Termyn8or
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Joined: 11/12/2005
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Ok then from the top.
The word salt is a derivative of the word salarum, which is also the root of the word salary. When mankind was no longer nomadic, before money was invented people were paid their wages in salt.
When people settled the land became played out and salt was a necessary supplement. It helped keep people alive and healthy.
This was unrefined salt with all the other minerals in it, those which exactly had been extracted from the land through repeated farming. In fact when seawater flooded the land it became more arable. But inland this did not happen of course. So the people used salt, unrefined salt for cooking and preserving food. This added the missing minerals. Livestock were given salt licks.
Thus the saying "The Man is worth his salt".
Today, what is on your kitchen table bears little resemblence to real salt. Of course it is sodium chloride, but really, the salt company makes more money from what they refine out of the salt than they do from the salt itself. These extracts are sold to chemical companies all over the world.
What's more if you are old enough you remember salt clumping up in the shaker, especially in the summer when it was humid. That was solved by adding an anti clumping agent which prevents it from absorbing moisture from the air. This same property is that which makes table salt useless for the body. The anti clumping agent is very similar to what is in those dessicant packs shipped inside of the package with electronic equipment and other things. Note that it says "Do not eat".
So we got table salt from which our bodies cannot properly absorb and metabolise sodium. The sodium goes somewhere and what it does is not healthy. This is not true of unrefined salt.
When doctors say not to eat salt, I wholeheartedly agree about the crap they sell as table salt, but when they claim that unrefined, naturally harvested seasalt is the same, they lose me. They obviously don't know what they're talking about.
If your table salt did not have the anti clumping agent in it you could eat all you want, although it would not be wise unless you are otherwise healthy. It takes a balance of minerals to stay healthy, and anytime they refine something, it is bad.
I did the research and I know these things.
Unrefined seasalt is big business almost, catering to health concious rich folk and gourmet chefs among others. I did not take their word for it, I looked around. Then I plunked down $250 for unrefined seasalt. I use it exclusively. I will not touch table salt.
Seasalt is hard to store and use, it eats everything. That may turn some folks off if they don't realize that your own stomach acid does the same thing. I have gone through numerous grinders, even the ones with ceramic blades. If it doesn't eat them up it clogs them up. I am down to a mortar and pistle.
So salt is not salt. Not necessarily.
But these properties that make it so hard to handle are what make it good for you. The emaciated and poisoned stuff sold by Morton's is not even a shadow of real salt.
Enough on salt, Rule has thusfar given the most coherent response to the OP. But the components of seawater are of course water, and natural salt. They used to harvest it by having a small area which the high tide would flood, and then damming it up so the sun can dry it. From there it was shipped all over the world.
Rule had a possible answer to my question, too much neuron firing or whatever due to an imbalance in the PH, and other things. That was the original question. But when it comes to salt, that stuff on the table is not, plain and simple.
MSG went through a similar metamorphosis. For millenia, healthy Chinese used it liberally, but it was refined differently. Now it has all the dangers of table salt because of pretty much the same reasons, and it does not have the nutriative content it used to.
Even my beloved kelp, which my Grandmother used to put in soup, has been bastardised. They used to farm the kelp from the ocean, where it absorbed all these nutrients. Now they grow it in tanks.
All life on this planet started in the ocean, and continually depends on the ocean.
So salt is not salt, it is not even close.
And just so you know, if you go do the research and decide to switch to unrefined salt I will tell you this. Be careful. It is not as salty, yet there is a fine line between enough and too much. The taste is different. And never let the salt be near metal of any kind.
If you use a spice grinder to grind salt, grind alot of it. No matter how much you clean the grinder, the next time you go to use it, it will be rusty, even if it is stainless steel. That may seem scary, but it's not. It is a natural substance that was used to the benefit of mankind for millenia, until someone came along and figured they knew better.
They don't know better.
T
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