New research suggests teens' indulgent salt consumption is contributing to obesity and inflammation.
Many of today's adolescents are consuming as much salt as adults or nearly twice the recommended amount, a Medical College of Georgia at Georgia Regents University news release reported.
The researchers looked at 766 healthy teens and found 97 percent said they exceeded American Heart Association's recommended 1,500 milligrams of sodium a day.
"The majority of studies in humans show the more food you eat, the more salt you consume, the fatter you are," Doctor Haidong Zhu, molecular geneticist at the Medical College of Georgia and Institute of Public and Preventive Health at Georgia Regents University, said in the news release. "Our study adjusted for what these young people ate and drank and there was still a correlation between salt intake and obesity."
Those who consumed high amounts of sodium had higher levels of "tumor necrosis factor alpha," which originates in immune cells and can cause inflammation leading to serious immune problems such as arthritis and lupus. The teen also had high levels of leptin, ", a hormone produced by fat cells that normally suppresses appetite and burns fat, but at chronically high levels can have the opposite effects," the news release reported.
"Losing weight is difficult, but hopefully more people can be successful at reducing their sodium intake," Zhu said.
"We hope these findings will reinforce for parents and pediatricians alike that daily decisions about how much salt children consume can set the stage for fatness, chronic inflammation and a host of associated diseases like hypertension and diabetes," study co-author Dr. Gregory Harshfield, Director of the Georgia Prevention Center at the GRU institute, said in the news release.
Sodium could be linked to heavier body weight because it causes water retention.
"Obesity has a lot of contributing factors, including physical inactivity," Zhu said. "We think that high sodium intake could be one of those factors." Evidence suggests one direct cause may be increasing the size of fat cells."
