Sunday, March 8, 2009

Sea Salt

Post detox, Doug and I are are continuing to do our best to eat the healthiest we can. We found it interesting that salt was allowed on our detox. Natural sea salt, that is.

Like sugar, the conventional way salt is processed is what makes the ingredient problematic in the diet. Jon Barron sums it up:

"Only 7% of salt goes for food; the other 93% goes to industry. Industry requires chemically pure sodium chloride for manufacture of explosives, chlorine gas, soda, fertilizers and plastics. In effect, table salt represents a "cheap" production overrun."

"In today's market, we now have two distinct choices when it comes to salt: unrefined and refined. Unrefined salt (sea salt) is 84% sodium chloride and 16% other minerals. Refined salt is 97.5% sodium chloride and approximately 2.5% chemical additives."



Unrefined sea salt

  • Natural salt is a prime condiment that stimulates salivation and helps to balance and replenish all of the body's electrolytes.
  • The natural iodine in these salts protects against radiation, atomic fallout, and many other pollutants.
  • Unrefined sea salt supplies all 92 vital trace minerals, thereby promoting optimum biological function and cellular maintenance:
    • Here is a partial list of the minerals found in unrefined salt and their function in human metabolism:
      • Sodium: Essential to digestion and metabolism, regulates body fluids, nerve and muscular functions.
      • Chlorine: Essential component of human body fluids.
      • Calcium: Needed for bone mineralization.
      • Magnesium: Dissipates sodium excess, forms and hardens bones, ensures mental development and sharpens intelligence, promotes assimilation of carbohydrates, assures metabolism of vitamin C and calcium, retards the aging process and dissolves kidney stones.
      • Sulfur: Controls energy transfer in tissue, bone and cartilage cells, essential for protein compounds.
      • Silicon: Needed in carbon metabolism and for skin and hair balance.
      • Iodine: Vital for energy production and mental development, ensures production of thyroid hormones, needed for strong auto-defense mechanism (lymphatic system).
      • Bromine: In magnesium bromide form, a nervous system regulator and restorer, vital for pituitary hormonal function.
      • Phosphorus: Essential for biochemical synthesis and nerve cell functions related to the brain, constituent of phosphoproteins, nucleoproteins and phospholipids.
      • Vanadium: Of greater value for tooth bone calcification than fluoride, tones cardiac and nervous systems, reduces cholesterol, regulates phospholipids in blood, and a catalyst for the oxidation of many biological substances.

Refined table salt

  • Inorganic sodium chloride upsets your fluid balance and constantly overburdens your elimination systems, which can impair your health.
  • When your body tries to isolate the overdose of refined salt you typically expose it to, water molecules must surround the sodium chloride molecules to break them up into sodium and chloride ions in order to help your body neutralize them. To accomplish this, water is taken from your cells, and you have to sacrifice the water stored in your cells in order to neutralize the unnatural sodium chloride.
    • This results in dehydrated cells that die prematurely.
  • Refined table salt contains added iodine, which may indeed have helped eliminate the incidence of endemic goiter, but has conversely increased the incidence of hypothyroidism.
  • Refined table salt lacks all trace minerals.
  • Refined salt contains anticaking agents such as ferrocyanide, yellow prussiate of soda, tricalcium phosphate, alumine-calcium silicate, sodium aluminosilicate. All work by preventing the salt from mixing with water, both inside the box and inside the human body. This prevents the salt from doing one of its important functions in the organism: regulating hydration.
"Truth be told, all refined table salt is actually sea salt at heart, either refined from the sea (brine sourced) or found in salt mines created by ancient seabed deposits known as halite. Refined salt is processed at high temperatures altering the molecular structure of the salt (not good) and removing the beneficial trace minerals. The human body doesn't like it."


Looking in the cabinet, all my "sea salt" is the processed kind. So much for spending extra money getting what you think is better. I'll be heading to my Central Market for real sea salt.

Recommended:

Celtic Salt aka French Grey Sea Salt
Fluer De Sel
Himilayan Sea Salt
New Zealand Organic
Matiz Salts

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