I don't normally use sea salt but I decided to try it for a couple of days on cucumbers. I noticed I don't like the effect on my ability to taste and I gained some weight even though I've been taking in less calories.

Is that water retention?

Needless to say, I won't be adding sea salt any time soon.

david

if you can do without it that's terrific! over consumption of salt is not a healthy thing at all. if you were wondering about your levels you can enter your daily diet into a nutrition tracking program like fitday.com to see where you're at. it's interesting to see it all in chart form i find. there you'll see how much sodium you're actually getting without adding in any salt at all. it's surprisingly adequate!

I wonder why people who get ship wrecked and then have only sea water to drink die of thirst while being surrounded by water ?

It is not useful to the body.

try eating half a handful this should tell you something about if it is good for you.

Celery, tomatoes, dulse.

Right. I stopped eating salt when I transitioned fully...about 8 years ago. Never craved it...never wanted it since. I don't personally think it's necessary - certainly not in my case.

-David Z. Mason

WWW.RawFoodFarm.com

Sodium is essential for cellular functions and life. In nature, animals have been known to travel dozens of miles at regular intervals to "salt licks", just to lick the salt from the ground.

The osmotic "pump" that drives water and many nutrients into and out of cells depends on the balance of sodium and potassium. We NEED both of these elements in sufficient quantities, and sodium in particular is lost through sweat (sweat tastes salty!). This is why marathon runners are sometimes given salt supplementation, to prevent collapse. However, unless you are running marathons or ultra-marathons, you are unlikely to sweat out enough sodium to ever need supplementation.

Those animals in nature --and our caveman ancestors-- have/had a potassium-rich diet from plants, but they have/had a harder time getting enough salt to balance the potassium. For health, we need something close to a 1:1 ratio. The situation for people today is just the opposite of the natural one we evolved in: salt is over-abundant in modern diets! It is added to almost every processed food there is... canned goods, boxed goods, instant foods, junk foods are all heavily salted... and deficient in potassium. Most restaurants and home-cooking is over-salted. Just ONE Big Mac meal at McDonald's has enough salt to meet a person's sodium requirements for a whole WEEK! [One of the reasons that stuff is so bad for you!]

As a result, most people eat a diet with 4,5, 6 or more times as much salt as potassium. This is THE MAJOR CAUSE of high blood pressure in the general population, and a major contributing factor to the increased rate of heart attacks. People are walking around over-saturated with sodium and borderline deficient in potassium. It unbalances their cells and causes systemic problems, kidney problems, just lots of low-level problems.

If you have transitioned to an all-raw vegan diet, you are probably eating a diet that is much richer in potassium than in sodium. However, unless you have been eating this way all your life you probably already have such a surplus of sodium in your tissues that it will take a few years to re-balance, and at least a decade or probably two (since there is SOME sodium in plant foods, too!) to risk being sodium deficient. If you are using ANY commercial sauces or preparations in your diet, you are probably getting enough sodium already, anyway. Most of us need to eat to eat a lot of potassium and little or no sodium over quite a period of time, just to re-adjust the imbalance we have (too much sodium!).

There is another issue with sea salt, however: Sea water has nearly 80 minerals and trace elements in it. Some --actually most, if not all-- of these we also need, in very small amounts. Therefore OCCASIONAL use of UNREFINED (NOT --I repeat, NOT refined!) sea salt can be important as a means of providing these trace elements. Make sure, if you decide to buy "sea salt" that it is raw, unrefined, and from a relatively clean (not polluted) source. The best that I know of comes from France. Many things labelled "sea salt" and sold in health food stores, unfortunately, have been refined and are simply "salt derived from sea salt". Those are probably BAD for you.

Even then, probably less than a teaspoon per year would be easily sufficient to meet the needs for trace elements, especially since many of them can also be obtained from a plant-based diet, if a wide variety of plants grown in differing soils are included.

If you do use sea salt to get these trace elements, then add them to other foods, including things like lemon juice and/or salads, to help convert them to forms that are readily assimilated. Not all of them are so easily absorbed in their seawater forms, but when combined with chemicals in the plants, they will form compounds our bodies can use. For example, the lemon juice I mentioned will create assimilable citrate forms with the natural citric acid in the lemons. So don't drink saltwater or seawater (yuck!) - just add a pinch of the unrefined sea salt to a vegetable smoothie, instead.

I have a large container of the best French salt I brought back from a trip to France about six years ago. Periodically I drop a few small granules in something I'm preparing to eat. In all that time, the level of salt in the container has dropped a little over an inch. That container will probably last me 15 or 20 years, maybe more!

The first couple times I took that unrefined salt, I noticed it made a positive difference. I felt more energy, and some niggling symptoms improved. I was probably deficient in SOMETHING in the salt, although I do not know exactly what it was.

Since then, I haven't noticed it making any big difference like it did at first, but I still just occasionally take a wee bit, just in case. It isn't the sodium I'm concerned about: its the little traces of rear earth elements, of which the body needs only a few molecules here and there for specialized purposes. Usually I mix it with a good source of potassium, too, so I don't push my body towards any excess sodium balance. Enough drivel. Hope some of it helps someone.

Here are a couple of interesting links:

Chloride: [www.healthy.net]

Sodium: [www.healthy.net]

and since they work together...
Potassium: [www.healthy.net]


I add sea salt to my diet, and I feel better for it. I started adding it because I "knew" something was not right. I was craving salty veggies, eating them like crazy, and still not getting enough. I believe that salt is necessary for my well being. Not everyone has the ability to absorb and retain these minerals, so adding some salt is an alternative to stuffing myself with so much veggies that I can't digest anyway. An electrolyte balance is so important for our cells to function properly.

[www.rawfoodexplained.com]
"Salt is not synthesized or processed in any way in the body and serves no useful purpose. It enters as sodium chloride, it is stored as sodium chloride, it is excreted as sodium chloride. It leaves a trail of destruction from the time it enters until the time it can be excreted."

Thanks Lillian,

Interesting article, but like every article on that site, I find it disappointing. It's opinion written as fact. There are no footnotes or references at all. I would love to see his sources.

Look at the salt "experiment" they list...

"In one experiment one of the authors ate typical restaurant salads (with the usual amount of salt in the dressings) for one meal and supplemented the salad meal with a few "no salt added" crackers (containing only whole wheat flour and salt in the baking of the crackers themselves) with commercial old fashioned peanut butter which contained only ground peanuts and salt. The next day his one-meal for the day consisted of his usual fresh vegetable salad without any dressing or seasoning supplemented by a bowl of commercial soup containing the usual amount of salt plus some of the same kind of crackers and peanut butter eaten the previous day."

That's not sea salt, it's processed table salt. Is it possible that it was the cooked, processed junk food he ate that made him feel ill, in addition to the salt in it?



"Salt is a deadly poison, a terrible abusive irritant to human tissue. This can be confirmed by anyone by sniffing salt water and experiencing the terrible burning sensation as the delicate sinus membranes are irritated, by putting salt water into the eyes and experiencing the burning sensation while observing the rush of blood to the eyes to protect their delicate membranes (bloodshot), by putting salt on an open wound and experiencing the terrible burning sensation as the tissue is irritated and destroyed, or by drinking a concentrated salt solution and experiencing vomiting as the body acts to repel this foreign and toxic substance."

Why then do we add a small amount salt to water to make "saline" for eye washes, and nasal sprays? The term salt water is vague, plain water stings our eyes also. But if you add a TINY amount of salt, making "normal saline" (0.9%), there is no sting, and it "feels" natural.



"Salt is sodium chloride first, last and always from the time it enters the body until the time it is discharged. If it were broken down into its primary constituents, sodium and chlorine, as it passed through the body the tragedy would be complete since both inorganic sodium and inorganic chlorine are highly destructive to life and would immediately render a human lifeless."

"Salt is not synthesized or processed in any way in the body and serves no useful purpose. It enters as sodium chloride, it is stored as sodium chloride, it is excreted as sodium chloride. It leaves a trail of destruction from the time it enters until the time it can be excreted."

These statmentes are simply untrue...sodium chloride (NaCl) is a weak bond that disassociates (breaks down) in water by simple "normalization" That's why it dissolves in water so easy to make salt water (Na1+ Cl1- + H+1 OH1- = NaOH + HCl)

[www.bartleby.com]

Sodium and chloride are minerals. Minerals are inorganic. If absorbed by a plant and consumed by humans, they will still be inorganic minerals. Chemically, there is no difference.

Here is an interesting chart of the chemical makeup of the human body. As you can see, if you remove water, sodium and chloride are actually pretty dominate in our bodies.

[en.wikipedia.org]

Thanks again for posting the article, but I thing the authors do a disservice to the raw food community when they fail to truly research what they write.

Yes, they used table salt in the experiment, the article was about table salt. How would sea salt have caused less problems? Are you still thirsty after consuming sea salt, I've heard that the minerals balance the cellular fluid better.

Yes, our bodies can tolerate a tiny amount of poison in a saline eyewash, it can also tolerate the tiny amount of cyanide in flax and almonds.

Ha, ha I should have realized that salt disolves in water. Thanks for catching that! But do you think that salt is actually absorbed by the body and becomes part of the cells?

-

Table salt is 60.663% elemental chlorine and 39.337% sodium or 99.9% composed of these elements.

Sea salt is: "52% chloride, 31% sodium, 0.45% #
magnesium, 0.36% sulfur, 0.13% potassium, 0.12% calcium, and
0.015% iron, plus another eighty or more trace elements."

So 13% of sea salt is not sodium or cloride but is trace minerals. The only thing that ever got me excited about sea salt was it's lithium content, and you can get that in seaweeds. I think sea minerals are important but I'd rather get them from seaweeds.

-

It seems that the difference between organic and inorganic minerals is the addition of carbon and the way that they spin. Fascinating if true!
[www.freedrinkingwater.com]
"Organic minerals- these are once living, or are living and can bring life to cells. These contain carbon, and their electrons spin clockwise, just like those of the human body. Additionally, these cells can form an ionic bond with the body and can easily break down into materials to help with bodily function, such as tissue repair.

Inorganic materials- these were never living, without carbon and cannot bring life to cells. The body treats these metals like toxins and are tightly held together; they cannot be easily broken down. And, their electrons spin counterclockwise, out of sync with the rest of the body."

Also, I didn't know that babies shouldn't be given salt (according to a UK government FAQs on salt):
[www.food.gov.uk]
"Very young babies cannot excreet sodium cloride through their kidneys, which gives rise to the advice that salt should not be added to baby foods."

very interesting discussion

i hope it is continued

Lillianswan Wrote:
-------------------------------------------------------
> Yes, they used table salt in the experiment, the
> article was about table salt. How would sea salt
> have caused less problems? Are you still thirsty
> after consuming sea salt, I've heard that the
> minerals balance the cellular fluid better.
>
> Yes, our bodies can tolerate a tiny amount of
> poison in a saline eyewash, it can also tolerate
> the tiny amount of cyanide in flax and almonds.

That's not a true comparison, cyanide is not an vital part of our body chemistry, Sodium and chloride are. Not much more then a small amount of cyanide is fatal quickly. Salt is over-consumed by a vast part of our population on a regular basis, it causes many health problems but is not fatal in of itself. I would venture a guess that salt intake could be immediately fatal but only in unreasonably vast amounts.
>
> Ha, ha I should have realized that salt disolves
> in water. Thanks for catching that! But do you
> think that salt is actually absorbed by the body
> and becomes part of the cells?

Yes, I do. Since our body is comprised of 75% hydrogen & oxygen, most of that is in the form of water within our cells, and salt dissolves in water, it seems logical. I'll post scientific articles to give you links to back that claim later. I would be happy to read any scientifically based links you provide to prove otherwise.
>
> -
>
> Table salt is 60.663% elemental chlorine and
> 39.337% sodium or 99.9% composed of these
> elements.
>
> Sea salt is: "52% chloride, 31% sodium, 0.45% #
> magnesium, 0.36% sulfur, 0.13% potassium, 0.12%
> calcium, and
> 0.015% iron, plus another eighty or more trace
> elements."
>
> So 13% of sea salt is not sodium or cloride but is
> trace minerals. The only thing that ever got me
> excited about sea salt was it's lithium content,
> and you can get that in seaweeds. I think sea
> minerals are important but I'd rather get them
> from seaweeds.
>
Yes, sea salt has trace minerals, it is one of the reasons I prefer it as well.
I also regularly add dulse and other sea veggies to my salads. Our nutritional preferences are just that, preferences. Again, I have not seen any scientific evidence that our bodies would not breakdown the sea salt molecule into usable trace minerals.

> -
>
> It seems that the difference between organic and
> inorganic minerals is the addition of carbon and
> the way that they spin. Fascinating if true!
> [www.freedrinkingwater.com]
> 25-water-organic-inorganic-minerals.htm
> "Organic minerals- these are once living, or are
> living and can bring life to cells. These contain
> carbon, and their electrons spin clockwise, just
> like those of the human body. Additionally, these
> cells can form an ionic bond with the body and can
> easily break down into materials to help with
> bodily function, such as tissue repair.
>
> Inorganic materials- these were never living,
> without carbon and cannot bring life to cells. The
> body treats these metals like toxins and are
> tightly held together; they cannot be easily
> broken down. And, their electrons spin
> counterclockwise, out of sync with the rest of the
> body."
>

But that is a side argument. There is a select group of organic minerals on earth. A mineral can not be converted from one to the other, as your linked article stated. Outside of coal oil shale, and tar sand, organic minerals are rare. Carbon is the only organic mineral found in our bodies in any great quantity. Please try and find some scientific data about the electron spin direction. It would be an interesting read, but that link was to a site that was a lot more sales pitch then science.

> Also, I didn't know that babies shouldn't be given
> salt (according to a UK government FAQs on salt):
> [www.food.gov.uk]
> hloride.pdf


> "Very young babies cannot excreet sodium cloride
> through their kidneys, which gives rise to the
> advice that salt should not be added to baby
> foods."

I didn't know this either. The nutritional absorption limitations of infants is not something I know much about. Although it was a simplified explanation, did you notice that the report in that link discussed absorption of sodium and chloride separately, and described how important they are to life?

Thanks again, Lillian. Fun stuff!

I don't know about the direction of spin, ( that does seems far-fetched - direction of spin relative to what?) but photosynthesis attaches enzymes to minerals. But sea salt might have gone through plants at some point, so who knows if it has enzymes attached to it.

[www.healmarketplace.com]
Inorganic Mineral from the Earth + Photosynthesis = Organic Minerals from Plants which provide Protein and Enzymes for animals and humans.
The animal kingdom does not possess the ability to perform photosynthesis, therefore must rely on the plant kingdom to prepare its food.

Any form of processing nature's foods (such as pasteurization, cooking, adding preservatives, etc.) breaks the bonds between the food components and their attached enzymes as well as destroys the enzyme. The result is inorganic or denatured food components and thus inorganic food.

The enzyme must be alive and attached to the mineral or food component in order for the body to utilize it. The enzyme acts as a "passport" to get the mineral into the cell of the body and aids in the cell's utilization of that mineral. Raw foods are living and thus produce life in the body; because they have intact enzymes they are organic. Enzymes are catalysts - substances which help the body work more efficiently in utilizing food for life maintaining purposes.

An example of an inorganic substance is table salt. It is simply sodium and chloride. No enzymes, thus it is dead and the body cannot use it. Our bodies cannot attach an enzyme to inorganic substances, except at great cost. It is only the plant kingdom, through the process of photosynthesis, that can attach enzymes to inorganics and make them living or organic.

[www.healthspas.co.za]
As humans, there is only one way that we can fully access minerals on a cellular level and that is through the consumption of offerings from the plant kingdom. We do not possess the ability to perform photosynthesis, therefore we must rely on the plant kingdom to prepare (chemically assemble) our foods (ingredients). Plants, through the process of photosynthesis attach enzymes to inorganic minerals found in soil or water and can make them living or organic minerals. In other words, the attached enzymes act as a “passport” to assist the transfer of the minerals into the cells of the human body and aid in the cells utilization of the delivered minerals. The key here is that the enzyme must be active and attached to the mineral in order for the body to utilize it. . .

Raw foods have active enzymes and thus directly assist the production of life processes in the body. Because they have intact/active enzymes they are chemically organic. Enzymes are catalysts; in this case, the catalysts are substances which help the body work more efficiently in utilizing food for life maintaining purposes.

An example of an inorganic substance is table salt. It is simply sodium and chloride. No enzymes, thus it is enzymatically inactive and the body cannot use it. Our bodies cannot attach an enzyme to inorganic substances (minerals), except at great cost to our health.

Remember, it is only the plant kingdom, through its various living and developing processes, that can attach enzymes to inorganic substances and make them chemically bonded, active and organic.



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 08/15/2008 01:55AM by Lillianswan.

This is interesting. This is a completely different definition of organic minerals from the what I thought. Do a google search for organic minerals, and you'll see what I mean. Thank you for the links. I need to study this further, and will respond more when I can, but for now, I say:

The first site is confusing. The Doctor makes claims about about minerals, including salt, but does not back up his claims with any detail. He then switches back to a more general argument about food. He then changes to detail claims about acid/alkaline. I'll agree that the acid/alkaline info seems to be correct, but taht does not attest to the accuracy of the mineral section. Unfortunately, he lists no sources or reference.

The second site seems very well written, but list sources in book form. I will definitely need some time to study this info in better detail.



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 08/15/2008 02:31AM by swimmer.

I had no clue about the details of photosynthesis before but it really seems exciting, it's like watching creation in action or something. I'm glad I read about this. Attaching enzymes to things!

I do have salt in my house but I don't eat it.

I use table salt for playdough and laundry disinfectant/bleach and someone gave me a jar of celtic sea salt and I use it for magic, who wants to use table salt for magic.

It's a little frustrating. I still have not found any scientific studies to prove the theory you've posted.

The first link is useless as science, as I mentioned. Also, I give no credit to someone who makes unfounded blanket statements blaming people for their misfortunes.

"There are two reasons for disease, or lack of health 1) Ignorance 2) Laziness"

Such statements show an incredible amount of ignorance as to the causes of diseases, and human suffering. And a total lack of understanding of genetics.

But I digress...

The second link is a good description, but I can not find the full texts of any of his sources. I have not found anything but descriptions and statements. No articles offer any proof in the form of tests, statistical data or subject research.

None of the scientific sites describing the photosynthesis process in a comprehensive article mentions this theory at all. Have you found any?

Here is what I mean from a personal point of view. I know two consecutive blood tests showed signs of low chloride. I had the symptoms of a chloride deficiency. After adding sea salt to my diet, the symptoms subsided and blood tests showed better numbers. The increased chloride in my blood has a high probability of coming from the chloride in the salt, as it was the only dietary difference. Blood tests are verifiable, empirical data. The effects on my symptoms was both observable, and verifiable. However, I am only one, not a good test sampling, and I do not live under what I would consider research quality experimental conditions.

The authors of these articles also seem to be making unsupported claims about humans not absorbing the minerals from salt. All I need is for one of these articles to show me data that salt is not broken down by our bodies and absorbed. So far I have not found any data to support the claim that it is not. A theory should be the beginning of science discovery, not the basis for definitive statements.



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 08/15/2008 05:21AM by swimmer.