Salt is essential to life. It is so important that it is one of the primary tastes our tongue perceives. We are driven to acquire enough salt from our environment; for without salt, the chemical engines that give us life, stop. The sodium in salt is half of the chemical battery system every cell in our body uses to make the electricity to run our cells.
Humankind has sought out salt forever. The Chinese were processing it 8000 years ago as were the middle Europeans. Entire trade routes were created for the salt trade throughout Africa, Europe, and Asia. Wars were fought, taxes levied, and in some places it was even used as a form of currency. It was highly valued because it was scarce compared to the level of demand for it. In fact the word salary comes from the latin word for salt.
Fast forward to today and we hear a very different message about salt. The medical community tells us to avoid salt because salt, they say, causes hypertension – the silent killer. Low sodium diets are standard for any heart patient. Yet somehow all this demonization of salt has not resulted in any decrease in heart disease or hypertension. “Ah,” but you say, “how bad would things be if we didn’t cut out the salt?” That is a very good question, and the answer is not what you think.
The real question is how can something that is essential for life suddenly become toxic for us? The devil is in the details. Lets take a look, starting with the obvious – are we even eating real salt anymore? Lets use an analogy with high fructose corn syrup. The evil damaging effects of high fructose corn syrup (HFCS) are now well known, even though most of your processed food still has it in it. When HFCS was created, it was a more convenient and less expensive form of sugar. It was used to replace the more expensive cane sugar. Before that, cane sugar was a simpler and more shelf stable way of storing and using fruit sugars in recipes. Before cane sugar was created, people used dried fruit and honey for sweetening. So the analogy is, is high fructose corn syrup as nutritious and the same as fresh fruit? Of course not! Fruit contains thousands of chemical nutrients while HFCS contains only sugar.
Real salt has the same story. Real salt comes from thousands of mineral salts in the soil being dissolved by the rain and washed down stream to the ocean. The most common mineral salt in ocean water is sodium chloride, just as the most common molecule in ripe fruit juice is sugar. But just like the real fruit juice, real salt has thousands of other chemical salts in it. Depending upon the area of the world the salt is derived from, real salt contains 68 to 76 different basic elements in it. All of these trace elements are essential for life – mostly as cofactors for various enzymes in our body. Enzymes are the workers that do everything in our body.
The stuff we buy at the grocery store has none of these trace minerals in it. It is devoid of all the vital life giving properties salt is supposed to have. Commercial salt manufacturers remove all the valuable trace minerals because they discolor the lovely pure white color of pure sodium chloride salt. Plus the trace minerals attract water from the air and make the salt clump. So, for a better shelf life and greater consumer appeal, all the health in our salt has been removed.
Lets change course and look at the other big problem with salt – over consumption. Remember I started with how valuable salt used to be? In some places it was more valuable than gold. With that understanding, how much salt do you imagine people would typically use? As history progresses and salt processing becomes widely practiced, the price of salt steadily decreased and its use increased. Salt became a primary tool of food processing as it keeps bad bacteria from growing on food. Salt cured meats and vegetables became staples of the average diet. Yet even with this increase in salt use, heart disease and high blood pressure was unknown. Heart issues were almost unknown until about 150 years ago, and didn’t become popular until about the 1950’s and 60’s. What changed?
There are a large number of factors involved, but I will focus on two of the largest – lifestyle changes and salt changes. About 150 years ago we see the development of modern table salt. Morton salt began in 1858 to meet the needs of the gold rush miners. The first anti-caking additives were not used until 1911 with modern salt containing additives like sodium ferrocyanide and calcium aluminosilicate – yes cyanide and aluminum are in your table salt. The government says the cyanide is ok because it wont be released unless it is exposed to acid – like in your stomach – and aluminum, well it was okayed before we knew it contributed to Alzheimer’s. Possibly the removal of all the life giving trace minerals and the addition of toxic poisons might be contributing to the modern salt-heart disease connections.
Actually there is a much bigger issue no one talks about with salt and hypertension – the change in dietary lifestyle since the 1950’s. Sodium is half the story in the energy forming battery like nature of how our cells work electrically. Potassium is the other half of the equation. Sodium and potassium have to be in balance for the whole system to work properly. Throughout history we as humans had no problem getting enough potassium because it is abundant in all grains, legumes, vegetables and fruits, and most of our diet throughout history has been mostly grains, legumes, vegetables and fruits. But all of a sudden in the 1950’s we developed convenience foods and food processing on a huge scale. We went from an agrarian diet to a processed food city dweller diet. The result is folks today end up getting one tenth of the potassium in their diet they used to get.
Here is the big point of this article – salt/sodium is not a health issue unless it is not balanced with potassium. The modern American diet does not provide enough potassium. Our diet should be 80% vegetables and only 20% grains and meats by weight. The more refined a food is, the less potassium there is because potassium is specifically removed as it does not taste so good to us.
So as I see it, we have three main issues here. We eat too much sodium chloride with its modern toxic additions. We are not getting enough potassium in our diet to balance the sodium. And we are not getting the vital trace minerals we need from our salt. These are the real reasons salt is associated with hypertension and heart disease.
The answer is really simple – use a salt with all the trace minerals in it. This is done by buying real salt like Redmond’s, or Himalayan pink salt, or Celtic, or French grey salt. Stop using normal toxic white salt. Increase you consumption of potassium, either by eating mostly vegetables or by taking potassium directly.
I have answered that need for myself by creating a Balanced Salt made from Redmond’s Real salt and potassium chloride. I like the Redmond’s Real salt because it has a better flavor profile than the other natural salt choices. Potassium chloride is potassium salt like they add to lite salt commercially. This way I get a balanced sodium/potassium ratio in my diet. This works since I still cook food and have some control over the salt I add to my food. If I bought processed food, I would be out of luck. But replacing your regular table salt with Balanced Salt will help you get your trace minerals and put at least some potassium into your system. And for people on a sodium restricted diet, Balanced salt should be a true gift.
Balanced Salt is now available in the office in 5 ounce table service containers for $7 and 9 ounce cooking style containers for $11.