Men – you can
Scientists have found out who benefits from a low-salt diet
A diet with a small amount of salt turned out to be useful only for women, since excess salt in the body of men does not lead to the development of hypertension. This is written by doctors who published an article in the journal Hypertension (Faulkner et al., Lack of Suppression of Aldosterone Production Leads to Salt-Sensitive Hypertension in Female but Not Male Balb/C Mice).
"We fed mice a diet with a lot of salt for just a week, and during this time the pressure in their vessels increased by 10 millimeters of mercury, which is extremely dangerous from a medical point of view. It is important that this happened only among females, but not males," says Jessica Faulkner from Augusta University (in a press release New evidence that females might benefit most from a low–salt diet - VM).
According to WHO statistics, heart and vascular diseases, including heart attacks, strokes and chronic heart failure, have long been the main cause of death of people on a global level. About 17 million people die from them every year, and most of them have similar problems due to hypertension, consistently high blood pressure in blood vessels.
In recent years, many doctors and biologists have begun to pay attention to the fact that the use of large amounts of salt significantly increases the likelihood of developing heart and vascular diseases, as well as dementia and other forms of dementia in young and elderly people belonging to a variety of social strata.
Such discoveries, as Faulkner notes, made various diets containing minimal amounts of salt unusually popular. When scientists studied the consequences of the spread of such a fashion, new scandalous discussions broke out.
It turned out that in most cases, switching to such food did not reduce the pressure of fans of such a diet and did not protect them from the development of hypertension. Moreover, two years ago, scientists from Canada showed that this diet was dangerous for the health of most people, increasing rather than decreasing the likelihood of developing heart and vascular diseases.
Analyzing the results of such experiments, Faulkner and her colleagues noticed that the positive effects of this diet were more pronounced during those observations in which more women than men participated.
This led them to the idea that many negative results, and in particular the results of experiments on mice, where only males are usually used, may be due to the fact that salt affects the functioning of the vessels of men and women differently.
They tested this idea by purchasing several dozen mice of both sexes. Half of them were put on a regular diet by doctors, and others began to be fed very salty food, consisting of 4% salt.
During the first day of the experiment, as Faulkner notes, there were no serious differences between males and females, but after a week the situation changed dramatically. The pressure in the vessels of the latter increased by 10 millimeters of mercury, which increased the risk of hypertension and other heart diseases several times.
The reason for this was that the female body produces more aldosterone, a hormone that controls the rate of withdrawal of water and sodium from the body. As a rule, when large amounts of salt appear, its concentration in the blood drops, which causes the kidneys to "pump out" additional amounts of fluid and sodium from the bloodstream.
This mechanism, as scientists have discovered, works perfectly in the body of males, but for some reason it almost does not turn on in the body of females. Due to this, salt begins to accumulate in their body, which leads to a thickening of the walls of blood vessels and an increase in pressure.
Guided by this idea, Faulkner and her colleagues tried to remedy the situation using one of the popular diuretic medications. The health of the mice immediately improved, and after a few days their blood pressure returned to normal, despite the fact that they continued to eat a "harmful" diet.
Accordingly, all this suggests that low-salt diets will be useful only for women and a small group of men whose body reacts unusually poorly to changes in the concentration of aldosterone. And even they don't have to torture themselves in this way – a similar effect can be achieved if you just take drugs that suppress this hormone.
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