Eating High Sodium Foods To Make Your Thinking Slow? This Is The Expert's Explanation

Illustration of sodium food (Castorly Stock / Pexels)

JAKARTA - Apart from sugar, salt is also relied on as a spice that can enhance the taste of food. If consumed in normal doses, this is fine. However, if excessive, it can potentially invite hypertension, even worse, it can interfere with brain function.

Launching from ABC.Net, Friday, March 5, the researchers found that salt can cause cognitive impairment in the mouse brain and this can also occur in humans. If you continue to consume large amounts of salt, it opens up opportunities to reduce brain function.

Costantino Iadecola, director of the Feil Family Brain and Mind Research Institute at Weill Cornell Medicine in New York, says that when researchers fed mice 8 to 16 times more salt than their normal intake, it didn't take long for researchers to observe the effect behavior in these mice.

"After about three months, the mice went crazy", said Dr. Iadecola. "Mice become very attractive, they gradually lose the ability to recognize normal objects".

“The mice also find it difficult to find a comfortable place to live in. They lost their nest-building abilities", continued Dr. Iadecola.

Research published in the journal Nature Neuroscience also shows that humans will experience a similar response if they eat foods with high sodium or salt levels.

According to available data, Australians tend to consume twice as much salt as the recommended daily portion. Most of your salt intake comes from processed food sources. Dr. Iadecola said the two teaspoons of salt that the average Australian eats each day can put you at risk of lowering brain function in the long run. Should, the maximum limit of salt intake in a person's body is only 1 teaspoon or the equivalent of 2,400mg per day.

However, the ability to think slowly may not be as fast as that seen in mice. "The effect is likely to be seen for years and maybe decades, compared to mice that are only a few months", said Dr. Iadecola.

Professor Bryce Vissel, director of the neuroscience center at the University of Technology Sydney also explained that high sodium consumption can lead to cognitive dysfunction. "This shows that salt causes profound immune changes in the gut so that the brain becomes autoimmune", he said.