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Unrefined SeaSalt: Nutrient Rich Condiment For Better Health

Early cultures all over the world have prized unrefined sea salt for its incredible value. The word 'salt' in the Celtic tongue also implies 'holy ' or 'sacred'. The Sumerian God Enlil once insisted that Gods and human rulers should never taste food prepared for them before it is sanctified by salt. In the Egyptian, Greek and Roman cultures, salt was considered as a divine endowment and often used in religious ceremonies.

The Romans assigned a similar high worth to salt and consequently it was used as money. Roman infantrymen were often paid a 'salary' with salt; the Chinese had a particular God for salt, named Phelo.

On a practical level, unrefined sea salt is one of the most essential sources of trace minerals on this planet, assisting with allergies, inflammations, asthma, digestive disorders, heart conditions, high blood pressure, kidney function, water retention and more.

The viewpoint of modern medicine that salt is a general poison, like alcohol and tobacco. People have been taught to believe since adolescence that "salt causes high blood pressure". Books on salt-free cooking are more in demand than ever. If you call the British Heart Association they are likely to send you leaflets on the risks of salt. Luckily modern science now evidences the incredible health benefits of unrefined salt.

What they DON'T tell you is:

- Minerals and Trace Elements in unrefined sea salt include potassium, calcium, indium, magnesium, iodine, sulphur, and more

- The health restorative powers of unrefined sea salt equal those of Vitamin C, Vitamin E and an abundance of other essential nutrients.

- Unrefined Sea Salt is full of the necessary minerals many people lack in the Western diet.

- A low salt diet for the treatment of high blood pressure is a colossal nationwide disgrace, based entirely on dogma, not evidence.

- A salt-restrictive diet can essentially raise your blood pressure and lead to faster ageing, cellular degeneration and biochemical depletion.

- A scarcity of salt can literally cripple your health and cause liver (renal) failure, kidney malfunction and massive adrenal fatigue.

- On a salt-free diet, the heart muscle valves can tire, tear and cause a fatal heart attack.

Recommended Unrefined Sea Salt

Fleur de Sel (organic table salt) and Gros Sel Guerande (organic cooking salt)

How commercial salt is 'made '

The multinational food producers buy unrefined salt in huge quantities. This vital condiment is put through a degrading process of mechanisation that involves heating it to over 2000 degrees Fahrenheit to crack the molecular structure. This allows for the extraction of minerals and trace elements and all of the goodness which is then separated and repackaged as individual sources of calcium, potassium, iodine, indium, magnesium and selenium and so on only to be sold to us to supplement the lack of minerals in our food. Now we know the reason why!

What's leftover is mostly sodium chloiride (or poison) Rather than being used for more appropriate purposes, it is first bleached; dextrose is added to improve the flavour, as is inorganic iodine and an aluminium-based substance to give it a free flow. This is packed and labelled as SALT and sold to the credulous public.

It should be labeled POISON as this is not salt. It is sodium chloride, or to the human digestive tract a slow kind of poison. In nearly every medical study conducted, sodium chloride is the 'salt ' that isn't good for you, not unrefined sea salt. Beware the corporations jumping on the health bandwagon; you want unrefined sea salt, not natural sea salt, which isn't natural by any stretch of the imagination.

Thyroid malfunction

The lack of iodine in food can bring about thyroid malfunction. The malfunction is caused by a deficiency of minerals rather than by a specific absence of iodine. There's irrefutable evidence that iodine enriched salts have limited benefit to thyroid conditions as they're based primarily on commercial salts. Inorganic iodine, added in a synthesised way that passes through the urine within 20 minutes and the body inside 24 hours.

Jacques de Langre, the 'Salt Man' writes:"The healing properties of iodine-rich marine products were known and used extensively for treating goitre before iodine was isolated and discovered. Around 1500 B.C. The Greeks ate charred sea sponges and drank seaweed teas; later both of these remedies were prescribed for the treatment of goitre by a Chinese doctor Ke-Hung, who lived A.D 281-361. The Chinese pharmacopoeia in the 8th century A.D. Listed about 27 different prescriptions for the treatment of goitre, all of them using forms of sea algae and other products of the sea. Modern medicine discovered that iodine was a prime constituent of the thyroid gland in 1895, and the thyroid hormone, thyroxin, was first isolated in 1914. In the first enthusiasm of discovery, all kinds of foods were bolstered with amounts of iodine, completely out of proportion to the requirements of the human or animal thyroid gland. Today the salt refiners, misguided by the medical establishment, continue this practice. Seventy-five years later, such practises continue unabated

(an average of 30 to 1200 times the dosage that occurs in natural Celtic sea salt). Iodine supplementation in inorganic form (such as through iodised table salt or pills) is responsible for the obscure glandular "borderline" symptoms without tangible pathology. Too much iodine in any diet is as negative as the lack of it."

A few years ago I stayed in a beachside home in Kingscote on Kangaroo Island, Australia. In the kitchen was a tank containing half a dozen sleepy looking fish. I took a healthy pinch of Fleur de Sel and sprinkled it on top of the water. It wasn't long before these fish showed a new lease of life. All they wanted was the minerals!

"If you change anything in your kitchen, change your salt"

Jacques de Langre.

From a family of Clydeside Scots, Graeme was born and brought up in Hong Kong. He lived for 35 years there, as well as in Borneo and Indonesia. Intrigued by the way in which the different Asian cultures approach their health and wellbeing, he studied aspects of Traditional Chinese Medicine and became familiar with many other ancient healing techniques, from the traditional Jamu herbal medicine healers of Java to the body balancing mechanisms of Jin Shin Jyutsu, from Japan.

Along with his wife Phylipa, Graeme runs Resources For Life, a natural health business in Chichester, West Sussex. Much of what is available on their website has origins steeped in traditional wisdom.

For more information on Celtic Sea Salt click here