Can Sea Salt Resolve America's War on Salt?

In the ongoing war over salt, one interesting fact seems to consistently get overlooked. While all salt contains heaps of the sodium we're supposedly getting too much of, not all salt is alike. There's the food-grade salt that goes into your bag of potato chips and your fast food chicken sandwich and the Morton's-type table salt you put into salt shakers -- and then there's sea salt, some varieties of which contain things that have been processed out of conventional salt. Unrefined Celtic sea salt and unrefined Hawaiian sea salt, for instance, possess the beneficial minerals potassium and magnesium.

You're never going to get enough of either of these nutrients from sea salt to make much of a dent in your recommended daily allotments. But there's a theory, espoused by salt purveyors like Selina DeLangre, that potassium and magnesium help our cells properly absorb sodium. (Sodium, it bears noting, is an essential component for life and we need a certain amount of it.) When these minerals are not present in salt, the thinking goes, sodium causes all kinds of trouble.

After all, there's whole wheat and whole (ie. brown) rice, why not whole salt?

As food writer Michael Pollan likes to point out, our bodies are designed to ingest whole, unprocessed food, not food that's been broken down into its individual components. This is why vitamins that are added to food don't always work as well as we'd hope. The mining of conventional salt is an industrial operation in which a stream of highly pressurized water is shot through a pipe deep underground. What comes back up is almost pure sodium chloride; any minerals are left behind. Celtic sea salt, on the other hand, is collected from sea water and then evaporated, removing only water and unwanted impurities, which is why it's gray and inconveniently chunky. Making matters more confusing, the most common type of sea salt -- the white, finely ground French-style variety that comes in cylindrical tubes -- is not awarded the same halo of health because it has been washed of most of its minerals.

It makes a certain amount of intuitive sense that unrefined, whole salt might be good for you, or at least not bad. Some doctors claim that their patients' blood pressure and overall energy levels have improved dramatically after switching from regular salt, but unfortunately these assertions have never been scientifically been tested. Virtually every study ever done on salt has used conventional refined salt. Given all the vitriol over this ingredient and the potential for changing the health profile of something food company executives constantly wring their hands over, it seems that scientific research is sorely needed.

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