“Dear Pharmacist,
I crave salty foods. I read in one of your books that you don’t think white table salt is good for people. How can you say this when every restaurant in America has salt on the table? What do you suggest?”
–D.W. Ft. Lauderdale, Florida
Answer: Hold on a sec here, I never said salt is bad for you! The part of my book that you didn’t read yet, fully explains the differences between high-quality sea salt and table salt, which happen to be massive. Both sea salt and table salt have a backbone of “sodium chloride” which the body requires. Healthy sea salts are never adulterated like regular table salt, so they retain healthy minerals like copper, iodine, potassium, magnesium, chromium, zinc, iron and others.
Table salt is so refined that I consider it a food additive because certain brands look virtually like the same industrial chemical used to de-ice highways. No kidding. Sea salt, on the other hand, is not synthesized in a lab. It is essentially water from a sea (or river) that gets evaporated and purified. This type of dried sea salt fully retains healthy minerals that you need for your very survival, and for normal thyroid, muscle, heart and pancreatic function. These types of salts won’t raise your blood pressure to the extent that table salt will. There are two salts that I recommend you use in your home, from now on. You can buy these at health food stores, Whole Foods or online from high-quality salt miners such as Salt Works or Real Salt, available internationally:
1. Himalayan salt: When it’s mined properly from pristine salt veins in the Himalayan Mountains in Pakistan, it contains the widest variety of minerals, over 83 kinds of minerals. Good Himalayan salt will look slightly pink because it contains a lot of iron.
2. Celtic sea salt or French Grey Sea Salt: This salt has does not have quite as many different minerals in it as the Himalayan sort, however, it has the highest content (gram for gram) of minerals.
It’s impossible to get nutritious minerals from typical white table salt and yet people debate this with me pointing out that their salt is healthy because it has been “iodized.” Yeah, so what? Someone decided to put iodine back in after stripping it naked in the first place? This is your idea of healthy? You are more likely to be able to lick your elbow than to get any sort of nutrition from white table salt!
Iodine is very good for you, but the amount of table salt you’d have to ingest in order to get healthy amounts of iodine would probably be the end of you! I’m just saying to stop rationalizing the use of table salt, because it provides iodine. I’m also saying that you can’t lick your elbow!
Suzy Cohen, has been a licensed pharmacist for over 30 years and believes the best approach to chronic illness is a combination of natural medicine and conventional. She founded her own dietary supplement company specializing in custom-formulas, some of which have patents. With a special focus on functional medicine, thyroid health and drug nutrient depletion, Suzy is the author of several related books including Thyroid Healthy, Drug Muggers, Diabetes Without Drugs, and a nationally syndicated column.
