DrG's Medisense Feature Article
18062-Salt_by_Any_Other_Name
Salt
by Any Other Name…
by Ann Gerhardt, MD
June 2018
Print Version
Table salt, Kosher salt, pickling salt, sea salt, Himalayan salt
– What’s a consumer to choose? Since our natural
affinity for salty foods bumped up against its demonization by the
medical community, people have searched for a reasonable way to
accommodate both.
Bottom Line at the Top: Consume
the salt you like, in moderate amounts (unless for some medical reason
you need more). Spend extra money on your salt for its esthetics
or taste, not because one is any healthier than another.
What exactly is salt?
Chemically speaking, a salt contains a positively charged and a
negatively charged entity bound together to become electrically
neutral. The salt that we add to food and is anathema to the
American Heart Association is sodium chloride. Epsom salt, with
which we soothe our feet or butt, is magnesium sulfate. Baking
soda is a salt of sodium and bicarbonate.
For the non-chemistry world, salt is white table salt, or sodium
chloride. Most commercial salt comes from salt mines around the
world. The rock mineral form (halite) can be mined and ground up
for salting roads. Or it can be leached from a salt deposit with
water, producing a brine, which is dehydrated to recover salt.
Table salt may or may not have
additives and impurities. Much of the table salt in the United
States is ‘iodized’. It contains iodine to prevent
iodine deficiency goiter (swollen thyroid). Since the element
iodine is negatively charged, it, too, must be in a chemically stable
form of a potassium or sodium salt to be added to food. The U.S.
Food and Drug Administration recommends 46-76 mg iodine per kilogram
(one million mg) of salt. Labels usually say there are 45 mg
iodine per kg salt, but iodine salts may destabilize in high humidity,
reducing iodine content over time. In any case, iodized
salt’s iodine content is extremely low.
Anti-caking agents are sometimes added to salt to adsorb moisture and
keep it from clumping. Companies use a variety of manmade
chemicals to do this. Adding rice to a salt shaker achieves the
same purpose without the chemicals. As far as I know, none of the
anti-caking chemicals have killed anyone.
Sea salt is popular now.
People believe that it contains less salt, tastes better, is healthier,
or all three. Sea salt is made by evaporating water from sea
water. Once the salt concentration in an evaporating pool is very
high, it can’t stay in solution and crystallizes out. If
you make it in a bucket, the crystals will contain other things in
seawater, like calcium, magnesium and a little retained sea
grunge. If a corporation harvests sea salt for large scale sale,
those contaminants are washed out with brine or more seawater.
Depending on how well the salt crystals are washed, they may be very
close to 100% sodium chloride salt.
A sea salt purveyor might say their salt contains less salt for two
reasons. The crystals may be coarse and not fit as neatly into a
teaspoon as fine table salt particles do. Thus, by volume, there
is less salt, but my weight, a gram of salt is still a gram of
salt. Alternatively, there may be less sodium chloride if the
salt hasn’t been washed and retained minerals or sea grunge make
up part of the weight. It’s retained contaminants that
might make it taste better or provide some extra nutritional
minerals. However, if you believe that purified sea salt (minus
contaminants) is healthier, the marketers have duped you well.
Pickling salt is pure sodium
chloride - no iodine, no anti-caking substances, no sea
contaminants. It’s actually what we think we are
getting when we add ‘salt’ to food.
Kosher salt is also iodine-free
but may have anti-caking material. It is called Kosher because it
is used to Kosher meat – its coarse, large crystals make it
perfect for drawing out moisture (and blood) from meat. Fancy
cooks like it, because of the non-iodized taste and its large, visible
crystals.
Himalayan salt comes from the
Pakistan’s Punjab region, far from the Himalayas. Ancient
seas in the area became land-locked and dried up, leaving behind deep
salt mines. If it’s pink, it’s because the dried-up
remains of a pink microorganism that lived in the sea millions of years
ago haven’t been washed out.
There is no proof that Himalayan salt is any healthier than any other
salt. Purveyors claim it is more pure than other salts, while
also asserting that its health benefit and taste derive from the rich
non-salt mineral content. Which is it – pure or a mixture
of minerals? One double-speak website claims that Himalayan salt
is healthy because it is 99 percent pure “sodium chloride, which
is defined as a mineral substance of great importance to human and
animal health.” Duh. Back to pickling salt, which is
100% sodium chloride.
Speaking of importance to health, many natural foods contain sodium,
but usually in the form of salts other than sodium chloride. The
American Heart Association equates salt with sodium and demonizes
both. The scientific community continues to debate whether it is
the sodium or the chloride which is unhealthy.
In any case our bodies can’t function without a normal amount of
sodium. When levels are critically low, we have seizures and
die. See my article about salt and health in the November 2010
issue of DrG’sMediSense:
http://www.healthychoicesformindandbody.org/Medisense_Articles/10111-How_Much_Salt.pdf