Analysis of Pink Salt

(Liz S) #1

So everyone is touting the Pink salt. I don’t get it. My background is in Chemistry and I just don’t understand the hype behind it, it is literally just contaminated salt. It has 84 trace minerals in it, we only use 16 trace minerals in our bodies. Not only that but it has lead, radioactive isotopes and mercury. And the trace minerals that we do use are in such small quantities that it doesn’t do much for us anyways. It’s normally quite expensive and taking a multivitamin or just eating a varied diet should be more than enough to get these trace minerals. So I don’t understand why it is suggested so much. Can someone explain this? Is it the taste? This article explains the contamination and has links to the spectral analysis.

https://sciencebasedmedicine.org/pink-himalayan-sea-salt-an-update/

(Doug) #2

I think it looks cool. Do get some other subtle flavors in it, and the relatively large crystals are more satisfying to suck on, versus regular granulated salt.

(Tammi) #3

With you on the skepticism. I think the hype profits a few with damage to the wallets of many.

But just to the wallets. I haven’t yet seen any science to suggest it’s damaging to the body in any significant way. So if it’s salt and tastes good and does no damage, it’s akin to “chicken soup for the keto soul”

(Jennifer) #4

I like to know where my contaminated salt comes from. Lol. Not sure it makes a difference, but I really like Celtic salt from France, Real salt from Utah and found another neat one from Australia called Murray River Pink Salt Flakes.

I guess I’m turning into a salt snob.

(Duncan Kerridge) #5

I don’t believe the hype either, I think it’s as much a con as the term superfood. However, I do use rock salt rather than sea salt - the sea’s pretty grubby these days. Regular rock salt is a damn sight cheaper than the pink stuff.

(CharleyD) #6

Because ancient seabed sodium is better than fresh sea salt? Because reasons? :sweat_smile:

I think it fits into the whole shotgun approach to many other aspects of our WOE. Or put another way, I think a lot of us have moved away from heavily processed and refined things and moved more towards things in the ‘raw’ so to speak.

Yes, the heavy metal content is concerning but the dose makes the poison. And there are beneficial interactions at play. For example, selenium helps the body detoxify mercury, whether in the salt or the fish you just ate.

(Duncan Kerridge) #7

Dinosaurs didn’t use plastic :grinning:

(CharleyD) #8

Yeah, it may very well be a triumph of marketing over science, and we should all hope that the science comes out in the end.

So that the price comes down. :money_mouth_face:

(Liz S) #9

It’s true that the dose makes the poison. There are other salts that have been refined to remove everything but the salt which makes more sense to me. Again the doses of the trace minerals are not very high either so if the benefit and the harms are both sort of negligible why pay the extra money is my question.

Like I totally understand it if it was a taste thing but unless its by itself I don’t notice a taste difference in my food. I think my biggest peeve is people keep telling me that I have to eat, its so good for me, its amazing but looking at it I just don’t see the evidence and I don’t see the point in spending the (sometimes massive) cost of using it. I know there are cheap places to get it like Costco but I see people buying it at ridiculous prices at other places and really I could buy just plain old kosher salt for half if not a third of the cost lol.

(CharleyD) #10

Nope, I’ve never taken a hard sell when it comes to health. That stuff grinds my gears as well.

(Chris) #11

Tinfoil time-- I’m told all sea salt now has a large amount of plastic in it, due to oceanic pollution. No idea on the validity of this claim, and also there’s no info on pink salt and its plastic content if any.

(Doug) #12

I guess if the particles of plastic are small enough… I doubt it’s “a large amount,” though. Hoping it’s inert in our bodies, however, regardless.

(Chris) #13

Who knows? Info overload sometimes, I swear!

(You've tried everything else; why not try bacon?) #14

Yeah, they become plastic! :rofl:

(CharleyD) #15

Ok plastics are now being recognized as a problem by having estrogenic activity.

I’d hate to lose all this hormonally active adipose tissue and then turn around and up an intake of hormonally active (but organically sourced and free-range, natch :sunglasses:) plastic particles.

I may personally end up using a mix of regular Morton’s and Morton’s Lite salt depending on how the wind blows. Sheesh. Dr Nasha’s book is starting to give me a crisis of pantry contents lately.

(You've tried everything else; why not try bacon?) #16

This reminds me of a Cajun comic I heard once, who said something along the lines of, "I don’t understand why blackened redfish is so popular these days; in my house, we call it ‘burnt fish.’ Y’all come over to my house and try a recipe I’m working on. I call it ‘fish I dropped on the floor and accidentally stepped on.’ "

(Naomi Brewster) #17

Lol - like everything I take the hype with well ‘a grain of salt’. Rock salt, pink salt seems better than table salt so I use them. Generally I avoid sea salts as who knows what’s in them. It’s not the panacea but as I am having more of it than ever before better to try for better quality even if not all it’s cracked up to be

(Doug) #18

Charley, that’s wild that it’d be estrogenic. I wonder how many particles of plastic one gets from the “standard American diet” or the like, with all the processed food.

Gotta say that despite knowing more about “other stuff” in salt now than I did this morning, it’s not very high on my list of things to worry about. :stuck_out_tongue:

(Chris) #19

Just check the label for added sugars…!

(Sjur Gjøstein Karevoll) #20

I don’t get the salt hype either. Some salt tastes better than others, that’s all I can think of. I don’t enjoy the taste of iodine (or at least I think it’s iodine, it’s the same off taste that makes me not like seafood too much) so I prefer rock salt to sea salt, and iodine fortified salt becomes nauseating real fast if I’m eating it by itself. When used on food all salt tastes exactly the same to me, so I use refined pure sodium chloride fortified with iodine, because it’s cheap and because it’s mixes well without having to grind it myself.

I’m not worried about sea salt or seafood in general because of the plastic content. It’s an absolute travesty the way we’ve contaminated the sea with plastic and I wouldn’t be surprised if it turned out to be an ecological disaster, but as for my own personal health I think the amount and concentration of plastics in sea salt and seafood is much too little to be of great concern. I just saw on the news that they found on average 2.7 plastic micro particles (smaller than 1mm in every direction) in oysters, and assuming the concentration is the same in every food (I think fish which is my main source of seafood is less susceptible, but I’m unsure) I’m only getting something like 100 of those particles in a year. Sounds like quite a bit, but then realize that I stopped using plastic kitchen tools when I found that a plastic spatula I’d been using for a few years was missing more than 1cm of material at the front and you’ll see that 100 micro particles a year is a really small amount of my total plastic intake. We’ve all been chewing on plastic toys since we were babies, so while plastic is undeniably not good for us at all, we don’t know much at all about how bad it is for us, and if there’s an amount of plastic where it’s not harmful at all.