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  How Excess Salt Intake Effects On Your Body

According to nutritionists, small amounts of salt on a daily basis is essential for cellular homeostasis and physiological function.

Salt works on your kidneys to make your body hold on to more water. This excess stored water increases blood pressure and puts strain on kidneys, arteries,heart and brain.

Kidneys

Your body removes unwanted fluid by filtering your blood through your kidneys.This unwanted fluid will be removed as urine. 

 In order, to perform this your kidneys uses osmosis which involves a delicate balance of sodium and potassium to draw the unwanted water out of your blood.

Eating excess salt raises the amount of sodium in your blood stream and damages the delicate balance of sodium and potassium, reduces the ability of your kidneys to remove the water. This finally results in a high blood pressure due to the extra fluid and extra strain on the delicate blood vessels leading to kidneys. Over time, this will leads to kidney damage.

Arteries

The high blood pressure which is caused by taking too much salt put extra strain on blood vessels. To cope up with the extra strain, the tiny muscles in the artery walls becomes stronger and thicker. This makes the space inside blood vessels smaller, and raises your blood pressure even higher.

This cycle of increasing blood pressure finally causes narrowing of blood vessels that clogs up slowly, this results in depriving of oxygen and nutrients to other organs which is fatal.

Heart

The raised blood pressure caused by eating too much of salt may damage the blood vessels of the heart.

At first, it may cause a slight reduction in the amount of blood reaching the heart. This may leads to angina (sharp pain in the chest). If you continue to eat too much salt, this leads to clogging up of arteries.

If this happens, then part of the heart that was receiving the blood no longer gets the required oxygen and nutrients. This results in heart attack.

Brain

Incase of  brain, high blood pressure causes slight reduction in the amount of blood reaching the brain. This leads to dementia (gradual decrease in ability to think and remember).

If you continue to eat too much of salt ,that causes clogging up of arteries which leads to brain.This finally results in brain stroke.

So the best way to prevent all this is, to keep your blood pressure low by taking less amount of salt.

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