The majority of first world countries have sub-replacement fertility. First world population increases are mostly fueled by immigration from poorer countries.
Countries that don’t put all the population controlling additives into the water supply!
“Deiodizing” salt isn’t a thing. The issue is that only standard table salt has ever been iodized in the first place. When people stop using that in favor of sea salt, Himalayan salt, or kosher salt, then they don’t have any other way of getting iodine. It’s not easy to find as a vitamin supplement (dunno why), and I suspect that trying to iodize those other salts would ruin their texture, taste, or kosherness (?). Another factor, and this is one I haven’t verified so anyone in the know please chime in, is that the mountains of salt we ingest in processed food is also not iodized. I assume that’s for cost reasons first and foremost, if it’s really true, but maybe it would cause overdosing too.
Also a number of other trace minerals, including Selenium. However, unlike iodine, the other trace minerals are (mostly?) toxic with only a very small amount over the minimum required, which means that suggestions of water supplementation tend to go along the lines: we thought about it, but it’s obviously a bad idea.
Sea water contains plenty of iodine, as does seaweed. The process of selective crystallization used to produce “sea salt” tends to concentrate the iodine in the water, and purify the iodine out of the salt. It’s an unfortunate side effect of industrial salt production.
Salt is not subject to being approved by the local Rabbi. The salt is used for “koshering” meat, which is a dry-brining process.
You speak as though you’re disagreeing with me, but you’re pretty much saying what I said.
Hold the phone. Lithium was a revolutionary medicine for bipolar illness–it is a mood-stabilizer, a band-filter, as it were.
It is woefully ineffective for “depression,” unless it presents as part of manic-depression; depression alone (ie a different illness) is psychopharcologically treated differently.
FTR, lithium, although still in use I believe, is now considered a 3rd (4th?) generation medication. Also, FTR, it saved my life.
In any event, forced ingestion of “happy pills”–social control, right :)–won’t do squat for the vast majority of people without depression and without medication, since they don’t exist.
To extend on this little side note, the product we see is called “kosher salt” is merely large-grain salt, which makes it easier to wash off the meat after it is kashered (that’s the verb).
Although the Morton’s and Diamond Kosher Salt brands stay in business I presume because they are widely used by amateur and professional cooks, being easily grab-able by hand.
FWIW, people who use volume (as opposed to mass/weight) measurements for salt must take into account not only that the same volume of table salt is a lot more salt, but that the same applies to Morton and Diamond, which differ in grain size.
ETA on happy pills: Lithium is toxic as all get out. Anyone using it must have regular blood scans to monitor their blood levels or bad things happen.
Clinical doses of lithium are measured in hundreds of mgs.
The dosage for water to help prevent suicide would probably be a few mg per liter, or possibly measured in mcg per liter.
This article claims 40mcg/liter is the cutoff where benefits for certain health benefits start happening.
According to an article on this site, 730mcg to 10mg a day is the dose that lowers suicide rates.
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/51082171_Lithium_in_drinking_water_and_suicide_mortality
You’re talking about prescription doses of lithium.
As I understand it, the brain can use lithium as one tiny building block in neural cells. Those cells are healthier and stay more clean of junk, over the long run. Over time, a tiny amount in the diet helps you to have stronger reasoning powers and effectively which, by extension, means being able to choose to follow the path of reason rather than chemical imbalance - irregardless of what sort of chemical imbalance that may be. Instead of falling prey to hormones, you make a conscious choice more frequently.
On the other hand, a medical dosage (which is something like 100X the intake of lithium as what we’re talking about here), lithium goes from being a nutrient that’s available in the blood stream to be used as a building block, and instead starts to flood things over and blocks out some specific neural pathways, and prevents specific subcategories of chemical imbalance.
I’ll try to post cites later, since I’m sure that these descriptions are mostly meaningless as written, given how non-technical they are. But that is the basic gist. A nutritional dosage and a prescription dosage are two wildly different animals with two entirely different paths of operation.
True. Fluoride in water is the most efficient way to prevent one of the most common childhood diseases – tooth decay. An estimated 51 million school hours and 164 million work hours are lost each year due to dental-related illness. Community water fluoridation is so effective at preventing tooth decay
On the other hand, having known both people with autism and people with neural tube defects, my opinion (as a lay person) is that folks are probably better off erring on the side of a bit more folic acid rather than a bit less - although of course the very best thing would be to aim for an ideal dose.
Sea salt actually does contain iodine (along with a bunch of other non-sodium-chloride stuff). In fact, by and large, salt deposits all contain iodine to one degree or another (Himalayan pink salt contains damn near the entire naturally occurring part of the periodic table - fortunately, the really toxic stuff is in teeny tiny amounts), it’s just that a lot of them contain very low amounts.
The problem with iodine deficiency, historically, was seen in areas either far inland or up on top of mountains - areas where natural rain/water cycles tend to remove salt from the environment/soil and wash it downstream. People who lived by the sea, and who ate stuff from the sea, typically didn’t have iodine deficiencies because even though sea salt has lower amounts of iodine than iodized table salt it still contains enough to prevent such deficiencies. Eat lots of seafood and sea vegetables and use sea salt you’ll probably be OK.
As long as people consume large quantities of sea salt they probably won’t get an iodine deficiency. Other fancy types of salt might or might not be a problem. People on a low sodium diet might have trouble, so eating less of a salt that contains more iodine should do the trick for them.
Personally, I see the “rise” in depression as being a combination of better recognition of the problem, and due to certain cultural factors that have been intensified in recent decades but that would be quite the tangent.
A LOT of foods contain trace amounts of lithium. If you’re a normal person (that is, aren’t bipolar) eating a healthy diet with vegetables and beans will probably do the trick, especially if they’re grown on soil with adequate amounts of lithium in it. In fact, supplementing the soil we use to grow food with lithium might be a better way to go about boosting the levels in people.
As I said - a lot of other salt sources have iodine, including sea salt. Just not as much as commercially iodized salt. And yes, there ARE other sources: if it grows in the sea it has iodine in it. Vegetables grown in soil that contains iodine have it, and dairy and eggs have it IF the animals that produce them eat stuff that was grown in soil containing iodine - and that’s why upland/inland/mountain regions that used to have such problems with deficiencies. The soil in those places has had the iodine removed via natural processes like the water cycle and uptake by plants.
Commercially produced pure sodium chloride has no iodine in it, just as it contains no other non-salt things in it. Natural deposits of salt will have variable amounts of iodine, but that’s a problem because you could be getting somewhere between next to nothing to too much. Iodized table salt has the advantage of being a more standardized substance. If you eat the amount needed/advisable (neither too much nor too little) then you’ll get a proper amount of iodine with it. Less guesswork.
At a guess - not often needed (due to the ubiquity of iodized table salt) and it can be lethal in overdoses.
Depends on the source of salt in that processed food. “Sea salt” is becoming more and more common, possibly because it’s seen as more “natural” or “healthy”.
Actually, iodized salt is quite variable in its iodine content - a quick google indicates between 0.002% and 0.1% I couldn’t get numbers for sea salt, which is always said to be less and is going to vary all over the place anyway. Somewhere between a half and full teaspoon of iodized salt a day will supply all the iodine you need (unless you’re pregnant or nursing, which ups the requirement a bit - you might get enough from diet but that’s a case where supplementing might be a good thing). Trying to get enough from your diet…? Well, if you live in a coastal area and eat lots of seafood, sure. Or your plant portion of the diet grows in iodine-rich soil, and the animal products you eat come from animals eating stuff grown in iodine-rich soil (which is usually coastal/lowland areas)… You definitely can get enough without iodized table salt, that’s why a lot of people didn’t get goiters in the old days, but it’s less certain.
Rather like how some natural water sources are high in fluoride and some aren’t, leading to the discovery that people in areas where the water naturally contained higher amounts of fluoride had less tooth decay than other folks.
Sure, there ARE natural sources that are adequate, but knowing for sure whether or not you’re in such a location is a bit difficult for the average person to determine, and then there’s the problem if you’re not in such an area. Do you move? Or do we add trace amounts of iodine to the salt and fluoride to the water to improve things for everyone regardless of where they live or where their water and food comes from?