As far as the body is concerned, there is no connection between the chemically-cleaned sodium chloride table salt you buy in the supermarket (which is also added to virtually every processed food you buy) and the mineral rich organic unrefined sea salt available in health food stores. One can kill you; the other heals you.

The typical table and cooking salt in your grocery store has been chemically cleaned or refined. While we have been led to believe grocery store sea salt is a better alternative, much like regular salt, it too has been totally refined.

At its origin, it may have come from the sea, but, it has been put through many degrading artificial processes; heated under extreme heat levels in order to crack its molecular structure and robbed of all of its essential minerals that are essential to our physiology.  Salt is then further adulterated by chemical additives to make it free- flowing, bleached, and iodized. To call what remains “sea salt” should be a crime.  Just like regular salt the end result of this refining process leaves sodium chloride.

Both of these salts, much like flour have suffered the same fate. The process of turning naturally occurring non-white salt into the white-powdery-easily poured table salt involves a distinct trade-off between health and aesthetics/profitability. The salt that remains once regarded as white gold, is now converted into white poison.  

And there’s one other financial reason for the dominance of refined salt in the market. Only 7% of salt goes for food; the other 93% goes to industry. Industry requires chemically pure sodium chloride for manufacture of explosives, chlorine gas, soda, fertilizers and plastics. In effect, table salt represents a “cheap” production overrun.
 

Why Sodium Chloride Is Bad For You

Sodium chloride is an aggressive substance, which needs its equalizing counterpart so that the body’s pH can always remain neutral.

Inorganic sodium chloride can keep you from an ideal fluid balance and can overburden your elimination systems. When your body tries to isolate the excess salt you consume, water molecules must surround the sodium chloride to break them up into sodium and chloride ions in order to help your body neutralize them. To accomplish this, water is taken from your cells in order to neutralize the unnatural sodium chloride.

This results in a less-than-ideal fluid balance in the cells. You are losing precious intracellular water when you eat regular table salt. For every gram of sodium chloride that your body cannot get rid of, your body uses 23 times the amount of cell water to neutralize the salt.

If the sodium chloride is still too high, re-crystallization of the table salt occurs as the body uses available non-degradable animal proteins (as those found in milk), which also have no value and cannot be broken down and eliminated. The body uses these proteins to produce uric acid in order to get rid of the excess salt. As the body cannot dispose of uric acid, it binds itself with the sodium chloride to form new crystals that are deposited directly in the bones and joints. This is the cause of different kinds of rheumatism such as arthritis, gout, and kidney and gall bladder stones. This re-crystallization is the body’s band-aid solution for the cells and organs in order to protect the body from irreparable damage of irresponsible food intake. But in the long run, it poisons the system because those substances cannot be disposed of.

The result of consuming common table salt is the formation of overly acidic edema, or excess fluid in the body tissue, which is also the cause of cellulite.  This excess fluid in your body tissue also contributes to rheumatism, arthritis, gout kidney and gall bladder stones. When you consider that the average person consumes 4,000 to 6,000 mg of sodium chloride each day, and heavy users can ingest as much as 10,000 mg in a day, it is clear that this is a serious health problems.

Natural Unrefined Sea Salt

Unlike refined salt, natural unrefined sea salt helps to balance and replenish all of the body’s electrolytes. The natural iodine in these salts protects against radiation, atomic fallout, and many other pollutants. Unrefined sea salt supplies all 92 vital trace minerals, thereby promoting optimum biological function and cellular maintenance:

Here is a partial list of the minerals found in unrefined salt and their function in human metabolism:

Sodium: Essential to digestion and metabolism, regulates body fluids, nerve and muscular functions.

Chlorine: Essential component of human body fluids.

Calcium: Needed for bone mineralization.

Magnesium: Dissipates sodium excess, forms and hardens bones, ensures mental development and sharpens intelligence, promotes assimilation of carbohydrates, assures metabolism of vitamin C and
calcium, retards the aging process and dissolves kidney stones.

Sulfur: Controls energy transfer in tissue, bone and cartilage cells, essential for protein compounds.

Silicon: Needed in carbon metabolism and for skin and hair balance.

Iodine: Vital for energy production and mental development, ensures production of thyroid hormones, needed for strong auto-defense mechanism (lymphatic system).

Bromine: In magnesium bromide form, a nervous system regulator and restorer, vital for pituitary hormonal function.

Phosphorus: Essential for biochemical synthesis and nerve cell functions related to the brain, constituent of phosphoproteins, nucleoproteins and phospholipids.

Vanadium: Of greater value for tooth bone calcification than fluoride, tones cardiac and nervous systems, reduces cholesterol, regulates phospholipids in blood, and a catalyst for the oxidation of many biological substances.

So the next time you reach for salt make sure it’s natural unrefined sea salt. Your body will thank you in the long run.