So it is 50% sugar-free?
If you wash it down with some gluten-free soda you can’t go wrong.
Has she said anything about the freshness? There is at least one customer where I work who is very, very concerned that her salt be fresh - none of that old, stale salt.
Lady, it’s a fucking rock. The salt crystals, whether in a box labeled “Morton’s” or labeled “Mined by Barefoot Monks Pink Himalayan Chakra Purifying Nummy-Bits”, is likely millions of years old. There’s no “best buy” date, unless you’re talking “end of the universe”.
Pure sodium chloride is white, as we all know. Himalayan salt is pink because of stuff in it that’s not salt. Or, as another poster described it: slightly dirty table salt.
In some people high blood pressure is “sensitive” to salt, meaning the more salt they eat the more it will rise. A lot of other peoples’ high blood pressure is NOT salt sensitive, so it doesn’t matter if they cut back or not.
How do you know which group you are in? Reduce your salt intake. If your BP goes down you’re a “salt sensitive” and restricting it may (or may not) be a good thing. If there’s no change you’re not salt sensitive and, as far as we know, there’s no reason to cut back in that case.
Himalayan sea salt? I thought sea salt was obtained by setting seawater out in pans to evaporate and collecting the residue.
Where are they finding seawater in the Himalayas?
Most of what is now the Himalayas and its foothills used to be the sea floor before the Indian plate hit the Eurasian one.
The word “sea” does not appear in this thread prior to your post.
ETA: my mistake, I see it now in Jackmanii’s quote of something. It’s just an error, I think. It’s usually referred to as just Himalayan salt.
That strikes me as accurate but irrelevant. My understanding is that you don’t get to call it sea salt unless it was harvested from seawater brine within living memory. Have I been misled?
Thats basically what Himalayan salts are anyway, the seawater from the ocean and the later shallow seas evaporated leaving behind salt deposits.
I just found this -FACT OR MYTH: SODIUM RAISES BLOOD PRESSURE:
It doesn’t have enough of the metals you need lots of (calcium, iron… and so on )
and the only two interesting things it does have is is lithium and sulfur.
The lithium is probably 1/10th of the strength you need to get an RDI from it, that is its meaningless to consider the lithium in the pink salt important,
and the sulfur is probably not in the correct form - you need to eat sulfur containing amino acids not mineral sulfur??
They don’t have to be amino acids - both thiamine/B1 and biotin/B7 are essential vitamins that contain sulfur but are not amino acids. I think the more correct term is “organosulfur compounds”.
Well sure, if you believe in all that ‘science’ crap. 
Salt is salt is salt. Everything else about it is pure marketing nonsense designed to empty your wallet, like most homeopathic bullshit.
As far as putting it on your food: my medicated BP is around 130/70 and I salt anything that needs it.
Jared Diamond in"the World Until Yesterday" spends a chapter on salt and high blood pressure. The natives of interior New Guinea had very limited access to salt and blood pressure problems were unknown. The current generation with a modern lifestyle pours on the salt like westerners and has the same high blood pressure issues.
Basically the human body has evolved mechanisms to retain salt in the face of a significant lack that only recent times has ameliorated. Like obesity, now our problem is the opposite - these now overdo the processes they were meant to sustain. Keeping acceptable BP with low sodium results now in excess BP for some people. The suggestion is that there are multiple mechanisms so no one simple solution to fix this, other than drastic reduction of salt intake.
One problem he mentioned (as will every nutritionist) is that many prepared foods have a hidden large amount of salt. It is added to almost every recipe to improve taste. Avoiding adding salt is only half the battle.
And yes, sodium chloride is sodium chloride no matter where it comes from. The only benefit of miscellaneous micro-contaminants is if you perhaps live in a remote mountain plateau and don’t otherwise have a sufficiently varied diet.
So a higher salt intake is the ONLY difference between a primitive lifestyle and a modern lifestyle?
:smack:
Methinks that your critical thinking skills need a tuneup.
This salt hypertension stuff confuses me.
FWIW here is a discussion with some critiques and responses to the critiques of that Lancet study.
The critique?
And the response? Basically “Is too.”
But what confuses me is the acceptance by both sides of urinary excretion as the gold standard marker of salt intake when the mechanism of salt-sensitivity hypertension (which as noted by Broomstick is variable in degree within the population) likely “is mainly attributable to an impaired renal capacity to excrete sodium (Na(+) )”
I am sure to be missing something but it seems to me that within the population that is likely to have salt-sensitive hypertension, however many they may be, urinary Na+ excretion may possibly be a particular poor marker of salt intake. Or is it assumed that some equilibrium must be reached, that after that what comes in must come out and urine is the only meaningful egress?
Feeling stupid here but would appreciate someone who actually understands talking me through it.
Also the article notes that very high salt intake is common across Asia but what does the diet of very high salt intake look like in America? Extremely high processed foods intake seems most likely to me, more than adding some salt to homemade stuff. If so could high salt intake be a marker for other issues related to a diet high in processed crap more than to the salt as the actual variable even in the hypertensive high salt intake population?
Seem to me like the straight dope here is a work still in progress.
Chefguy as a foodie do you hear anyone claiming that those trace elements change the flavor profile of the salt?
Himalayan Salt does taste noticeably different than regular salt (it has a rather tart almost lemony, aftertaste) and the Salt Mines are worth a visit, but I doubt it has much by the way of health benefits and would not be surprised if it has some adverse effects instead, since it contains some uncommon impurities, which turn the Salt nearly red.
@DSeid:Oh yes. See here for an example. About Us - The Meadow
The guy’s written a 300 page foodie book on the subtle distinctions of the various sorts. The store has quite a variety; each best paired with different dishes. They can even set you up with a 50-flavor starter set for a mere USD300. Note that each one of the 50 samples is tiny, so it’s barely a couple pounds of salt.
Trendy restaurants have “salmeliers” to recommend the perfect salt with the gentle overtones to best complement the chef’s creation du jour.
People claim all sorts of things. I can’t confirm or deny it, as I won’t waste the money to give it a shot. AK84 claims a lemony flavor for the Himalayan, and I can’t refute that. Whether that’s the salt, or how it was processed is up for argument. Most people who claim different flavors are doing so because the size of the salt flake is different, so they are getting a bigger salt blast on the tongue than with, say, the same amount of table salt.
Yeah, when you go to the actual Himalayan Salt mine, the red salt is so ubiquitous, that their gift shops sell you statutes, cups, plates and other things made of the stuff for about $1. Go to a restaurant and they tell you that because a dish uses real Himalayan salt, they charge the equivalent of $100 for it. Apparently the process of driving the salt up the Motorway causes it to become more expensive.:rolleyes:
[QUOTE=Chefguy]
People claim all sorts of things. I can’t confirm or deny it, as I won’t waste the money to give it a shot. AK84 claims a lemony flavor for the Himalayan, and I can’t refute that. Whether that’s the salt, or how it was processed is up for argument. Most people who claim different flavors are doing so because the size of the salt flake is different, so they are getting a bigger salt blast on the tongue than with, say, the same amount of table salt.
[/QUOTE]
The taste is absolutely because of the impurities. Himalayan Salt is typically not refined much, just cleaned and packaged. The same mines also produce salt for everyday use (these are the second largest mines in the world and have produced over 250 Million tonnes of the stuff over their lifetimes), and the difference is; Himalayan Salt, the salt they extracted which was not refined, regular salt; what was refined.
Another complication with using urine to measure salt intake is that urine isn’t the only way that the body sheds salt. It can also be lost in perspiration, which could easily be a confounding factor: People who exercise a lot will lose more salt in sweat, and will therefore have less in their urine… but maybe the real correlation there is that exercise reduces blood pressure.
Thanks for the information about the claimed flavor differences.