A-RockLeFrench wrote:
If you need or crave salt it is your body telling you that you need sodium chloride, the mineral humans need to survive. Not the synthetically derived, iodized crap that says Morton's on the box. Real, naturally occurring salt. Unrefined sea salt is best, especially salt from the Dead Sea. It also contains other natural minerals beneficial to the body as micro-nutrients and electrolytes.
Actually, Mortons salt is mined salt, and this is the same stuff as "solar" or "natural" or "sea" salt. The only difference is that mined salt was deposited millions of years ago by nature from ancient seas
before nuclear bombs, chemical weapons, large-scale industry, heavy metals, and human sewage came on the scene and used our lakes and oceans for a global cesspool. Contrast this stuff to salt deposited 6 months ago by some guy named Ringo who has bleeding ulcers on his feet and just got over a bout of amoebic dysentery. The same guy who is pumping polluted seawater into drying flats beneath where seagulls roost (and shit) every night.
As far as Dead Sea salts being good for you, this is now nothing more than hype based on what used to be. The truth is the current Dead Sea is MASSIVELY contaminated. The Jordan River has become an industrial waste canal and parts of Old Jerusalem as late as 2012 lacked even rudimentary sewage handling, preferring instead to just dump this stuff raw into the Dead Sea. In the last 5 years the Jordan flow is down to just 10% of what it was 60 years ago, and current estimates are that almost HALF of this flow is refuse water from human sewage and industrial/agriculture operations upstream. The real problem with the Dead Sea is this: Once in, never out. This stuff accumulates, and without any real outlet, it has become the ultimate septic tank. Mud samples from the Dead Sea show an alarming heavy-metals profile, cryptosporidium, and industrial compounds. Honestly, I don't see how they can even sell this stuff with a straight face. 40 years ago? Maybe. But today, I wouldn't put it in my mouth, but that's just me. In contrast, none of these issues are present in the "old" deposits from ancient seas.
A-RockLeFrench wrote:'Modern' table salt is like so many modern foods in that it has been bastardized so much it is no longer beneficial to humans, so in our infinite wisdom we're trying to figure out how we can make it healthy again. Like adding synthetic iodide when everyone in the country started getting goiters from using synthetic salt. Instead of just switching back to sea salt we start adding synthetic iodide (not iodine) to table salt. Guess what? Unrefined sea salt contains iodine and potassium chloride along with close to 80 other trace minerals in the same proportions needed by the human body and most other animals as well.
I disagree. None of the food-grade salt in the US is synthetically-derived. All food-grade salt comes from natural sources. You can't even use "produced" salt for feed additives or free-feed supplements with livestock. All of the synthetically produced salt gets recycled in the manufacturing of goods (rubber, metals, especially aluminum).
A-RockLeFrench wrote:Ask any farmer or rancher and he will tell you that his livestock needs salt licks, because sodium chloride and other minerals are essential to life functions. The problem is the shit we call 'salt'. Sodium replacement is not the answer for correcting mineral imbalance.
As a livestock owner, let me expand on this a bit. Livestock are no different from any other animal, including humans, in that we all need salt to survive. This much is true. And in fact, most higher species make periodic trips to natural salt licks or brackish springs for exactly this reason. But the similarities end there. We all have different requirements, and there is no reason to use a "one-size-fits-all" mentality when it comes to salt for a given species. Feed livestock common table salt and you are asking for disaster in the long run. Not because it is "contaminated" or "bad", but because it's not what nature intended for them to have. Different species need different stuff in different amounts in their salt.
Modern livestock salt is a highly engineered compound that is completely unsuitable for humans. In fact, unlike table salt (which is essentially pure NaCL), livestock salt is engineered and blended for a specific species. Livestock salt contains all of the trace minerals, metals, and other "stuff" that is missing from their diets. (Most livestock can't get to a salt lick every couple of weeks to recharge, so the salt lick has to come to them. And since we are now putting non-native species on lands that could never have supported them, we have to tweak the salt composition toward their "native" licks in order to make them survive and thrive on an "alien" landscape). Salt for cattle contains copper, vanadium, arsenic, zinc, manganese, iron, and cobalt. Salt for sheep contains the same thing plus sulfur and iodine. Horses need a slightly different formulation with less copper and vanadium and no sulfur. Same for pigs. But none of this stuff goes on a "human" table and is expressly labeled against human use. Humans are at the top of the food chain, and they get most of these other trace compounds from our diet alone. (Exception: iodine, for reasons I will explain later).
One thing I giggle at, is people who don't understand that ALL salt for human consumption comes from one of two
natural sources: brine springs/sea water, or mined salt (which is nothing more than ancient deposits of salt that precipitated from seawater). The difference for humans isn't biologically significant. Both sources are oceanic salt, contain trace minerals and electrolytes, and are equally useful to humans. Some will claim that sea salt evaporated recently is "better", but this isn't the case. The fact is, no naturally occurring salt source contains enough iodine to keep modern humans out of trouble. It must be supplemented.
To understand why iodine supplementation for humans is necessary, you need look no further than the modern diet. It's basically refined crap. All of the old-time "power-foods" are largely gone. Natural sources of iodine in yesteryear were hard cheeses, raw milk, free-range eggs, saltwater fish, dried seaweed, shellfish, and old-style yogurts as well as muscle-meat with yellow carotene-tinged fats from grass-fed herbivores. (How much of this stuff did you eat this week? heheheh). As man learned to intensively farm, most of these natural sources of iodine went away, and by the late 1800's and early 1900's, goiter was a big problem. So we dropped-back and added iodine (in the form or iodide or iodate) to common table salt, and the problem disappeared almost overnight. Goiter became rare, and cretinism dropped radically.
So I would dispute that the current salt we consume is crap and only holistic salts are good for you. Todays table salt is some of the best salt in history. Our ability to purify salt and to remove impurities such as magnesium, manganese, iron, calcium and organics isn't a "problem". We have abundant sources of all of these things in the diet already. Refining salt, when it is actually done, is a solution to shelf-storage and stability problems, and it eliminates almost all of the really nasty salt-tolerant bacteria that used to kill people. (In ancient days, kings would require a new salt source to be fed to slaves for up to 7 years before allowing it to be used in the kingdom. Salt-resistant bacteria were rare, but when found, killed humans in droves). None of this is an issue today.
There are those who would prefer a modern, solar-evaporated sea salt, and that is their choice. But they need to understand the only difference between that stuff, and the evil "mined" salt is the presence of impurities that give it its color, fragrance and taste. Both are "natural" salts. Should the "purists" decide to get their "natural, sea-salt" from a source that is laden with toxins, heavy metals, and modern rubbish, that is their right. But personally I'll take something 200 million years older than Man any day.
To be clear there is no flame intended to A-Rock. I just felt I needed to set the record straight before some hippies start trying to make "Love Salts" from the reactor discharge near San Onofre.
Maybe Rhino will pitch-in here and grade my paper. I'd love to hear his thoughts on this too.
I crack myself up 
