Researchers from the University of Edinburgh in the United Kingdom recommend consuming no more than six grams every day, but several people consume as much as nine grams daily.

Mice with low-salt diets ate high-salt food, and a 75-percent increase in stress hormone levels was observed.

‘They found that not only resting stress hormone levels increase but the mice’s hormonal response to environmental stress was double compared with the mice that had a normal diet,’ the experts noted in their study, published in the Cardiovascular Research journal.

Salt intake, the experts stressed, increased the activity of genes that produce the proteins in the brain that control how the body responds to stress.

They recalled that a diet containing a lot of salt could contribute to higher blood pressure, increasing the risks of heart attacks, strokes, and vascular dementia.

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