What is Salt?
Salt (NaCl) is a natural mineral made up of white cube-shaped crystals composed of two elements, sodium and chlorine.
It is translucent, colourless, odourless (officially, though we think you can smell the freshness of the sea in one of our boxes) and has a distinctive and characteristic taste.
Salt occurs naturally in many parts of the world in mineral form and has been mined for thousands of years. Chemically, sea salt is the same. Gastronomically, it’s very different.
Our rather firm views on salt are not shared by everybody. You’ll find some alternative points of view among the sources below, included here in a spirit of salty open mindedness, rather than agreement.
Why Do We Like Salt
Salt is essential to our health and, luckily for us, a way to enhance the flavor of the foods that we eat.Salt is one of the commonly-recognized five basic tastes that humans can sense. The basic tastes—salty, bitter, sour, sweet, and savory are received through our taste buds and contribute tremendously to the entire process of experiencing food. (To learn more about the five basic tastes.
Salt helps maintain our health and basic functions as humans. The absorption of potassium, the stimulation of salivation, the balance of our body's fluids, and the transportation of nutrients to our cells and energy to our muscles are among its many accomplishments in our own bodies. Bottom line: We need salt to survive.Using natural and unrefined salts in our diets is a way for us to replenish our bodies' needs. For this reason, we have developed a very keen taste for it to ensure we have plenty of salt to keep us going day in and day out.
It's Time to End the War on Salt
For many decades now, U.S. policy makers have been attempting to get Americans to eat less salt. But the drive to do this has little basis in science.
In fact, a recent meta-analysis by the Cochrane Review involving a total of 6,250 subjects found no strong evidence that cutting salt intake reduces the risk for heart attacks, strokes or death.
CHLORIDE IN FOOD SALT FOUND CRITICAL TO REDUCING HYPERTENSION MORTALITY
Chloride in food salt found critical to reducing hypertension mortalityThe latest scientific research confirms the critical role of everyday table salt in our diets.For years now, we have seen mounting evidence demonstrating that reducing salt consumption in out diet leads to increased sickness and death. Ignoring such a strong body of evidence that contradicts the current recommendations for salt points to the political nature of the ongoing salt debate. Since the scientific evidence keeps coming in, always pointing to an increased health risks associated with reduced salt consumption, it becomes folly to continue pretending this association doesn’t exist.The latest evidence confirming this relationship between reduced salt consumption and increased sickness and death, comes at us from an entirely different direction. Writing in the September 2013 edition of the journal Hypertension, authors McCallum, Jeemon, Hastie et al., studying an enormous group of 13,000 hypertensive patients show that the chloride portion of salt (sodium chloride) can also be an independent predictor of risk.Referring to chloride, one of the authors, Dr. Sandosh Padmanabhan states , “….. our study has put the spotlight on this under-studied part of salt to reveal an association between low levels of chloride serum in the blood and a higher mortality rate……It is likely that chloride plays an important part in the physiology of the body and we need to investigate this further.”.
