Over the last six years, Green Health Watch subscribers have followed Nick Anderson’s quest to find the ‘best salt in the world’. He thought he had found it in Celtic Salt, the unrefined sea salt harvested from the salt flats just outside Guérande on France’s Atlantic coast, until a subscriber pointed out that the Loire estuary and the major industrial city of Nantes was nearby, and that the Le Bloyais nuclear reactor was only 150 miles down the coast in the Gironde. Requests to the French authorities for pollution analyses of the sea on that part of the coast were ignored (the Guérande salt flats are classed as a ‘national treasure), so the quest moved on.
BACK TO MAIN PAGE

Nick’s next stop was a salt dome mine in the US, but the unrefined Redmond Salt fell at the first fence. Although it had not been exposed to industrial pollution by being buried underground for thousands, possibly millions of years, the Redmond mining process contaminated it immediately. The salt was mined using explosives and brought to the surface in open diesel trucks!

Very much a ‘salt novice’ at this stage, Nick was still under the mistaken assumption that unrefined sea salt and unrefined rock salt (in fact sea salt laid down in ‘salt domes’ thousands or millions of years ago) had essentially the same chemical composition. Accordingly, he continued to search simply for the cleanest unrefined salt, which he probably found with the ‘Himalayan Salt’ he offered to subscribers in 2005. Large chunks are mined and brought to the surface by human and animal power alone, then gently washed before stone-grinding.

It was then that other subscriber pointed out that the chemical compositions of unrefined sea salt and unrefined rock salt were, in fact, usually very different. The pressure put onto the salt in ‘salt domes’ from the rock and earth above squeezes most of the beneficial minerals and trace elements out. Thi turned out to be the case with the Himalayan salt so Nick took up his quest once again. The ‘best salt in the world’ would have to be a sea salt harvested from the cleanest sea, in an area with the lowest levels of air pollution, and harvested in the least damaging wa,y to ensure that as many of seawater’s 85 natural chemicals and trace elements were preserved.

However, Nick also felt that the distance the salt was transported had to be limited. After all, could one justify the pollution produced by flying or shipping salt from the other side of the world just because it was cleaner, when most of us breathe industrially polluted air and eat industrially-polluted food every day? He set Western Europe as the maximum distance, and eventually found a great source, the salt marshes in the Ria Formosa Lagoon Natural Park in the Portuguese Algarve. We have now teamed up with the Portuguese company Necton S.A. to bring Ria Formosa salt to the UK.

Both of Necton S.A.’s sea salts are totally natural - unrefined, unprocessed, and without additives. They are produced in exactly the same simple way as practised by the Romans some 2,000 years ago. Seawater is concentrated first in small ‘evaporation pans’ then in small ‘crystallisation pans’, and then harvested by hand.