Salt - table salt - is wickedly bad for you. So sinister, you should read this. Maybe you completely cut out refined sugar, additives and processed food from your diet, and you’re still not feeling great. What salt are you using?
Refined salt is the cheap stuff otherwise known as table salt. Right now my mother is shouting from across the Pacific, but it’s all just sodium chloride! Well Ma, that's the problem, isn't it?!
Our bodies are not designed to process sodium chloride straight up. It is so foreign to the human body that when absorbed, is likely to cause oedema (water retention), high blood pressure, scary degenerative diseases from your nightmares, and super overtime in your kidneys. Kidneys don't like that.
Our bodies like to be alkaline (7.4pH). When one’s diet (cough*meat eating*cough*processed foods*cough) or emotional stress pushes us into acidic territory, we rely on mineral stores to return our system to normal. The stores are in our bones, the marrow.
But our body’s super smart. When your mineral stores are low, you’ll crave salt, because salt is one of the greatest sources of important minerals and trace minerals. This is where the good salt/bad salt road split: If the salt craving is answered with refined salt, the body never gets what it needs. Its craving will be relentless, and only a matter of time before there’s a train wreck.
Refined Salt
To make table salt, sea salt is treated with lime or caustic soda to remove the magnesium (it fetches a higher price when sold separately to industry). Most of the other valuable elements in the sea salt are also lost or extracted. The manufacturers then add an anti-caking agent such as aluminum silicate or sodium prussiate, bleaches and even white sugar.
Proven Link to MS
Scientists put T helper cells from poor mice in contact with table salt and it totally freaked them out, scientifically speaking. They saw a dramatic increase in the number of Th17 cells – cells which promote inflammation. They concluded that these poor mice were likely to develop a severe form of a disease associated with multiple sclerosis in humans.
The Good Stuff
Unrefined salt is a whole other story. There’s a reason why it was as valuable as gold at the height of the Egyptian and Roman Empires. Soldiers were paid in salt. Good workers were ‘worth their salt’.
During the middle ages prisoners were tortured to death by being fed a diet void of salt. I can’t substantiate this ‘fact’, but it was so Monty Python I had to include it.
Our bones are hollow in the center. Marrow fills the void, blood cells are made there. Marrow is covered with strands of calcium salts, in a way that mimics the weave in rope. It’s the salt crystals that makes bone hard, not the calcium.
Unrefined salt is also known as Celtic Sea Salt, Himalayan Salt, Dead Sea Salt, and Unrefined Sea Salt.
How About This Killer Piece of Trivia
Researchers at Australian National University found a way to kill malaria parasites using salt – straight up sodium chloride. Not even poor little killer infected lavae can withstand refined salt!
Try This Experiment
Put a teaspoon of refined table salt in a glass of water and stir... and stir and stir because that white milky color won't go away. It's sand and calcium. It adheres to the lining of veins and arteries and has been linked to arthritis and, of course, all the diseases in your nightmares.