Switch your salt to 'Real Salt' - A simple hack for health

Hi Everyone,

I hope you're keeping well! Apologies for the delay between posts - I've been quite busy over the past few weeks. I'm working on a longer post on the importance of maintaining stable blood sugar - and what you can do to facilitate that - but in the meantime, I wanted to share with you one of most simple hacks or tweaks that you can make to your diet, to improve your health.

Summary: Switching from using white table salt to a high quality unrefined salt (note, your average sea salt probably doesn't qualify - see below) provides a range of important trace minerals, and can reduce the potential negative effects of too much sodium. These are some great healthy salts:

"Real Salt"

Himalayan Pink Salt

Another Pink Salt on Amazon

Full post: White table salt, the kind that comes in those big cardboard cylinders at the grocery store, and in salt shakers on most dining tables and in most restaurants, is a highly refined - and often bleached - version of natural salt, that removes a wide range of trace minerals to leave only sodium and chloride.

It turns out that many of those trace minerals are important for our health. Certain unrefined salts, including pink Himalayan mine salts, contain as many as 60-80 additional minerals, such as magnesium, zinc, manganese, and potassium, to name a few.

Further, consuming large amounts of pure sodium - without these additional minerals to provide balance - can contribute to health problems such as high blood pressure. The CDC notes that "Americans consume too much sodium and not enough potassium" and that "consuming high amounts of sodium and low amounts of potassium can increase risk of heart disease and stroke."

So, a simple and easy hack for better health is to replace your traditional table salt with a good natural, unrefined salt. My personal favorite is 'Real Salt', which comes from a salt mine in Redmond, Utah. I like their 'fine' variety, which you can put in salt shakers, and on salads, vegetables, sweet potatoes, etc. You can buy it on Amazon here.

Then, this is my favorite coarse salt, which I put on meat. In addition to be more healthy, it tastes great! Having a high quality natural salt can definitely take the flavor of your food to the next level. If you want to buy a similar product on Amazon, this is a good one.

Some have even argued that the idea that 'salt is bad' applies only to refined and processed white table salt, and that as long as you are getting sufficient potassium - contained in many foods including bananas, spinach, avocado, sweet potatoes, and salmon - you may be able to eat as much salt as you want. In fact, salt is critical to health, so just as it is possible to have unhealthily high sodium levels, it is also possible to be salt deficient, which can lead to various problems. Personally, given how much water I drink and how much I sweat from exercising and using the sauna, I actually supplement with additional 'Real Salt' by putting a few shakes into a glass of water once or twice a day.

IMPORTANT: Note that, sadly, recent evidence suggests that up to 90% of commercial 'sea salts' contain microplastics (tiny plastic particles; another sad reminder of how polluted our oceans have become). So, the source of your salt is important. Ancient, unpolluted, mines like the ones in Redmond and the Himalayas avoid the problem of microplastics.

What about iodine?

One other thing to note - most commercial white refined table salt has iodine added to it. This is done because iodine is an essential mineral, and iodine deficiencies - leading most notably to goitres and cognitive issues - are fairly common. Indeed, iodine is important to thyroid health, and sluggish thyroids are a common problem (which I'll cover in a future post). However, the evidence suggests that there is ultimately not enough iodine in iodized salt to provide the necessary amount anyway, so the recommendation is instead to eat foods high in iodine, including in particular, fish, shellfish, and seaweed.

Furthermore, I hope it's obvious that not everyone needs the same amount of iodine. In fact some people have overactive thyroids, in which case supplemental iodine can be dangerous.

So what to do? If you think you may have a sluggish thyroid - some symptoms include fatigue, feeling cold, and losing hair - and would benefit from added iodine, you can either try to eat more seafood and sea vegetables (of course, sadly, the same concerns about ocean pollution can apply), or take a small and inexpensive iodine supplement (one capsule a day should be sufficient, unless you have real thyroid issues - in which case, again, stay tuned for a future post). In my opinion taking a little supplemental iodine is a pretty good idea for most people, as again, iodine is an essential mineral, iodine deficiency is common, and the iodine added to table salt is not sufficient to address the problem. This would certainly be a much better approach than trying to consume lots of unhealthy refined white salt.

Thanks for reading and to your health!

Gavin