University of Regensburg in Germany says Salt heals cuts - How to Add Salt to alcohol bandages to increase healing

“Up to now, salt has been regarded as a detrimental dietary factor. Our current study challenges this one-sided view and suggests that increasing salt accumulation at the site of infections might be an ancient strategy to ward off infections, long before antibiotics were invented”

Dr. Jonathan Jantsch, a microbiologist at Universitätsklinikum Regensburg and Universität Regensburg commenting on his research that suggests that Salt helps the body fight infection

I am now thoroughly confused on what Scientists think about salt.

Turns out that salt may actually good for fighting infections, at least according to a study by Dr. Jonathan Jantsch and his research team from the University of Regensburg in Germany as stated in the article “The Weird Benefit of Eating Salty Food”, published March 3, 2015 by Alice Park, Time.

This latest bit of research, published in the journal Cell Metabolism, runs counter to a study done by Professor of Nutrition and Epidemiology at Harvard, Dr. Frank Hu.

In that study, published in the Journal of Nutrition, he posited that women who ate instant Noodles twice a week were at a 68% risk of basically getting fat and having high cholesterol and Hypertension as detailed in my blog article entitled “Cooking gone wrong at MICO – Harvard Study links Instant Ramen Noodles to Metabolic Syndrome despite being So Delicious”.

That Harvard University Study was really focused on the use of preservatives and MSG (Monosodium Glucomate) that can in the little sachet in these dehydrated packets of Noodles. I personally know of salt being used as a preservative for some foods, including salted fish and salted pork.

Sodium chloride is a listed ingredient for Ramen soups also so they're not off the hook totally and neither am I, as I eat them regularly while studying and doing homework for my Diploma in Professional Studies in Teaching at the MICO University College in the evenings.

So does this latest study means you can stock on all the noodles you can eat? Not really.

Salt and Healing – Bacteriophages get a boost from High Salt concentration in their diet

First thing to get out of the way is that this does not mean salt is safe, neither does it invalidate years o previous research stating the link between dietary salt or Sodium Chloride (NaCl) and hypertension as noted in the article “Salty foods could protect against microbes”  Published Wednesday, March 4, 2015, 6:33 PM, The NY Daily News.

Dr. Jonathan Jantsch was at pains to make this quite clear, quote: “Due to the overwhelming clinical studies demonstrating that high dietary salt is detrimental to hypertension and cardiovascular diseases, we feel that at present our data does not justify recommendations on high dietary salt in the general population”.

Rather, it points to a previously unknown role played by salt in the body defending itself against infections, being as it appears to accumulate under the skin near the site of infections and cuts made by other mice and parasites, quote: “A further understanding of the regulatory cascades might not only help to design drugs that specifically enhance local salt deposition and help to combat infectious diseases, but also may lead to novel strategies to mobilize sodium stores in the aging population and prevent cardiovascular disease”.

Dr. Jonathan Jantsch team decided to do their paper on Salt after senior author, Dr. Jens Titze, a clinical pharmacologist at the Vanderbilt University School of Medicine in Nashville as reported in the article “Does high-salt diet combat infections?”, published 3 March 2015 1:00 pm By Kate Wheeling, Science Magazine happened to notice that mice bitten by members of the group, had a large  accumulates of Salt around the side of their cuts.

Most likely too, Dr. Jonathan Jantsch team and his team may have possibly looked into the mice getting a bigger wheel and a Flat screen TV with an Xbox so as to reduce their tendency to fight.

After realizing that a flat screen TV or getting a bigger wheel to fir into their tiny cages was not in the budget, they decided to make the mice pay for fighting amongst themselves.

Instead of investigating the reason why they were fighting amongst themselves, Dr. Jonathan Jantsch decided to focus his team to unravel this mystery to determine how Sodium Chloride (NaCl) may be aiding the infection-fighting functions of the immune system. 

The researchers from the University of Regensburg in Germany theorized that the extra Sodium Chloride (NaCl) boosting the ability of  macrophages, a type of bacteriophage as described in my blog article entitled “Bacteriophage Therapy from former USSR State Georgia is a potential treatment against Super-bug Bacteria - Hansel and Gretel Witch Hunters Panacea to eradicate Bacterial infections” to produce reactive oxygen species, the molecules that bacteriophage release to kill bacteria via oxidizing their cellular walls to death.

So the team extracted macrophages from the mice and culture them to a high enough concentration in a manner similar to how Dr Bas Dutilh, a bio-informatician at Radboud University Medical Centre in the Netherlands, cultured bacteriophage from the stomachs of hundred of  patients as described in my blog article entitled “Dr Bas Dutilh’s crAss discovers crAssphage Virus - How Bacteriophages can prevent Colorectal Cancer and attack other Bacteria”.

Then they increased the sodium chloride in the nutrient bath in which the macrophages were growing to levels equivalent to those seen in the cuts of the mice that were fighting infections.

They discovered that the macrophages produced higher concentrations of reactive oxygen species, indicating that what may be happening in the mice's body was the immune system carrying Salt to help the macrophages fight of the infection.

This is somewhat like soldiers in the field of battle carrying extra cannonballs for the artillerymen to shoot at the enemy behind a blockade also made of cannonballs, which are the alt molecules. Or villages in a village carrying extra sandbags to the edge of a river in spate to prevent it from overflowing its banks and flooding the town!

Then, in the name of science, they decided to test out this macrophage theory.

They deliberately infected the nutrient bath that the bacteriophages were in with Escherichia coli and Leishmania major. To their astonishment, the macrophage cultures that had been fed with higher levels of sodium chloride showed a stronger response in fighting the infection, with infection being more quickly removed after twenty four (24) hours, whether it is Escherichia coli and Leishmania major.

Now, it was time for testing on the live mice to see how their actual Immune Systems would stand up to an infection, with and without hello from a high salt diet.

The researchers from the University of Regensburg in Germany fed the two (2) different groups of mice on a two (2) week diet. One group had a high-salt diet and the other had a low-salt diet.

Then they infected the skin on the mice footpads with Leishmania major.

At first, there were no significant difference between the two (2) groups of mice and how their bodies fought the infections for the first twenty (20) days. But after twenty (20) days, the mice with the high-salt diet showed improved healing with fewer foot lesions and a lower level of parasitic infections around those foot lesions than those mice that had a low-salt diet.

Salt is good for your Cuts - Add Salt to your alcohol tinctures before soak bandages and applying to cuts

The results were clear; salt is good for healing your bunions to quote Dr. Jonathan Jantsch: “[The experiments] demonstrate that extremes of salt intake result in additional salt accumulation in infected skin and boost immune defense experimentally”.

Dr. Jonathan Jantsch team speculates that certain cells in the Immune System may be stockpiling salt around the site where bacterial populations are high in much the same way people on the side of a river in spate about to overflow it banks will pile up sandbags to keep the levees from bursting and the rivers from flooding their town.

This isn’t the first known case of the body 's Immune System using chemical compounds to fight infections; Vitamin C aka Ascorbic Acid is used by the body both directly and indirectly to fight almost every virus and is helpful in larger doses as noted in my blog article entitled “Vitamin C and the Chikungunya Virus - How to increase your Vitamin C Intake and Glutathione and Interferon by White Blood Cells”.

No humans were experimented on to prove that this worked on humans as well. But the research group, using MRI (Magnetic Resonance Imaging) to measure Sodium in their skin, also noticed the same accumulation of salt around the wounds of people with cuts of bacterial infections that caused skin lesions.

So the practical takeaway from this research?

When making dressings for your wounds, using alcohol, dissolve some salt into the mixture; the alcohol will kill infection with the salt helping to prevent the bacterial infection going deeper into your body. No salt consumption needed and hypertension risk avoided!

Here’s the link:

University of Regensburg