You didn't wait for the scientists at the University of Alabama at Birmingham to learn that salt makes your food taste better, but it is useful to limit its amount for the good of our heart and blood pressure.
What the people at the public research university in Alabama discovered, and presented at the Seventeenth International Conference, was that too much salt can also disturb the circadian rhythm. Where circadian rhythm is our biological clock or as it is scientifically defined, it is any biological process undergoes an endogenous periodic change, within a 24-hour period. Biochemists describe it as “the fluctuation of secretions of certain hormones, affecting a number of functions of our body”.
For the record, the term was inspired by Franz Halberg in the 1950s. It comes from the Latin circa diem meaning ’during the course of a day“.
In the meantime, as Mind Body Green notes research was done on mice and therefore the results cannot be considered as 100% guaranteed. That is, further study will be needed to confirm that those who consume too much salt are not following normal sleep-wake patterns - as has been found in previous research. Mice on a high-salt diet had much higher neuronal activity at night, compared to those on a low-salt diet. The scientists noted that “neuronal stimulation at night could lead to a decline or incorrect sleep-wake rhythm, hormonal and physiological rhythms”.
