One soup swap shields a gut bug that salt wipes out in 14 days

The salt that keeps ham from spoiling also reaches the bacteria in your gut

People have packed fish, pork, and pickles in salt for centuries. It pulls water out of germs until they can't grow.

That's great news for a ham. But your gut holds trillions of bacteria you want to keep… And the salt in your lunch passes right by them.

So what happens to those bacteria if you double your daily dose? A team in Berlin tried it.

14 days of doubled salt, and one key gut bug all but vanished in most of the men

Wilck, Müller et al. · Max Delbrück Center, Berlin · Nature, 2017

The team started with mice. Then a group of men signed up.

Berlin researchers fed extra salt to mice and men, and Lactobacillus dropped in both

Nicola Wilck and Dominik Müller put mice on a high-salt diet. One species fell harder than the rest: Lactobacillus murinus.

Next, 12 healthy men took 6 grams of salt a day, about a level teaspoon, on top of their usual food. That roughly doubled their intake. By the end, most of the men had too little Lactobacillus in their stool to detect.

Their blood pressure rose. So did their Th17 cells, a kind of immune cell tied to inflammation.

Why would losing one small bug push blood pressure up?

Lactobacillus holds back the immune cells that raise your blood pressure

A big share of your immune cells learn their jobs in your gut wall. Lactobacillus helps decide what they become.

This bug turns tryptophan, an amino acid from food, into indole-3-lactic acid. That compound acts like a brake on Th17 cells.

Left unchecked, they send out signals that tighten blood vessels and push your kidneys to hold on to sodium and water.

Salt hits Lactobacillus hard. In lab dishes, it slowed the growth of L. murinus. Fewer bugs means less of that brake… and more Th17 cells pushing your pressure up.

So where does a teaspoon of extra salt sneak in? One cozy lunch hands you most of it, under a famous red-and-white label.

Campbell's Condensed Chicken Noodle: almost a full day of sodium in one can

Flip a can over. The label lists 890 mg of sodium per serving. Then look at the top: each can holds about two and a half.

Eat all of it for lunch, which plenty of us do, and you get about 2,200 mg of sodium. The daily value printed on that label is 2,300 mg.

That's nearly the extra teaspoon of salt the Berlin men ate each day. And chicken noodle is the soup we grab on sick days, when we want to feel better.

The fix sits one spot over on the same shelf.

Campbell's Heart Healthy Chicken Noodle cuts the sodium by more than half

This version comes in the same 10.75 oz can. Its label lists 410 mg of sodium per serving instead of 890. That trims about 1,200 mg from every can.

It tastes milder at first. So bring the flavor back without the shaker. In a UC San Diego trial led by Cheryl Anderson, adults who learned to cook with herbs and spices ate nearly 1,000 mg less sodium a day.

Heart Healthy Chicken Noodle Your go-to soup at 410 mg per serving.		Fresh dill A classic with chicken soup. Snip a little over the bowl.
Cracked black pepper A few grinds add bite and heat with zero sodium.		Garlic powder, not garlic salt Garlic salt is mostly salt. The plain powder is all flavor.

So what goes in your cart, and what goes in your bowl?

On your next grocery run, grab the Heart Healthy can and season it at the table

In the soup aisle, check each label before it goes in your cart. At home, let the herbs do the shaker's job.

❎ Regular can plus a shake of salt

✅ Heart Healthy can plus dill and pepper

Make the switch once, and every lunch after is lighter on salt. That's a lot less sodium reaching your Lactobacillus.