Free What Einstein Told His Cook by Robert L. Wolke

salt is “loaded with nutritious minerals.”
    But cold, hard chemical analysis tells the tale: The minerals, even in this raw, unprocessed sludge, are present in nutritionally negligible amounts. You’d have to eat two tablespoons of it to get the amount of iron, for example, contained in a single grape. Although people in the coastal regions of some countries do use this raw material as a condiment, the FDA requires that in the U.S. food-grade salt be at least 97.5 percent pure sodium chloride. In practice, it is invariably much purer.
    That’s only the beginning of the Great Mineral Deception. The sea salt that winds up in the stores contains only about one-tenth of the mineral matter in raw sea sludge. The reason for that is that in the production of food-grade sea salt, the sun is allowed to evaporate much of the water in the ponds, but by no means all of it—and that’s a critical distinction. As water evaporates, the remaining water becomes more and more concentrated in sodium chloride. When the concentration of salt in the ponds gets to be about nine times what it was in the ocean, it begins to separate out as crystals, because there isn’t enough water left to hold the salt in its dissolved form. The crystals are then raked or scooped out for subsequent washing, drying and packaging. (How do you wash salt without dissolving it away? You wash it with a solution that is already holding as much salt as possible and cannot dissolve any more. In Techspeak, a saturated solution.)
    The vital point here is that this “natural” crystallization process is in itself an extremely effective refining step. Sun-induced evaporation and crystallization make the sodium chloride about 10 times purer—freer of other minerals—than it was in the ocean.
    Here’s why.
    Whenever you have a water solution containing a preponderance of one chemical (in this case, sodium chloride) along with a lot of other chemicals in much lesser amounts (in this case, the other minerals), then as the water evaporates away, the preponderant chemical will crystallize out in a relatively pure form, leaving all the others behind. It’s a purification process that chemists use all the time. Madame Curie used it repeatedly to isolate pure radium from uranium ore.
    Salt harvested by the solar evaporation of ocean water, known as solar salt, is therefore about 99 percent pure sodium chloride right off the bat, with no further processing. The other 1 percent consists almost entirely of magnesium and calcium compounds. Those other 75-or-so “precious mineral nutrients” are virtually gone. To get that single grape’s worth of iron, you’d have to eat about a quarter of a pound of solar salt. (Two pounds of salt can be fatal.)
    Incidentally, the notion that sea salt arrives naturally iodized is a myth. Just because certain seaweeds are rich in iodine, some people think of the oceans as vast pots of iodine soup. In terms of the chemical elements in seawater, there is 100 times more boron, for example, than there is iodine, and I’ve never heard anybody tout sea salt as a source of boron. Un-iodized commercial sea salts contain less than 2 percent of the amount of iodine in iodized salt.
    IS “SEA SALT” SEA SALT?
     
    Actually, the “sea salt” sold in markets might not even have been taken from the sea, because as long as they satisfy the FDA’s purity requirements manufacturers don’t have to specify their sources, and according to industry insiders I have talked with, fibbing does occur. Two batches of salt may have been taken from the same bin at the mine plant and one of them labeled for sale as “sea salt.” Well, of course it is. It just crystallized a few million years earlier. Conversely, on the West Coast of the U. S. the common table salt in the salt shaker is most likely to have come from the sea, rather than from a mine.
    The point is that a salt’s characteristics depend on how the raw material has been processed, rather than on