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Rumor Refutation：Does Excessive Salt Intake Affect Intelligence?

 On January 14, 2018, American scientists published a mouse study from Weill Cornell Medicine in the UK-based journal Nature Neuroscience. The study indicated that a high-salt diet can induce cognitive impairments in the brain.

In the study, scientists fed mice with food containing 4% or 8% salt (equivalent to 8 to 16 times more salt than a normal healthy diet) and subsequently tested the mice in a maze. They concluded that a high-salt diet affects brain health because there is communication between the gut and the brain through the gut-brain axis, which regulates brain development and alters the host's behavior.

However, the subjects of this experiment were mice, and no specific studies have been conducted on humans yet. Therefore, there is currently no definitive scientific basis for determining the exact dosage of salt intake in humans that can cause phenomena such as slowed reaction times and decreased intelligence.

Furthermore, the amount of salt used in the experiment was 8 to 16 times more than a normal healthy diet, and presumably, no matter how much someone prefers salty food, they would not consume such a high amount of salt in their daily lives.

However, it is undeniable that consuming excessive salt over a long period of time poses adverse effects on health, mainly manifesting in the following hazards:

Excessive salt intake can easily lead to an increase in blood volume, thereby increasing the lateral pressure on the blood vessel walls, resulting in hypertension and potentially causing blood vessel sclerosis.

It can cause edema. Consuming too much salt can create a sensation of thirst, prompting individuals to drink large amounts of water to alleviate it. Long-term and excessive salt intake can result in body edema and simultaneously increase the burden on the kidneys.

It can harm the throat. After consuming food with high salt content, many people can clearly feel an increase in throat mucus and a sensation of throat congestion.

It can damage the skin. When salt intake is high, due to osmotic pressure, the water content in body tissues decreases, while the amount of water excreted from the body increases, which is detrimental to skin hydration.

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