Benefits of Real Salt
by The Grain and Salt Society
WHAT IS REAL SEA-SALT?
Why is it hard to obtain…. but also, how do we recognize the real thing? Humans need whole, clean ocean salt; medical and biological facts support that. The ocean contains all of the precious minerals that our body requires for optimum function. The salt refiners, however, keep these facts hidden from the public because they profit from selling the minerals extracted from rich ocean brine. The same vital minerals that, when left in at the onset, make salt the vital necessity and its color light gray. This is the salt of Life!
BASIC ROLES OF SEASALT
Natural light gray salt is the most basic condiment as well as a staple food: it possesses the power to rejuvenate the body’s bio-systems, therefore, a powerful remedy for countless health problems. No pill supplementation can equal the wealth of minerals that natural seasalt supplies, regardless of how rich of precisely that supplementation is formulated.
Clean, unrefined, and hand-harvested natural seasalt, used in the proper manner, has reversed many a “chronic illness” and restored wholeness in just a few days. Because of its complex beneficial minerals and bio-electronic power it offers countless health benefits: it balances alkalinity/acidity levels, restores good digestion, and relieves allergies and skin diseases.
Natural Celtic seasalt in either white small crystals or larger light gray crystals, is the gentlest alkaline-forming substance known; therefore, if a natural and better diet is undertaken in order to heal, it must include natural unrefined Celtic salt as part of the food preparation process. Furthermore, cereal grains, beans, roots or vegetables pickled or aged with salt (pickle, sauerkraut, kisiel, kvass, or naturally fermented, starter-type bread), all become even better healing foods when prepared with unrefined natural salt. The absence of salt in the daily diet greatly hampers absorption of the nutrition contained in grains and vegetables as it renders them unable to function as natural healing agents. If you pickle, brew, bake, or make miso, request this Society’s special bulletin on “Salt Quality and Fermentation” for $2. p.p. “Natural seasalt is a living food, with its ionic and electrolytic properties profoundly anchored in its grounding crystals.”
A SIMPLE TRANSFORMATION OF ELEMENTS…..
Sodium>to>potassium,
SUPPLIES OUR MOST VITAL NEEDS!
An acidic body condition is at the root of many sicknesses: since natural Celtic seasalt strongly alkalinizes, it is a powerful remedy. If there has been hemorrhaging, severe burns, physical trauma, acute infection, shock from illness or surgical intervention, or very deep emotional turmoil, the body requires extra potassium immediately. This is best done by administering small extra doses of an isotonic salt solution made from natural light gray Celtic seasalt dissolved in water. The potassium will be replenished quickly through the process of transmutation from sodium to potassium. Proper balance in the body is achieved by maintaining a relatively high sodium concentration in the fluid outside the cell. The concentration of salt diminishes in the blood as sodium transmutes into potassium. In effect, we use up the salt that we take in our food in order to maintain our equilibrium while replenishing the loss. Thus truly helps maintain good health.
THE HUMAN INTERNAL OCEANS
Our bodies contain 3 internal oceans that require frequent mineral replenishment of many trace elements, best done by taking minute amounts of salt in out food. Each one of these complex solution surrounds and circulates through our body:
1. one forms the plasma of our blood,
2. another the lymphatic circulatory system, and
3. the extracellular fluid that…
bathes every living cell … in a regenerating solution rich in mineralizing elements. Each of the macro- and micronutrients inherent in natural seasalt plays a specific role in safeguarding health.
These single elements work in conjunction with all the others to regulate optimum body function.
Comparative analysis shows that these fluids are very close in their chemical composition as well as in their physio-chemical and biological properties. Since they are so intimately interconnected, the three body fluids greatly influence one another. Their salinity is lower but very compatible to seawater.
Since they are so inter-dependant, these body fluids influence one another. That is why a variation of the body’s external environment-heat, diet, humidity, electromagnetic forces, acidity, etc.-has such a definite bearing on the body’s whole internal climate. External influences quickly modify these fluids. As an example, bathing in seawater has an immediate strengthening effect on the lymphatic system. Oppositely, bathing in soft water-such as in city water, rivers or lakes- which is unsalted, mineral hungry, and sometimes chlorinated to boot-will weaken the lymph system and also drain the body’s precious minerals from the other two fluids.
The human embryo spends the first 9 months of its life floating in a miniature ocean. In this salty environment of the amniotic fluid it grows over 3 billion times its weight. At no time in our entire existence, from the moment of conception onward, are we ever without the need of salt!
PRECIOUS MINERALS WORKING TOGETHER: CO-ACTION
Trace elements, found in minute quantities in seawater and therefore in natural unrefined seasalt, all work together to assure and maintain proper function of the body’s systems. If any one of them is left out-or even just diminished-a link will be missing, and the whole organism will suffer as a result. Stated another way, if any of our internal oceans are short-changed of trace nutrients, the body will lack the triggering bio-electrical impulses and the mineral building blocks necessary to function at full efficiency or to renew its systems properly.
BUT…..ISN’T SALT BAD FOR YOU?
All the medical and scientific studies condemning table salt would appear to be justified, except for the fact that these studies examined only refined white salt, a biologically damaging, completely unnatural, and chemicalized substance. In the industrial refining process, as many as 82 trace minerals and essential macronutrients are forcibly removed, leaving only a single compound made of sodium and chloride.
Were these 82 nutritive substances left in as they occur in clean natural seasalt, table salt would again be whole and would fulfill its vital role, which is to enhance life and to maintain optimum health. That beneficial form would receive the full endorsement of medical and health professionals alike. However, the industrial salt refining methods used today in the U.S. and other industrialized countries cannot make natural salt because the refiners start with a bulldozer-harvested product, which contains many pollutants and must be cleansed of them. Their technology is geared to mass-produce, mainly for industry, the most refined-and deadly white-of chemical grade sodium chloride.
The high technology methods we have inherited from the Industrial Revolution days were never designed to produce mineral rich, food grade salt. In the light of what is known today about human biology, salt refiners would be forbidden to make their ultra-refined salt available for human food use.
The Food Chemical Codex-a regulatory agency which sets standards for the composition and manufacture of foods-has no clean natural domestic salt to compare with the refined samples it tests for food. Otherwise, it would outlaw today’s mineral-deficient refined salt. Were the Codex chemists and biologists aware of the availability of a clean whole seasalt produced ecologically, its health advantages as well as its cleanliness would win their approval as a completely safe and desirable table condiment and food.
A dark refined salt is made in the U.S.A., but it is an industrial crude product, mechanically bulldozed from stagnant cement-lined salt flats which draw their water from industrially polluted bays and industry-laden coasts. Such crude salt is totally unsuitable for food use as it is filled with dirt, oily sand, concrete efflorescence, and heavy metal pollution. Crude salt does not qualify as a clean, natural agricultural or maricultural product; it requires refining-and gets it!
The same U.S. crude salt, even though sometimes has the connotation of being a health-producing natural seasalt, should never be used for food under any circumstances, as it will cause severe skeletal damage. Even if properly hand-picked or stripped of the darker crystals it still contains large amounts of toxic heavy metals, concrete efflorescence, and pollution locked within all its crystals, and is therefore unsafe.
Domestic salt refiners cannot economically develop a production method that will yield clean whole food salt. It was profitable and convenient for these salt and chemical conglomerates to tailor and requested definition to fit their own product: Salt, they declared, “must not contain over 2 1/2% of trace minerals”-back then, all minerals were lumped together under the term “impurities” and were extracted for their profit. Refinery salt, however, may legally receive up to 2% of chemical additives, such as bleachers, anti-caking agents, and conditioners.
WATCH OUT FOR THESE ADDITIVES…..
Ferrocyanide, yellow prussiate of soda, tricalcium phosphate, alumino-calcium – are all anti-caking agents whose role is to prevent the salt from mixing with water, in the box or within the human body. Thus prevention the salt from doing one of its important functions on the organism.
SODIUM-RESTRICTED DIETS KILL!
Public health policy should be guided only by proven facts. Current scientific research reveals that there are actually very few salt-related health problems.
A healthy and active lifestyle demands a sufficient-through reasonable-salt intake. The current medical dictate; “that our body can function on no salt at all or on a restricted ration of salt” causes more problems than it tries to solve!
Life is closely dependent upon the presence of sodium. However, to clearly understand the role of sodium in biology, we should always view it along with the role of water and the various ions of chlorine, potassium, calcium, hydrogen, etc. That is why it is more important to study the co-activity of sodium WITH these other ions, rather than the sodium element alone.
Sodium, in the form of sodium chloride, plays an important part in the primary processes of digestion and absorption. Salt activates the first enzyme in the mouth, salivary amylase. At this stage, sodium exposes food to the tastebuds – a reason why food has always has been salted “to taste” – it also helps start digestion by breaking down food. In the parietal cells of the most important of all digestive secretions.
If potassium is in excess in relation to sodium, the body’s enzyme pathway loses its ability to produce hydrochloric acid. Thus most diets, but especially vegetarian and grain diets, require slightly more salt in order to prevent an excess of potassium over sodium. With salt present, the acidity of the partially-digested food is able to trigger off some needed natural sodium bicarbonate, derived from the supply of sodium chloride, as well as enzymatic and bile secretions from the gallbladder and pancreatic ducts. Without salt no digestion is possible.
In illnesses such as diabetes mellitus. Addison’s disease, kidney or gastrointestinal disorders, or any time there has been surgery or other significant fluid losses triggered, the requirement for an abundant supply of salt is vital for survival. A certain amount of extra salt ration at that crucial time has often been a factor that has saved lives.
HIGH BLOOD PRESSURE AND REFINED SALT
The research of Dr. John H. Laragh, M.D., at the Hypertension Center of the New York-Cornell Medical Center, shows that the High Blood Pressure (HBP) problem lies not in salt intake but in an overactive hormone system. When this system is overactive, i.e., high rennin levels. body salt content is usually excessively reduced and thus salt starvation could occur if the patient is put on a low salt diet. On the other hand, low rennin levels, which occur only in a third of hypertensive people, actually reveal a sodium excess. Only patients in the latter group should lower their sodium intake.
MAGNESIUM SCARCITY: THE CAUSE OF MANY DISEASES!
Magnesium is one of the major constituents of living matter. Magnesium salts are vitally needed to stimulate white blood cell activity, they also promote the action of vitamins, enhance the effect of numerous diastases such as the alkaline phosphatases, and play an important part in glucid metabolism and phospho-calcium metabolism. When magnesium-rich seasalt is used as a dressing on wounds it promotes and accelerates healing. Sipped in diluted solution, such as a pinch in a cup of tea, magnesium chloride banishes fatigue and invigorates. Certain skin ailments such as acne, eczema, herpes, psoriasis, and pruritus are relieved.
Magnesium salts, while quite abundant in young adults, become scarce in older persons, and a relationship exists between diminished magnesium salts and senility or impotence. A young adult of 150 pounds requires about 1 gram of magnesium salts per day.
A lack of magnesium in the organism results when one or more of these occurs:
1. POOR FARMING PRACTICES – Consuming grains and vegetables grown on chemically fertilized or sprayed fields, creates a deficiency in magnesium.
2. JUNK FOODS – Consuming white bread and refined grain products. The magnesium and other vital minerals are removed with the bran when rice is polished or whole flour is sifted to remove its bran.
3. REFINED SALT CONSUMPTION – Using vacuum-processed refined white table salt or boiled salt. These contain either no magnesium salts or less than 0.03%, instead of the 0.7% average content in natural Celtic salt.
EVALUATING VARIOUS NATURAL SALTS
The percentage of magnesium salts varies greatly from one natural salt to the others. Even within the same salt farm installation, it is impossible to extract two salts of slightly different magnesium content.
Cold, active, northern seas, because of upwelling and other marine and climatic conditions, offer the advantages of a richer mix of minerals. Geographical orientation of the coastline also plays an important part in the final quality of the naturally extracted seasalt. Winds not only dry more than sun alone, but “load” the salt flats and stacks with additional trace elements, mainly iodine salts. These additional nutrients are carried as spray from the crests of waves (by aerosolization). Finally, the method used for getting salt from natural flats are effectively separating it from the hard clay sole is crucial to the production of health-giving salt. There must be some constant eddying movement to the brine-a kinetic crystallization-over and through the clay flats (if concrete-lined beds should be reused, as in refinery-type salt, the efflorescence of the cement pollutes and loads the salt with toxins). In order to ionize and harmonize the trace elements by the clay’s filtering action, the final hand-raking of the moist crystals is done by artisans with such a skillful light touch that almost no particles of clay appear in the finished natural product. In the case of “Flower of Ocean” salt, an almost white Celtic salt which is also harvested traditionally and rare because it crystallizes naturally on top of the water only during the hottest days of the harvest, it contains no clay particles at all and yields tiny white crystals. The gathering is done delicately from the top layer of the brine and thus NO clay is ever trapped in the final smaller crystal structure.
Both methods just described are still formed by a dedicated group of professional natural salt farmers in Europe who perpetuate the traditional skills passed down through generations from antiquity. When harvested in these ways, both of these natural seasalts are highly beneficial to anyone’s health as they possess therapeutic qualities that are capable to restore balance, even in long-standing chronic afflictions.
You can purchase Real Celtic Salt directly from the Grain & Salt Society at http://celtic-seasalt.com/
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