Himalayan salt

[Dancing David]

Thanks Dilb.

It would be interesting to try KCl, since potassium is quite beneficial. I think though, and please correct me if I'm wrong, we need more amounts of sodium than potassium in our diet?

We need both in our diet, in most case more sodium than potasium. Both are essential to nerve conduction and your heart will stop if you don't have enough, hypertremia? I was speaking to a food scientist about the K-Cl and he said that the chloride is also implicated in high blood pressure and that therefore, I as a salt sensitive person should watch it as well.

I am not sure what his degree was in , he worked making foods for a large name brand national company designing common table foods.

 

[clarsct]

I would find it hard to believe that you don't get enough sodium in a regular diet. Sodium is a relatively ubiquitous element to be found in the foods we eat. If you eat foods high in MSG, Sodium Benzoate, or frozen or pre-processed foods, you probably get more than enough. If you eat a balanced diet, you probably get plenty. If you are an athelete, that's why gatorade is so damned salty, donchya know.

Himilayan salt? Bah. Just eat healthy and exercise. Whoops...that takes work..my bad...

 

[neil]

Our food typically contains quite pure NaCl sometimes with a bit of iodine added. I rarely add any salt to my food, but do eat about a gram of KCl most weeks. We typically get about 30 grams of NaCl per week, so a potassium deficiency is likely adding one gram per week of KCl, but 30 grams of KCl per week would likely be slightly toxic for some of us. I recently read that a gram or two of magnessium, and zinc suppliment would also be helpful, but who are you going to believe? Neil

 

[Diamond]

We humans have a very sophisticated evolutionary mechanism for maintaining a good salt balance - too much we get thirsty, too little and we feel lethargic and food seems tasteless. I'm not convinced that adding salt to food is justified because it just makes us thirsty and doesn't improve the taste of the food.

The only exceptions are the very old and very young. Babies haven't developed their salt balance and if fed too much salt in processed foods made for adults, can cause severe problems or even death (I've read about a case recently where this happened). In old people, the taste buds aren't as efficient, so they can over-salt food leading to high blood pressure problems.

There is a public campaign at the moment about the dangers of salt - generally speaking its government sponsored pseudoscience at its finest.

If Himalayan salt contains 84 elements and is "pure" I wonder what impure salt would be like....there can't be too many naturally occurring elements left in the periodic table.

 

[luchog]

Just for something to do, I did a quick browse through the Periodic Table.

of the 118 listed elements, one of them (118) has been determined to not actually exist; 27 are synthetic, and do not exist outside the laboratory or nuclear reactor; and 6 are noble gasses that do not form any sort of compounds, let alone solid ones.

That leaves exactly 84 elements; the number claimed by the "Himalayan salt" woos.

Of those, a substantial number are radioactive. Quite a few are tolerable only in very small doses, and only when compounded with certain other elements, usually in the form of a salt. A few are heavy metals that are highly toxic in pretty much all forms, and which are tolerable only in very minute doses. A few of these are cumulatively toxic.

Make all the claims you want about that "84 element Himalayan salt", but I'm not touching the filthy stuff. I'll stick with my nice, safe, refined sea salt.

 

[fuelair]

That was my point

I doubt anyone has ever made copletely pure soudium chloride. Even the very purest reagent have impurities.

IF it has 84 elements represented in it, it can't be particularly pure - and if it doesn't actually have 84 elements they are what we chemists like to call lying.

 

[geni]

IF it has 84 elements represented in it, it can't be particularly pure - and if it doesn't actually have 84 elements they are what we chemists like to call lying.

Spent much time dealing with organic papers?

 

[epepke]

of the 118 listed elements, one of them (118) has been determined to not actually exist; 27 are synthetic, and do not exist outside the laboratory or nuclear reactor; and 6 are noble gasses that do not form any sort of compounds, let alone solid ones.

The noble gases actually do form some compounds, but not many.

 

[geni]

The noble gases actually do form some compounds, but not many.

No reported compound for helium and neon. there was one suggested for argon when I last cheacked but that was a while back.

 

[epepke]

No reported compound for helium and neon. there was one suggested for argon when I last cheacked but that was a while back.

Xenon fluoride. Actually, several fluorine compounds. Fairly stable under laboratory conditions.

There are theoretical reasons to think that neon might form a coumpound with fluorine, but none has clearly been detected.

Helium can form a compound with hydrogen and fluorine, but only in pressurized solid helium.

 

[Euromutt]

I concur with SezMe and Eos. Woo, to the core.

Except for one nitpick: Table salt, Sodium Chloride, is vastly different from many other salts, like Sodium Carbonate, Calcium Carbide, and Magnesium Sulfate.
I would say that one table salt is probably very much the same and any other table salt.

I recall reading years ago--in a role-playing game supplement of all things--that a salt, chemically speaking, is an acid in which one more hydrogen atoms have been replaced by a metal. Thus, table salt (NaCl) is to hydrochloric acid (HCl) what copper sulfate (CuSO4) is to sulphuric acid (H2SO4). Still, you wouldn't want to ingest copper sulfate, since it's rather toxic, which is why it's commonly used as a pesticide in vineyards, among other things (at least, it was back in the 1980s). MSG (C5H8NO4Na) is also a salt (of glutamic acid, C5H9NO4), and potassium chloride's been mentioned, but in common parlance, "salt" is understood to mean sodium chloride.

Oh hey, check this out:

When we speak of Himalayan Crystal Salt™, we are referring to only one specific crystal salt, “The Original®”, coming from one specific location in Pakistan and has been the subject of comprehensive medical research as featured in the book Water&Salt - The Essence of Life, by Dr. Barbara Hendel, MD and Peter Ferreira. Original Himalayan Crystal Salt™ is more than sodium and chloride.

Oh, dear.
Call me old-fashioned, but I'm not placing my trust in someone who doesn't know enough chemistry to know that "chloride" does not exist independently. The term "crystal salt" is also meaningless, as all NaCl has a crystalline structure.
Note also the failure to identify the specific location in Pakistan. This is suspicious because the best known location where salt is mined in Pakistan is Khewra, which lies 100 miles south of Islamabad, and is nowhere near the Himalayas. I guess that "Original Punjabi Crystal Salt™" wouldn't have quite the same ring to it.

Original Himalayan Crystal Salt can actually be viewed as food. When we speak of salt, and as we scrutinize its properties, we mean salt in its original form: holistic, wholesome, unaltered, natural salt, as it has crystallized in the Earth over millions of years.

Just like the stuff mined in Cleveland, Ohio, then. Again, I guess "Original Lake Erie Crystal Salt™" doesn't sound exotic enough. (I'm getting flashbacks to the P&T:BS bottled water episode here, where "Everest" drinking water was shown to come from the municipal water supply of Corpus Christi, TX.)

Original Himalayan Crystal Salt contains all the elements of which the human body is comprised. From the periodic table of elements we are familiar with 94 natural elements (stable as well as unstable). Apart from inert gases, all of these elements (84) can be found in crystal salt. Hence, crystal salt contains all natural minerals and trace elements that are found in the human body.

I'd been wondering whether they were using the word "element" to mean something other than what is commonly understood, but evidently not. So, if I understand correctly, "Original Himalayan Crystal Salt™" contains such fun stuffs as lead, cadmium, strontium, you name it. And this is supposed to be beneficial to my health?

 

[Oldpossum]

Hello all.

Another professional Chemist votes Total Woo here too!

Although IIRC, the proportion of minerals found in Sea Salt, is almost the same as the proportions, that the same minerals are found in, in vertebrate blood.

 

[MRC_Hans]

I use it. It tastes quite nice.

Health benefits? Don't be daft.

Hans