Your brain on salt: here’s how salty snacks affect your cognition

Do you want to keep your brain sharp well into your senior years? Well, you might have to say goodbye to that happy meal in your younger years.

A pathbreaking new study has revealed how your salt consumption can affect the blood flow and neural activity in your brain.

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We know that our meals have a massive impact on all body functions. For this research, scientists focussed on salt because the body needs to control sodium levels very precisely.

So, whenever you consume salty food, the brain has to activate a series of compensatory mechanisms to bring sodium levels back down. For this, the body activates neurons that, in turn, help maintain the proper concentration of salt.

But scientists found that this process decreases the blood flow in your brain rather than increasing it, which is usually observed in people with Alzheimer’s disease, or a stroke.

Published in the journal Cell Reports, the team explains that if you regularly ingest too much salt, this may lead to hyperactivation of the neurons which could eventually lead to tissue damage in the brain.

Looking ahead, scientists hope to understand this process better and devise novel treatments to control this neural activation.

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