Do Not be Deceived by the Crusade Against Salt

Water and Salt often work hand in hand, and our bodies have an essential need for both. Salt is considered public enemy number 1 at present, but this reputation is based on the harmfull effects of processed table Salt, where the Sodium becomes 'hard' and does not operate as it should in our bodies. At one tme Roman soldierrs were paid in bags of salt for their services, which is the origin of the word 'salary'.

Dr Batmangheldj writes in details about the need to ensure that we are consuming sufficient salt along with sufficient water, as do many other doctors and health experts. This article looks at the Dangers of a Low Salt Diet and why you need the right kind of Sea Salt to live

The media and medical system have told you a lie: that avoiding salt will help you live longer. The prevailing viewpoint is that salt is a general poison, like alcohol and tobacco. Salt has been vilified as the great devil at the dinner table. Even the health food industry has gone along with this one.

But if you think about it – this makes no sense. Our cells all contain salt. We sweat salt. Our tears contain salt. Our blood is salty. If we don’t eat salt, where will it come from?

The question should not be “Do we need salt”. We absolutely do. We cannot live without it. The questions should be “What kind of salts are good and bad for us?”.

There are basically three kinds of salt:

1) Sodium Chloride. Normal table salt. This is toxic and bad for your health, as you have been told.

2) So called "sea salt". This should be good for you but unfortunately it has been processed and many of the valuable minerals removed. It's not much better than normal table salt.

3) "Celtic sea salt" or "macrobiotic, hand-harvested, sun-dried sea salt". This is SUPER GOOD FOR YOU! And delicious! We NEED salt - REAL salt. We sweat salt. Our cells are full of salt. We cry salt. We need all the minerals, and things that science has not yet discovered, that are in the sea. We all need this salt for ideal health.

The following information is mostly from Dr. Jacques de Langre, .a California biochemist who has studied the health benefits of salt for over 35 years. He has a Ph.D. in biochemistry from the University of Brussels. He wrote two books on this topic, "Sea Salt's Hidden Powers” and "Sea Salt, the Vital Spark for Life".

Dr. de Langre openly agrees that refined salt (pure sodium chloride) is toxic to the body - and can cause high blood pressure. Yet he believes Celtic sea salt is extremely healthy, and has the exact opposite effect of refined salt. Celtic sea salt is so names because it was first produced in France.

The entire health field is very sloppy with its terminology on salt. They think all salt is the same. This is far from true. Most refined salts are a poison. But some natural salts are a nutritious food.

In America, doctors condemn salt. They take heart patients off of salt. In France, they give heart patients good salt.

"The most convincing fact that salt is critical to life is that the amniotic fluid is salty. Amniotic fluid is the fluid surrounding the embryo. (Editor’s note: And yet, ALL salt has been removed from virtually all baby foods. Where will the salt come from for these babies to produce properly functioning bodies?).

99% of the world's research on salt is done on commercial table salt. This is the only salt they know of. They think all salt is the same - but they're wrong.

The medical doctors have a dilemma. Refined salt can cause a lot of problems. They are correct on that point, and that has been well documented. Yet, a salt-free diet has problems of its own. Neither approach, taking refined salt, or avoiding it - is the answer. People desperately need salt for good health, and medicine doesn't have any solution.

On the topic of salt, American scientists are very narrow-minded and insular. We are still in the dark ages of salt making. In many parts of France, when a person comes in with heart problems, high blood pressure, or other problems which are hard to diagnose, the first question the physician may ask is, "What kind of salt are you using?" There is no such opportunity here, because the only recognized salt is refined, white table salt.

Some of the best scientific research on the health properties of good salt are written in French, German and Portuguese. But few American doctors have read them. This country was raised on refined salt. We inherited this from the English. So, we have never been exposed to a healthy salt.

If your tears weren't salty, if your blood wasn't salty, if your sweat wasn't salty, you wouldn't be functioning very well. The current medical belief that our body can function on no salt at all, or on a restricted salt intake, causes more problems than it tries to solve.

You can't function without salt. You can't digest food without salt. Your heart can't function. Your adrenal glands can't function. Your liver can't function Your kidneys can't function.

Sodium is the predominant cation in the circulating blood plasma and tissue fluids. Derek Demon brought out this point in the medical physiology book, 'The Hunger for Salt."

Everyone was born in a salty solution - our mother's amniotic fluid This is probably the best biological proof we have that cellular structure is enhanced by salt. The amniotic fluid is a salty, 'mini-ocean' for the fetus. This is a prime example of why we need all of the ocean's minerals as part of our make-up. This is basic.

Your very blood needs salt to function. There was an article in the Scientific American on this topic in the July, 1963 issue, "'The Social Influencce of Salt." It said, '"The chemical requirements of the human body demand that the salt concentration in the blood be kept constant." They discussed how you con die on a completely salt-less diet.

A salt-free diet speeds up aging. Your cells must be bathed in a sodium-based, extracellular fluid. When the cells are not in this fluid, they will explode. This has been proven biologically. The cells of a mammal deprived of sodium literally explode.

Without salt, there is no longer any exchange between the sodium on the outside of the cell, and the potassium on the inside. Talk about aging, this is probably the one, single, most important biological fact that must be considered when you discuss salt. Deprived of that saline solution, the cells age.

On the other hand, taking refined salt is not the answer. This will promote a pathological calcification and a breakdown of cellular tissue. In either case, you have problems.

De Langre says that in most cases, high blood pressure is not measurably lowered by restricting salt intake. Even a drastically reduced sodium diet - down to less than 1/2 gram/clay, often fails to show any improvements in cardiovascular problems. Dr. John Laragh expressed the same thought in the May, 1983 issue of the Annals-of Internal Medicine (page 740) "..it is likely that even drastic sodium restriction would not prevent hypertension, because fewer than half of hypertensive patients would respond." He goes on to say, "Public health policy should be dictated by facts, and not by hopes or opinions."

De Langre believes that a low-salt diet can actually cause high blood pressure in some people. A salt-free diet can damage the valves of the heart. The contractibility of the heart muscles is negatively affected by a deficiency of salt. The heart can no longer contract normally. Remember, the heart is fed by a saline solution from the blood and lymph.

On a salt-free diet, the valves of the heart can tire. They will begin to lacerate, and break up in shreds. Biochemically, without salt, the cells starve. On a salt-free diet, you will not recover quickly after an iilness.

Salt is an energizer. Athletes drink salt-based fluids. There is a definite need for sodium chloride to maintain and rebuild the cells.

If salt was so bad, why do they feed intravenous saline solutions in hospital patients? They do that because the body runs on salt. Without salt, we run out of electrolytes. Without electrolytes, our human batteries die out.

A lot of vegetarians eat a salt-less diet. This is bad because you have so much ingested potassium from the green leafy vegetables which is not neutralized by the sodium. If potassium is in excess in relation to sodium, the body loses its ability to produce hydrochloric acid. Then you have digestion problems, which a number of vegetarians have.

Nature put 84 elements in salt, as a buffer, to protect you from pure sodium chloride. In the USA people have been taught that salt is pure sodium chloride. When people talk about salt, they overlook completely that there are 84 buffering elements in salt to protect people from the harshness of sodium chloride in its pure state.

Nature put these complementary elements in salt for two reasons. First, to make sure that people could use the sodium properly. And second, to ensure that once the sodium has been utilized, it will be eliminated completely and quickly from the kidneys.

An analysis of salt goes way beyond the minerals and the chemical elements. There was an article on this topic in the September 1982 issue of Ocean Magazine. They made a fantastic defense of salt, saying salt is not just chemicals, it is a lot more. There is:

bio-electric energy
magnetism
vital and inert gases, such as helium, neon, and argon
micro organisms that are critical for the life of salt
84 of the 103 known elements

Sea water is a complex chemical soup, containing 84 of the 103 known elements.

Nature had a purpose in making our blood like the ocean. In the ocean, sodium is buffered. In our blood, the sodium is buffered. And in our diet, the sodium should be buffered as well.

If you tried to inject pure sodium chloride intravenously, you would kill the patient. He goes into salt shock. This is well-known in medical circles.

In the 1900's, a medical doctor named Jacques Loeb, from the University of California, performed an epic experiment. He put fish in a tank of water mixed with refined salt, the same concentration of salt that exists in sea water. All the fish died. If fish can't live on pure sodium chloride in dilute concentrations, how can we?

The Celtic process of drying the salt by the sun and the wind first started well over 900 years ago. Today, this same pristine process of salt-making continues Celtic salt contains every element that is in seawater, minus the mud. There are actually more than 84 elements in the ocean, but they haven't all been detected yet. There is never any heat used. What remains is biologically active, pure, moist, Celtic salt. No chemicals, preservatives, or anything else has been added.

De Langre has said that he has had reports of people going to the doctor and their doctor saying, "Well, you must be taking less salt, because your blood pressure is lower." But the truth was, they didn't cut down their salt intake at all. They were taking the Celtic salt.

Here's a letter from a man in Los Angeles to De Langre: "Two weeks ago I donated blood at a Red Cross station. At that time my blood pressure was 160 over 90. ( Normal is 120 over 80). Yesterday, after hardly one week of using the Celtic salt, the only new addition to my diet, I recorded a blood pressure reading of 105 over 82”.

De Langre reported that over several decades around a couple of thousand people have reported similar stories - that suddenly their blood pressure became normal when they switched from no salt or table salt to celtic sea salt. Of course, results will vary from individual to individual and there are always exceptions.

In regular salt, the refined sodium chloride often stays in the body long after it has done it's job. Celtic salt helps to remove this excess sodium, as soon as it is no longer needed. This is because the Celtic salt has magnesium.

It's one of the great nutritional paradoxes, that you have to give salt, in order to lower the level of salt in the tissues. The Celtic salt literally "scrounges" around the body looking for excess salt deposits in the interstitial tissue and it just drains this sodium through the kidneys. De Langre said that medical doctors had told him that the Celtic salt will also help to dissolve kidney stones.

De Langre claims that if a person has low blood pressure, taking the Celtic salt will not make their pressure go even lower. The Celtic salt has the canny ability to bring back to center whatever function is unbalanced in the body.

Celtic salt is a blood pressure normalizer. Most people can't understand this, but Celtic salt has a 'biochemical intelligence.' It's a thinking salt. It is totally different from the dead, lifeless, refined salt currently used.

Unfortunately, De Langre says that most sea salt that is sold in health food stores can be just as bad for your health as regular salt, because it is so highly refined. You can tell sea salt is refined if it does not have any sign of moisture at all. Refined salt is very dry salt. This tells you the magnesium has been taken out, because magnesium is a water-hugging molecule.

When salt is refined, even sea salt, the manufacturers basically extract all the precious elements out of salt so they can sell the minerals to chemical companies for a good profit.

What's left is a by-product, pure sodium chloride. To this they add anti-caking agents, anti-yellowing bleaches, and glucose.

There is a huge difference in taste between refined salt and celtic sea salt. First taste Celtic salt. Your taste buds will .be gently awakened. But f you put the regular salt on your tongue, your tongue will be out of commission for at least 30 minutes. You cannot taste anything else, because your taste buds are stunned and weakened.

This is why you see people in restaurants piling the salt on in order to get some taste out of the food. The salt irritates the taste buds and inhibits them.

In addition, if you eat celtic sea salt y ou don't need to eat as much food, because you are getting more nutrition from the food you eat. You will find you are satisfied quicker.

Ideally, you want to cook the salt as little as possible. It is best to add the Celtic salt to your food directly. When you cook with the salt, try to add the salt toward the very end of the cooking. This is when you have almost no boiling going on. Just a low simmer.

Can you have too much celtic sea salt? Of course, you can overdose on anything. You have to use common sense. In healthy people, there is a built-in mechanism that tells them when the body has had enough salt. You are not as prone to start pouring the salt from the shaker as many do with refined salt.

Vegetables cannot be fully digested without being salted. De Langre believes that when you use Celtic salt, you can get up to seven times the nutrition out of vegetables. Some people believe that vegetables have little taste until you put good salt on them.

Anyone who takes herbal teas for healing should add a pinch of Celtic salt to the tea. This will make it far more potent. In Africa, the natives add this salt to their tea at night. It is far healthier to take tea with celtic sea salt, than with a sweetener.

While some people like to eat salt from ancient sea beds, De Langre also believes this is not fit for humans, because after thousands of years of rainfall through the geological layers, many of the vital minerals are depleted. The natural balance of the salt is gone.

Celtic salt is also good for animals, even pet fish. You can tell that good salt is good for animals by watching how much trouble animals go to collect salt. For example, in parts of Africa, elephants dig huge holes with their tusks to get salt, or even go down deep, dark caves to grind rocks off the walls and suck salt out of them.

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Occasionally some people initially have adverse reactions from using celtic sea salt. Some people get rashes. The salt acts as a scavenger and purges the body of many toxins from some hidden areas. These toxins come out into the circulatory and lymph system, and particu larly the kidney area. This is where the rash comes from, it is a kidney cleansing. This is a normal reaction for people who are very toxic. If you are not toxic, it will not happen. A similar reaction is that sores will break out under the arm pits.

Editor’s Note: You can buy celtic sea salt from the web or your health food store. If they don’t stock it, give them a copy of this article and ask them to stock it. Prices can be as high as $12 a pound or even higher. However, I once found a salt which was described as unrefined, sun-dried sea salt which was moist and was only $4.00 a pound, which I believe would be just as good as celtic sea salt.

References:

"Sea Salt's Hidden Powers" by Jacques de Langre Ph. D.

"The Newsletter of Advancd Natural Therapies", 1992, published by the University of Natural Healng"

SOURCE: http://www.relfe.com/low_salt_diet_dangers.html