This week’s my podcast episode of FORK U was about Salt.
Salt helped preserve food, provision armies, build economies, and prevent iodine deficiency. Then we figured out how to put it everywhere. If you like this, please find FORK U wherever you download podcasts.
Roman soldiers were paid in salt.
You may have heard that Roman Legionairs were partially paid in salt. It’s supposedly where we get the word salary, and the saying that someone is “worth his salt.”
There’s a problem with that wonderful story, is it is a myth.
The Romans had money.
If you ever collected coines, getting a Roman coin isn’t very expensive. The reason is Romans minted enormous quantities of coins. Roman coins are found throughout what was once the Empire, particularly around military installations such as the forts along Hadrian’s Wall. Because, Roman soldiers were paid in money, not salt
I’d love the thought of some Roman quartermaster standing beside the imperial salt lick, handing each legionary his monthly scoop. It didn’t happen.
Here is some truth that underlies the legend. The Latin word for salt is sal. Rome had the Via Salaria aka the Salt Road. The Latin salarium, from which our word salary ultimately derives, was associated with salt.
But the fact that generations found the story believable tells us that salt really was valuable.
Before Rome, There Was the Salt Lick
Humans have always sought salt. We can argue that the evolutionary (teleological) reason for the salt taste bud’s redeeming value.
Forgive me, chemistry nerds, but I will use salt and sodium interchangeably here. To be precise, sodium is a positively charged cation. I remind myself of this, because my son is taking 10th-grade chemistry, and I have to keep up. Combine sodium with the negatively charged chloride anion, and you get sodium chloride—table salt.
Sodium is essential for human physiology. Sodium is involved in countless processes in the body from nerve transmission to muscle function. If your sodium level gets too low, like if you over drink water, you can get brain swelling and die. If your sodium level gets too high, as can happen with some brain injuries or other pathologic processes, you will also die. Hence, our bodies, mostly kidneys, regulate blood sodium levels tightly. Too much and too little is too bad.
Animals also seek salt. Elephants visit mineral deposits, they never forget. Hoofed animals gather at salt licks. Some mineral licks have been used by generations of animals. You can imagine the conversation:
”Yes, my grandfather brought me to this same salt lick when I was just a baby chimp.”
But taste alone doesn’t explain why salt became valuable enough to shape civilizations. Salt had another trick.
Salt Gave Us Time
Imagine killing a large animal without refrigeration. I can picture a woman at the mouth of a cave saying, “You can’t bring that in here.” Turns out, that was one of the cartoons made for a book I wrote years ago.
Imagine you just killed this large beast, knowing you can only eat so much before it spoils. Bacteria don’t particularly care that you were hoping to save some of that animal for February.
Early man developed several preservation solutions; We dried food, smoked food, fermented food, and we salted it.
Salt helps to draw the water out of tissues, making it difficult for bacteria to take hold. It also helps dry the chicken skin for when you bake a chicken.
Cheese is one of our great food-preservation stories, we discussed this previously. Fresh milk is highly perishable. Fermentation, removal of whey, reduction of moisture and the use of salt transform it into concentrated nutrition that, depending upon the cheese, can last for months or even years.
The Pharaoh Wasn’t Exactly Salted
The Egyptians understood preservation extraordinarily well. Not only did They salt and dry foods, including fish, but they also used sodium salts to preserve something considerably more valuable to them: their dead.
Egyptian mummification employed natron. Natron is sodium rich soil that comes from salty lake beds once some of the water evaporated. Much like putting Kosher salt on your chicken skin and drying it out before cooking, these sodium solutions dried out the bodies.
The Pharaoh wasn’t technically salted like a cod. But sodium chemistry helped give us the mummy, or the daddy.
At the ancient Chehrabad salt mine in modern Iran, archaeologists have recovered well preserved bodies of miners killed there centuries ago. Salt preserved them quite well
Then Governments Discovered Salt
If almost everyone needs and wants something, eventually a government will discover it can tax it. Never fails.
Salt taxes became major source of state revenue. Ancient Chinese governments were some of the first to impose a salt tax. France eventually imposed the famously unpopular gabelle. That famous salt tax helping lead to the French Revolution.
And centuries later, British control and taxation of salt in India provided Gandhi with one of the most powerful symbols of the independence movement: the Salt March.
Refrigeration Changed the Equation
Refrigeration removed one of reasons humans needed large quantities of salt. Refrigeration allowed food to be transported, salt free.
Meat could remain cold, Fish could be frozen. Milk refrigerated. Food could be shipped, via railroads, hundreds of miles without being salted.
Technology changed, our taste buds didn’t.
The era of ultra processed food has its foundation in salt. Salt not only provides an inexpensive way to preserve food, it also tickles the tongue and makes any snack delicious.
We went from spending thousands of years trying to find enough salt to where sodium excess, from food, has become a major public health problem.
Excess sodium in the diet, contributes to heart disease, strokes, and cancer. And in the era of processed foods, excess salt is a problem.
And much of that sodium isn’t coming from somebody standing over dinner with a salt shaker. The majority of the salt in our diet comes from processed food. Depending upon the country and diet, major sources include instant noodles, canned soups, frozen meals, and even restaurant food.
The Time We Put Something Useful Into Salt
Imagine the early pioneers coming to the Middle West and seeing the rich black soil, often referred to as black gold. This soil grew amazing vegetables. What they didn’t know was that this soil was deficient in iodine. Iodine deficiency led to goiter, and that part of the middle west became known as the goiter belt.
Goiters are large abnormal growths of the thyroid gland, in the neck. These goiters would grow to large sizes, because the thyroid was trying to compensate for a lack of iodine. Goiters became so large they interfered with swallowing and even breathing. The only solution was to operate on them.
Goiters became a major problem, and operating on them was fraught with danger. One clinic became known for safe and careful thyroid surgery, The Mayo Clinic.
To fix this, one only needs to add a little iodine to the diet. At first public health officials gave iodine as a supplement, and iodine worked. What didn't work was getting everybody to take it. Then the brilliant idea of putting iodine into salt led to iodized salt.
On May 1, 1924, iodized salt appeared on grocery shelves in Michigan. Morton introduced iodized salt nationally later that year. The intervention was voluntary in the United States, inexpensive and effective. So much so that one no longer sees those large goiters except in medical textbooks or third world countries.
Which makes our modern fascination with expensive “mineral salts” particularly amusing.
Your Celtic Salt Is Not a Multivitamin
Maldon flakes taste great on a tomato, providing unique texture. Different salts have different crystal structures, moisture and cooking properties. I use Kosher salt to season meats before they are cooked.
Celtic salt and Himalayan salt are frequently promoted because they contain magnesium, calcium, potassium and dozens of other trace minerals. The operative word is trace. Pink salt often touted as having magnesium, but to get 80 mg of magnesium, you would need to consume about 3.4 cups of salt.
Some influencers sell you their version of salt, usually as an electrolyte solution, touting the trace minerals of the pink salt. They don’t tell you a better solution is to eat an ounce of almonds . One ounce provides about 80 milligrams of magnesium along with fiber, protein and unsaturated fat.
There is an additional irony here. Many fashionable specialty salts aren’t iodized. The inexpensive table salt with iodine was deliberately added to fix a nutrition problem
From Salt Tablets to Gatorade
Of course, there are circumstances when people genuinely lose substantial amounts of sodium. Being ill, like vomiting or severe diarrhea, is the most common way people need salt.
Someone working for hours in extreme heat, fighting a wildfire, running a marathon or playing football in August can lose considerable amounts of both water and electrolytes through sweat. For years, one response was the salt tablet. The thinking was simple, you sweat out salt, Therefore, replace salt.
In 1965, University of Florida nephrologist Robert Cade and his colleagues developed a drink containing water, salts and sugars to replace what the college football players were losing. That became Gatorade.
We’ve discussed electrolyte solutions before, and how the intestine given both sugar and salt improve the absorption of not only the electrolytes but also the water. When someone tries to sell you “no sugar” electrolyte solution, they are going backwards in time to the old salt tablet.
Most people do not need replacement electrolytes (of which the major one is salt) unless they are sick. An hour or two in the gym is not going to cause problems that simple water won’t fix.
Himalayan Salt Is Still Salt
Himalayan pink salt has some brilliant branding.
The name conjures up pristine crystals gathered from some inaccessible Himalayan mountaintop in time to refill your electrolyte bottle.
In reality, Himalayan pink salt is mined in Pakistan.
Its beautiful pink appearance comes from trace mineral compounds, including iron as well as the algae.
There is no health benefit to pink salt, or sea salt, or any salt. Chemically, salt is 99 percent sodium chloride. Your kidneys don’t know that the package has a mountain on it.
Again, buy it because you like it. Not because you think pink sodium chloride has become a different nutrient from white sodium chloride.
Blood Pressure Matters
The effect of excess sodium is increased blood pressure. We have lots of data showing that reducing sodium intake leads to lower blood pressure. The health benefits are remarkable: lowering systolic blood pressure (the top number) by two points can decrease your risk of a heart attack by ten percent in ten years, and stroke by seven percent in ten years.
One of my favorite diets is the DASH (Dietary Approach to Stop Hypertension) diet. They fed people a diet limiting salt to 2300 mg per day, and increasing fruits and vegetables. This led to a drop in blood pressure equal to one blood pressure pill. I’ve had a FORK U episode about DASH previously, episode 46.
Your Stomach Also Gets a Vote
The discussion about sodium is usually reduced to hypertension, but that’s not the only reason to care about high salt intake.
High dietary sodium is also associated with gastric cancer. WHO explicitly includes gastric cancer associated with high sodium consumption.
That doesn’t mean salting your scrambled eggs causes cancer. Excess salt in ultraprocessed food leads to adverse outcomes.
So Should I Throw Away My Salt Shaker?
No.
If you’ve followed my work for any length of time, you know where this is going. Cook food. Vegetables , beans and fish taste better when it’s seasoned. And by seasoning, we mean adding salt to the food.
The advantage of cooking is that you use other ingredients for flavor, beside salt. Such as garlic, herbs, spices, lemon and vinegar.
We Solved the Salt Problem
The history of salt is really the history of solving one problem and getting another. Our ancestors sought mineral deposits and saline springs because salt tasted good. Then we discovered salt preserves food.
Salt allowed fish and meat to travel. It helped turn milk into cheese. It provisioned armies and ships. People mined it. Governments controlled it. Governments taxed it. Gandhi marched over it.
We even fortified salt to deliver iodine and prevent a genuine deficiency disease.
And now, having reached the point in human history when the average American consumes too much sodium. Then to top it off, we’ve created an industry devoted to convincing people that their water bottle needs more of it through electrolytes. I wonder if they call it “electrolytes” to avoid pointing out they are loading you with sodium?
Sometimes you need electrolytes. Sometimes you need sodium. Most of the time, you need water.
Just don’t confuse culinary pleasure with nutritional magic. For the magnesium, eat almonds.