevated blood pressure and increased Th17 helper cell immune response.
Does that mean we all need to start taking probiotics everyday? It couldn’t hurt. But we can also get lactobaccilli from raw, fermented foods such as sauerkraut, yogurt, and aged cheese. Some fermented vegetables like sauerkraut tend to have salt added as a preservative. Luckily, as this study suggests, the abundance of lactobaccilli in these products likely outweighs the negative repercussions of the added salt. Just be sure to check the labels to make sure it’s raw, unpasteurized, and not too high in table salt.
Research is now finding the microbiome may be at the root of many autoimmune diseases, such as multiple sclerosis and celiac disease. Scientific research has finally struck gold. In the not to far off future, doctors may be prescribing us a probiotic pill for just about any illness we may have.
We are entering an era where we can discover the health promoting or health disrupting properties of just about anything we encounter — food, medications, teas, chemicals, plants — all based on their effect on our commensal, a.k.a. healthy, bacteria in our guts.
With just a little base knowledge of the microbiome we can start to make educated decisions for ourselves and our families, and feel more confident in our food choices than ever before.
Citation:
Max Delbrück Center for Molecular Medicine in the Helmholtz Association. (2017, November 15). Gut bacteria are sensitive to salt: Link to autoimmune disease and hypertension. ScienceDaily. Retrieved August 1, 2018 from www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2017/11/171115131251.htm
