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NDTV
25-07-2025
- Health
- NDTV
Why Do You Feel So Thirsty After Eating Salty Food? Science Has The Answer
You finish a plate of chaat, a packet of chips, or maybe some Chinese noodles, and suddenly, you feel unusually thirsty. You reach for a glass of water, and sometimes even that does not feel enough. Quite a familiar feeling, is it not? But have you ever wondered why salty food makes us feel this way? The answer lies in how our body tries to maintain balance. Salt, or sodium chloride, plays an important role in several bodily functions. And when we consume more salt than we need, the body responds by asking for more water. But that is not all. Some recent studies suggest that the story might be a bit more complex than expected. Let us break it down. Also Read: 8 Genius Tricks to Reduce Excess Salt in Curries What Does Salt Do To The Body? Our body needs salt to function, but in small amounts. Salt, or sodium, helps with muscle function, nerve signals, and fluid balance. The World Health Organisation (WHO) recommends less than five grams of salt intake a day, which is about one teaspoon. It is believed that having salty food increases sodium levels in the blood, which pulls water from our cells and makes us feel thirsty. But a study published in The Journal of Clinical Investigation found that when salt levels go up, the body produces more urea, a compound that helps hold on to water while getting rid of salt. Making urea takes energy, which might explain why salty meals sometimes leave you feeling hungrier too. A long-term study, conducted by researchers from Helmholtz, the German Aerospace Centre, looked at how salt affected fluid intake during a simulated Mars mission. Surprisingly, participants on a high-salt diet did not drink more water. In fact, they drank slightly less. Instead of triggering thirst, the body adapted by producing more water internally. This process involved the liver, muscles, and kidneys working together to manage hydration. Here too, the researchers found that urea played a key role in the body's water retention, while excreting excess salt. This means, while salty food may make you feel thirsty in the short term, your body might be doing more behind the scenes than we realise. Also Read: Are You Trying To Cut Back On Salt? FSSAI Has The Perfect Tips For You Photo Credit: Pexels How Does The Brain React To Excess Salt? The hypothalamus, a part of the brain, monitors hydration. When it detects high sodium levels, it sends out a thirst signal. That is why you suddenly feel like you need a drink, as explained by experts at the Cleveland Clinic. Is Salt The Only Thing That Makes You Thirsty? Salt is a common trigger, but other foods and lifestyle factors can also leave you reaching for water: 1. Sugary foods: Sugar pulls water from your cells during digestion, which can leave you feeling dry. 2. Caffeine and alcohol: Both are diuretics, meaning they make you urinate more and lose fluids. 3. Processed foods: Packaged items like breads, biscuits, and sauces often contain hidden sodium, even though the food might not taste salty. 4. Hot weather or exercise: Excess sweating leads to fluid loss and increased thirst. 5. Health conditions: Lifestyle conditions like diabetes and certain medications can affect hydration levels as well. Also Read: Are You Sprinkling Excess Salt Over Your Food? Stop Now! Here Are 5 Easy Ways To Stay Hydrated 1. Drink water regularly: Do not reach out for a glass of water just when you feel thirsty. Instead, sip it throughout the day to stay balanced. 2. Pair salty meals with water-rich foods: Cucumber, watermelon, oranges, and tomatoes have high water content that helps maintain the fluid level in the body, making you feel less thirsty 3. Limit packaged snacks: Almost every packaged snack contains more sodium than you realise, even if it does not taste that salty. 4. Cook with less salt: Limit salt use in your daily meals and rely more on natural flavours, herbs, and spices to spruce up your meal. 5. Skip sugary or caffeinated drinks: These are diuretic in nature and can be harmful, especially when you are already thirsty. In fact, these drinks can worsen dehydration in your body. Eat healthy, stay fit! Disclaimer: This content including advice provides generic information only. It is in no way a substitute for qualified medical opinion. Always consult a specialist or your doctor for more information. NDTV does not claim responsibility for this information. Advertisement About Somdatta Saha Explorer- this is what Somdatta likes to call herself. Be it in terms of food, people or places, all she craves for is to know the unknown. A simple aglio olio pasta or daal-chawal and a good movie can make her day. For the latest food news, health tips and recipes, like us on Facebook or follow us on Twitter and YouTube. Tags: Salt Effects Of Having Too Much Salt How To Control Salt Intake Show full article Comments
The Hindu
26-06-2025
- Health
- The Hindu
Air, Ash, and Astronomy: How Tiny Pollutants and Giant Telescopes Define the Future
The team concluded that the absence of ALDH1A1 left the cells at a higher risk of serious respiratory infection when exposed to air pollutants. It was also found that drug-enhanced ALDH1A1 levels improved the mice's mucociliary function in response to pollutants. The finding thus implied a potential therapeutic target, namely the enzyme ALDH1A1. 'Aldehyde dehydrogenase (ALDH1A1) is an enzyme that plays an important role in protection against aldehydes. We used experimental mice that lacked ALDH1A1 to investigate the impact of air pollutants without the gene,' explained Yasutaka Okabe, senior author. 'As expected, the mice had impaired cilia formation and function and high levels of aldehydes.' The team also explored how to restore normal cellular function and reverse damage. The researchers investigated the expression of one gene from the ALDH family known to protect the body against harmful aldehydes, to see whether it countered the effect of airway pollutants. The researchers found that oxidative injury in the airways caused by the pollutants facilitated the formation of lipid peroxide–derived aldehydes, which damaged the protective cells in the airway, including airway cilia. With the damaged airway cells and cilia no longer able to move debris and pollutants out of the airways, the risk of infection is enhanced. 'We found that PM2.5 air pollutants negatively affect mucociliary clearance, a major protective mechanism in the respiratory tract,' said the lead author, Noriko Shinjyo. Mucociliary clearance basically involves trapping pollutants in a sticky mucus and then sweeping the pollutants out of the airways with hair-like projections called cilia. Most air pollutants—for example, dust, vehicle exhaust, and wildfire smoke—belong to the PM2.5 category and, when inhaled, cause severe airway damage resulting in respiratory distress. To understand how exactly air pollutant particles affect the respiratory system, the researchers performed a series of experiments on mice. After exposing mice to environmental pollutants, their respiratory tracts were examined for changes in structure and function. In a study recently published in The Journal of Clinical Investigation , a multi-institutional research team led by the University of Osaka, Japan, has unravelled the mechanism by which exposure to air pollutants of particle size ≤ 2.5 micrometres (PM2.5) cause airway dysfunction. With most of the world population subject to harmful levels of air pollutants, air pollution is stated to be the second leading risk factor that could lead to death globally. However, how air pollution affects human health and mortality remains poorly understood, rendering treatment strategies largely symptomatic. Also Read | Rural India is choking Vera C. Rubin Observatory will start showing spectacular images of the sky from June Astronomers around the world are eagerly waiting for the clock to strike 11 am EDT (8:30 pm IST) on June 23 when the Vera C. Rubin Observatory, located atop the El Peñón peak of the 2,682-metre-high mountain Cerro Pachón in northern Chile, will showcase online its first spectacular images of the sky. The observatory is named after the American astronomer Vera Florence Cooper Rubin (1928–2016), who pioneered work on galaxy rotation rates. This study led her to discover the discrepancy between the predicted and observed angular motion of galaxies, which has been cited by astronomers as evidence for the existence of dark matter. The chief objective of the observatory's telescope, called the Simonyi Survey Telescope (or SST, named after the private donor-couple Charles and Lisa Simonyi), is to carry out a synoptic astronomical survey, the Legacy Survey of Space and Time (LSST), using its camera, which is the largest digital camera ever built. The LSST camera was built as a multi-institutional project at the SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory, Stanford, California, over a seven-year period. It was shipped to the observatory site in Chile exactly a year ago and was installed in March 2025. The SST is a wide-field reflecting telescope with an 8.4 m primary mirror. The optics uses a novel three-mirror design that allows the telescope to deliver sharp images over a very wide 3.5o-diameter field of view. The images will be recorded by the mind-boggling 3.2 gigapixel charge-coupled device (CCD) imaging LSST camera—roughly the same number of pixels as 260 modern cell phone sensors—which itself is of the size of a small car and weighs about 3 tonnes. The observatory is jointly funded by the National Science Foundation and the Department of Energy of the US government. To produce an image of the night sky, the Rubin Observatory's large mirrors first collect the light arriving from the cosmos. After bouncing through the mirrors, the light gets focussed by the camera's three lenses onto the image sensors. When taking an image of the sky, the camera uses one of six different coloured filters, u, g, r, i, z, and y, ranging from ultraviolet (u), which is outside the human range of vision, through visible colours (g, r, i), and outside the human range of vision in the other direction into the infrared (i, z, y). The filters are housed in a carousel so that they can be easily switched during observations. However, the geometry of the carousel only allows it to hold five filters at once. The sixth filter is housed in a special storage stand separate from the camera, and a device called the filter loader is used to exchange a particular filter when needed with one in the carousel. Compared with filters in normal cameras, these filters are big, each is 75 cm across. A sophisticated machine called the auto-changer is capable of changing the filters in under two minutes. One would need hundreds of ultra-high-definition TV screens to display a single image taken by this camera. Its sensor needs to be kept extremely cold (about −100°C) to limit the number of defective (bright) pixels in images. These images and videos will be the first of many that Rubin will release over the course of the next decade as the camera and telescope conduct a sweep of the entire visible southern sky every three to four nights. In doing so, the Rubin Observatory's telescope will produce the most detailed time-lapse view of the cosmos ever.
