I’m heating up some spaghetti sauce and happened to look at the ingredients list on the jar. One of the ingredients is “lower sodium natural sea salt”. Wah?
Wait a minute here. Salt is salt, isn’t it? The mineral called Halite. Chemical formula NaCl. As far as I know, the only difference between “lower sodium natural sea salt” and plain old run of the mill table salt is that sea salt has larger crystals and perhaps a few trace minerals that aren’t found in table salt.
The only thing I can think of that would make sea salt lower in sodium is the fact that the crystals are larger and it won’t pack as tightly. There is more air between the crystals. So a specific measure (pinch, teaspoon, tablespoon) of “lower sodium natural sea salt” would indeed have less sodium than an identical measure of table salt simply because there is less of it.
No. Sea salt contains other salts than sodium chloride - for example, salts of calcium, potassium, magnesium. That’s at least one way in which salt can have a lower sodium content.
In terms of nutrition, salt is salt, at least by weight. The other salts Mangetout mentions are present in insufficient quantities to have an effect on sodium levels.
One thing sea salt does is it’s usually finer than typical salt, which gives more surface area for a given weight and can get you more salt flavor with less actual salt. Dissolved in spaghetti sauce, I don’t see how that could be a factor, though, so I’d be more likely to go with “we reduced our salt content and decided to use sea salt to cash in on this trendy marketing phrase while we’re at it” rather than “sea salt actually contains less sodium”.
http://oceansflavor.com/faq.php
They claim its got 60% of the sodium atoms replaced with potassium atoms.
Well perhaps if they collect the water from valley that is high in potassium ?
but then it wouldn’t be sea salt, it would be land salt. Well we could equally call it ‘land salt’.
Not sure, it seems that they may fortify the potassium artificially ?
as they have two levels…
Personally, I like to have natural ground Sea Pepper with my ground Sea Salt.
“Gourmet” salts have become a big thing in recent years (an acquaintance even sells a selection in his store). There are black, pink, orange, and other colors around. Obvously, there’s other stuff in there besides salt, as noted above. The biblical saying about “salt that has lost is savour” is clearly referring to such other-ingredient salt, likely from salt deposits from old seabeds or salt lake beds that have lost much of their sodium chloridde content.
However, since sodium chloride is what gives table salt its flavor, reducing the sodium content is going to make such salt “lose its savour”. People would likely throw that out even if the Bible didn’t say they would.
Except that the flavor of salt comes from the chlorine ion. In theory, another chloride could substitute (that’s why there are potassium chloride salt substitutes), but the element bonded to the chlorine may add flavors of its own.
I’m suspicious of this. If all the flavor came from the chloride ion, then potassium chloride “salt substitute” ought to taste just like table salt. It doesn’t. Moreover, you ought to be able to engineer other Salt Substitutes that have different ions or complexes in place of the sodium that “taste just like salt”, but I’ve never seen any.
There’s also ammonium chloride, which is used in salt licorice. It definitely tastes “salty,” but also ammonia-y, and would not work as a generic salt substitute.
Where do you think ‘regular salt’ comes from? It is either from the sea or from rock salt, which is itself evaporite from ancient seas. In either case it will consist overwhelmingly of sodium chloride, with very small amount of other salts as impurities.
My wife accidentally bought a can of “low sodium salt” recently. Not sea salt, just the regular kind.
Basically, it was fluffier than regular salt, so an equal sized spoonful simply contained less salt. Nice gimmick, up there with watered-down “light” beer. Just get the regular stuff and use less of it.
Identical (as opposed to very similar), probably not, but, by the same token, there is no reason to expect that that they would differ very much, still less that ancient oceans would have systematically contained a lesser proportion of trace (non-NaCl) salts than current oceans do. The amounts of the relevant elements on Earth has not really changed. It is quite possible that any given sample of rock salt will contain slightly more or slightly less of other metals and anions than any given sample of modern sea salt will. In either case, except in special circumstances, the amount that is not NaCl is negligible.
OK, but now we’re way off track anyway. If the sea salt contains 95% NaCl and refined table salt contains 99% NaCl, then ‘Lower Sodium Sea Salt’ is correct, even though it’s pretty meaningless and misleading.
Many years ago, I worked at a place that had salt substitute in the cafeteria, so I tried it. That stuff was VILE! I found out later that it was actually potassium.
Lithium was used as a salt substitute at one time too, but found to be too toxic.
That we cannot beat up those people is proof that we live in a nanny state rather than something out of 1984, because if Big Brother were anything like my big brother he’d help us beat them up.
Table salt is generally more refined than what is labelled as sea salt, so I imagine it is much closer to pure NaCl. Not that it matters in the end, as +/1 5% or so is meaningless when I’m just shaking something on food/
Much more important is the density of salt. Kosher salt, for example, weighs less than table salt (sometimes half as much) so a cup is going to have less sodium in it. Important if you are pickling, making a brine, etc.
Just get the regular stuff and use less of it.