Back to 'Real Salt'

In Green Health Watch 23 we featured the unrefined 'Celtic sea salt' near Guérande on the west coast of France. Two Green Health Watch Magazine subscribers pointed out that Guérande is very close to the estuary of the River Loire and within 150 miles of the Le Blayais nuclear reactor in the Gironde, so we decided to continue our quest for the best salt in the world.

At that point in our research we decided (erroneously as it turned out) that sea salt recently extracted from seawater had to be ruled out. In the highly unlikely event that it was presently free from human-caused pollution (oestrogenic compounds, for instance, have been detected deep in the Arctic), it could become contaminated at any moment. Sea salt laid down thousands, even millions, of years ago then covered by other deposits and known as ‘rock salt’ (or 'halite') was the only possibility. However, we discovered that there are two major problems with rock salt:

• There are very few deposits of ‘pure’ rock salt. Most were very polluted with mud, sand or clay when they were laid down, so the salt must be cleaned (refined) before it can be consumed. Uncleaned rock salt is the salt used, for instance, for de-icing roads. The cleaning process removes many of the naturally-occurring trace minerals we are keen to preserve
• Most deposits of rock salt have been compressed by the weight of the sediment (e.g. sand, mud, clay) deposited on top of them. The long-term compression literally squeezes the precious trace minerals out of the salt

Our quest for ‘pure whole’ salt began to seem hopeless until we discovered that geological events occasionally form ‘pure’ salt ‘domes’. For some reason the salt in these domes (also called ‘diapirs’) is less damaged by pressure and had keeps far more of its trace minerals BUT

In the more industrially developed countries, where wages are higher, it is not economic to mine salt by hand. The salt from these ‘domes’ is extracted by drilling and blasting, then either dissolved in water and pumped up to the surface, or brought up in diesel-powered trucks or on electric conveyor belts. Whereas drilling and blasting, apparently, put very little pollution into the salt because ...

• the pollution caused by drilling and the explosive materials used are virtually all burnt by the explosion
• thousands of tonnes of salt are dislodged by each explosion

the method of bringing the salt to the surface can degrade it.

Of the three methods described above, electric conveyor belts appears to be the best. Dissolving the salt in water and pumping it up reduces its trace mineral content. Carrying the salt up to the surface in diesel-powered trucks pollutes any exposed salt with their emissions. We were unable to find information on any salt domes in Europe where electric conveyor-belting was used so, setting aside the issue of ‘food miles’ for the time being, looked for domes further afield.

The first mined salt dome we discovered was originally dug by American indians around 900 years ago near the town of Redmond in south-western Utah (US).[1] Redmond Natural Minerals’ Real Salt is completely unrefined and claimed to contain at least 50 valuable trace minerals. Of these, the most important are calcium, potassium, sulphur, magnesium, iron, phosphorous, iodine, manganese, copper and zinc. Better still, it is delicious and well-packaged, and the company will post to the UK. The only downside is that it is brought to the surface in diesel-powered trucks.

Another mined salt dome was even further away, in the Pakistani Himalayas. It is probably the purest commercially mined whole salt in the world, but what about the damage done to the environment and therefore to us by all those food miles?

Again, the salt is completely unrefined, thus containing up to 84 trace minerals. Large crystals are selected, mined and brought to the surface by hand. There they are broken into smaller crystals, gently washed, then slowly stone-ground to minimise any nutritional damage. The company, which leases the mine from the Pakistani Government, states that it pays its workers top wages for the area as well as providing free medical support.

Researchers at the University of Madras have apparently found that it protects against liver, heart and neuro-digestive diseases, and can help control body weight, remove obesity and even improve skin gloss.

The one downside is that the principal importer is based in Canada [2] and is not yet ready to post to the UK.

Read 'The end of the quest'

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