We’re always being told that too much salt is bad for us, but a new study has found that it may actually reduce tumor growth in mice.
The pro-inflammatory effects of salt
Knowing that inducing a pro-inflammatory state might be beneficial in helping cancer, researchers from the Flanders Institute of Biotechnology and the University of Hasselt in Belgium wanted to look at the effects of high salt intake on tumor growth. The hope was that immunotherapy that replicated high-salt intake might eventually help humans.
When the team replicated a high-salt environment in a cell-culture experiment, they discovered that the excess salt inhibited the function of myeloid-derived suppressor cells (MDSCs) in both mice and humans with cancer.
The function of MDSCs is to inhibit other immune cells. Once MDSCs were depleted, the researchers kept the high-salt environment and the other immune cells were able to attack the tumors.
In the mouse model, rodents with melanoma that consumed a high-salt diet showed “significantly inhibited tumor growth” when compared to a control group.
“Delayed tumor outgrowth was evident as early as day 11 post-inject,” write the researchers, “leading to significant differences in tumor size between both groups at day 13 [post-injection] and at the day of sacrifice.”
The same was found to be true in a mouse model of lung cancer.
More research needed
With 1,762,450 new cases of cancer being diagnosed in the United States by the end of the year (according to the American Cancer Society), this discovery on the benefits of high-salt diets to fight cancer is big news.
Still, more research needs to be done to ensure that the effects of high-salt intake will work on humans as well as it did on rodents.
“Future studies are needed to fully understand the effect and the detailed underlying molecular mechanisms behind to judge its therapeutic potential for anticancer immunotherapies,” explains Professor Markus Kleinewietfeld, head of the VIB-UHasselt lab.
In other words, don’t jump on the high-salt diet bandwagon quite yet.
