Podcast 103: Eat MORE Whole-food Salt

Sodium is being described as essential, and it is said that too much is not healthy. There is talk about reducing sodium “but not elimination”. This latter point is important for without sodium (sodium chloride) we die.

We are electrical creatures, and electricity is produced at cell level when water, potassium and sodium are all present in appropriate amounts. Apparently a molecule of water entering a cell under the influence of sodium in the extracellular fluid and potassium in the intracellular water generates a tiny amount of electricity. Without a suitable balance of all three you have no electricity.

Excessive sodium is thought to increase high blood pressure in some circumstances and so doctors may recommend that persons with high pressure to reduce their salt intake. However the evidence against sodium is questionable and my doctor was emphatic that the advice does not apply to people without high blood pressure (when I questioned him about this matter). Has anyone got any evidence?

Himalayan Crystal Salt contains 84 minerals and trace elements, unlike table salt (industrial waste) that has a meager 2 elements (sodium chloride). You can eat Himalayan Crystal Salt like a mineral supplement, because it actually has health benefits!

Podcast 103: Eat MORE Whole-food Salt

Scott: You are listening to the Life Enthusiast online radio network Restoring Vitality to You and to the Planet I am your co-host Scott Paton along with master of minerals Martin Pytela, hi Martin how are you doing this fine day?

Martin: Doing great feeling mineralized all the way to the tip of my nose.

Scott: As you can guess everybody our topic today is minerals and how important they are to your overall health and particularly what we wanted to talk about was a mineral that everyone knows about and everyone eats more of than they should but unfortunately in our hyper processed sterile environment we have done a disservice to this particular mineral which is vital to healthy cells and healthy body and having a lot of vitality in your life.

Martin: Gosh you said it so well. Well you know the way I think of it myself is the quality of the electrolytes in your cell is dictated by the mineralization that you have and the electrolyte dictates how well the electric exchanges will function so if you have a very low content of minerals in your body you will be very fragile, the electric transactions will be at a much lower voltage so you will glow at a very low kind of rate. So the same way as your light bulb in your dining room if you turn down the rheostat you are kind of murky whereas if you turn up the voltage it all glows brighter.

Scott: Well when I turn down the lights I think of it as really romantic but if the lights are down low and it is really romantic and I don’t have any energy in my body and I fall asleep I guess that defeats the purpose of the romantic environment that I tried to create.

Martin: Yeah that is something different I wanted to give you an example of a person that enters the room and it is like something just lit up as opposed to these pasty skinned green faced just about ready to keel over and die people.

Scott: And of course the mineral that we are talking about specifically here is sodium or salt.

Martin: Oh you want to jump straight to sodium okay well salt is one of the least appreciated or rather I would say it differently it has lately been tarnished with this witch hunt that salt causes high blood pressure which is almost hundred percent wrong.

Scott: Oh that surprises me to hear you say that because I thought it had a lot to do with it.

Martin: Well actually the way it works in the human body is that when you are stressed you get this hormone released by your adrenals called cortisol and cortisol inhibits the excretion of sodium and it hangs onto it.

Scott: So then you get high salt in your body.

Martin: So then you get high sodium in your body and then you have high blood pressure because of that. There are two ways to get rid of the problem one is to eat lass salt and the other is to relax.

Scott: And of course with our high stressed life styles with the stock market dropping, houses prices crashing, billion dollar bail outs, trillion dollar bail outs makes for a very relaxing environment for us all to live in right.

Martin: Well I understand the inputs but the number of inputs doesn’t change you can get excited birds flying into your window and it can scare you every bit as bad as some news coming on the television. It is not what happens it is how you react to it so I would recommend that you just get yourself a bucket of magnesium salts and retire into your bathroom for a twenty five minute soak that is going to relax you and undo all the effects of stress and allow you to get rid of the sodium that you have been retaining and your blood pressure will normalize.

Scott: So we are talking about salt I thought we were going to be talking more about sodium chloride or the table salt.

Martin: As we should.

Scott: But magnesium salts are a type of salts too right I mean here is the thing too I grew up as you know I spent 20 years selling groceries in a grocery stores all across the country and the only salt I ever saw was this white powdered table salt and one of the things that you taught me was there are many types of salt and I was thinking wow this is amazing to me and then when you said magnesium salt it was like yeah there is another salt right.

Martin: Well it all starts with sea water if you will and sea water has dissolved ions of these different salts like sodium chloride like there is the loose ion of sodium and loose ions of chlorine or chloride or magnesium chloride which we use for our bath salts they are like cousins really they both use the chloride on the acidic end and they use the sodium or magnesium on the alkaline end.

Scott: So are there other salts? I am just asking that because I have never thought of it before you mentioned magnesium.

Martin: Sure common salt would be Epsom salt which is magnesium sulphate that would use the sulphuric acid as the acid that will react with the magnesium and then of course potassium salts like potassium chloride and potassium iodide well there is this list of important minerals that are all involved in our bodies and there are two types. There is the macro minerals and trace minerals and when we talk about salts they always involve the macro minerals now they would involve calcium and magnesium and those two are involved in the sympathetic and parasympathetic nervous system and then you have sodium and potassium and those two are involved in the it’s called the sodium potassium pump. They are involved in the transport of everything into and out of the cells at the cellular level. The you have phosphorus and sulphur which are the medium quantity which is involved in cellular structure building and chlorine or chloride which is usually involved in the other side of the equation. You know when you talk about salts, salt is always a reaction between and alkaline and an acid like for instance hydrochloric acid. You will also notice the muriatic acid is that which you produce in your to stomach digest food with and that’s the HCl so if you react HCL with a mineral such as sodium bicarbonate, baking soda you will end up with sodium chloride NaCl and on the other side water and carbon dioxide, really simple stuff right basic building blocks of life. So what is involved here is basic minerals that are found in sea water are important for all of the life processes for instance the calcium will be important for bone building and muscle function you know all contractions every time something shortens calcium was involved the opposite with the magnesium is the relaxation you know if you visualize your heart the muscle shortens that is a calcium initiated transaction and then it has to relax that is a magnesium initiated transaction.

Scott: So on a simplistic level that just tells you the importance of magnesium because it is half of your heart working properly.

Martin: Or your muscles because if you want to lift anything you have to contract the muscle but if you want to move your arm back into the other position you have to relax that muscle, sodium that is cell life the waste removal because a sodium pump without that just doesn’t work.

Scott: All the stuff that happens inside your cell that just stays there is the waste and would just stay there if we didn’t have sodium to pull it out.

Martin: That’s correct yes or also it wouldn’t allow for the nutrients to come in so we are just describing these transactions that all these minerals are important for these minerals came and were present in sea water and so all life on earth that is somehow related to sea water which most everything is, is dependent on these ions and we have to have proper ratios with all of these in our bodies and if we don’t we are in trouble. For instance I will just quote a recent case on a female marathon runner who drank a lot of water, she just wanted to keep herself properly hydrated at the end of the run she collapsed and died. She drank so much water that she had lowered her potassium level so much to a point where you just cause a heart arrhythmia and died. So you could drink yourself t death you know when I was a worker in my twenties working physically and sweating lots it was absolutely necessary for me to take salt or else I would be getting cramps all of us guys had to take salt because we were sweaty and encrusted in salt at the end of the day, you could see it all over our bodies. Anybody who is a serious athlete and workout that sweats has to take extra salt and this is where you were making an excellent point about the salt intake we have to do that or else and it needs to be whole salt not refined salt.

Scott: That is an interesting point because I always thought salt was salt was salt but as I am learning I am finding that is not the case.

Martin: Yeah natural whole as opposed to manmade refined. It is the funniest thing when you refine salt you end up with sodium chloride which is really just a by product of extracting desired things so even though they package it as pure salt what they are really giving you is the poor salt.

Scott: Because you are taking out all the stuff that you need for it to really work well right.

Martin: I just wanted to remind our listeners that we do offer discounts for the patience with putting up with us talking right so I would like to give a discount on all minerals today so if you are going to hang in here all the way till the end of the show you will hear a coupon code that is going to give you a discount on all minerals so hang in there.

Scott: Wonderful that is going to be great because there is a lot of minerals people need.

Martin: Absolutely and we have a lot of mineral supplements you know we have the trace minerals as well as the major minerals you know one of my favorite products is the EssenceSea Sea Vitality where this product is made with the bitter salt and the bitterns is what is left over when you remove the sodium chloride from the brine in the sea so that is essentially everything else that should be in sea salt but isn’t. They call it the bitterns and all you need to do is add a pinch of that to your drinking water or to your smoothies or something like that and it supplements all of the necessary trace minerals. Okay Scott if you wanted to know something about trace minerals what sort of questions would you bee asking?

Scott: Well first of all why do I want the minerals and I think we have covered that and what are they for and we have covered that and how does it work?

Martin: Well how does that work can get very scientific it all depends on how detailed you want it. I think at this level of expertise that we are covering here all we need to tell people is typically minerals get into your body through your food and your drink you know your drinking water has some hardness to it, it will have sodium or potassium or something like that in the minerals in your water but more importantly there will be minerals in the food that you eat because foods are growing in fields in soils from which these plants extract the minerals and here is where we get into trouble because our fields have been used in the practice of industrial agriculture for the last close to one hundred years and they use an NPK fertilizer as in N for nitrogen and P for phosphorus and K for potassium and they have pushed the soils to grow plants quickly but without any of the other things that are necessary so calcium magnesium gets side lined or sulphur gets side lined in this exchange and the trace minerals get completely forgotten and for instance if you don’t have enough selenium which is an immune stimulant and a pre radical prevention you will have trouble like dandruff you have heard about dandruff the most common cause of dandruff is a deficiency of selenium and vitamin D, do they tell you that?

Scott: Nope they tell you to use head and shoulders.

Martin: Which is a zinc oxide based topical treatment that will prevent the flaking of the skin but will do nothing for the cause it just simply tries to stop the flaking of it or if you don’t have enough molybdenum, Molybdenum is engaged as a catalyst to trigger enzyme function and protein assembly. You know if there is not enough trace molybdenum in your food you are in trouble you will get dysbiosis in the gut you know leaky gut type of problems, you will have pains and aches and the problems associated with aging and you start taking molybdenum in the proper dosage and a lot of this pain goes away or chromium. Chromium is involved in sugar metabolism if you don’t get enough chromium you will end up with hypoglycemia, like swings in blood sugar levels which will totally make you hyper just bouncing off the walls and in another moment just crashing practically blacking out from being so tired and falling asleep in the late afternoon from just having no energy or sugar in your blood stream.

Scott: I thought that was normal.

Martin: Well let’s define normal it is certainly normal for our industrialized society office worker.

Scott: And if anyone thinks they are not deficient there was a study done of the US population that came up with the following percentages that the US population was deficient. Magnesium 75 percent and no wonder we talk about magnesium all the time, iron 58 percent, copper 81 percent, manganese 50 percent, chromium 50 percent, zinc 67 percent I mean that is just astounding. It is absolutely incredible that we can be so deficient in a society that is so obese. It is not that we don’t have things to stick in our mouths it is that we don’t have the right things to stick in our mouths.

Martin: That is correct deficient foods they look good on the outside but they are deficient on the inside. It is sort of like the model on the cover of Vogue or some other high fashion magazine she looks gorgeous made up and airbrushed and hair dried and polished and whatever it looks great but you couldn’t possibly have her as the mother of your children. It is I don’t know what you would call it, it is useless as a life partner but it sure looks good.

Scott: You have destroyed every man’s fantasy.

Martin: Well fantasy is okay you can fantasize about the picture of the apple that is all polished and wonderful on the outside but are the minerals in there. Right there in lies my trouble. Scott you destroy me.

Scott: Yeah I have a one track mind, I know but I also want to make sure we talk about sodium like is sodium like white flour like white sugar, like tap water or the water that runs down the river by your home. It is not what we should be doing but we need to get salts into our body you know there is a problem there.

Martin: Yeah so what do we do right? Well whole salt it is the grey Celtic salt or whole crystallized salt like Himalayan salt or Real salt or something like that. At Life Enthusiast we have chosen the Himalayan salt because it has been in the ground for two hundred and fifty million years so it is guaranteed to be preindustrial and it is unlike the freshly harvested sea salt that is contaminated a bit by pollutants that the rivers are bringing in the industrial sewer garbage or the shipping accidents that will spill some petroleum probably.

Scott: So what you are saying is that the Himalayan salts are pure.

Martin: They are definitely pure and yet whole.

Scott: Anyway so you would just take it like table salt?

Martin: Yes we have it available in fine ground and you can just put it into a salt shaker and use it although it salts a little more intensely than what you would expect by about a third so you would use less of it rather than more of it.

Scott: Okay well that is a good thing to know.

Martin: Yes it tastes much more intense when you start salting your food with it everything will taste so much better. Are we ready for the coupon Scott?

Scott: I think so but the other question I had because we have talked about magnesium salts and magnesium and how if you get magnesium salts you are better off having a salt bath and getting it in that way rather than taking it orally because if you take that amount of magnesium orally it is just going to flow through your body a little quicker than you might want. So I was just wondering if you added the sea salt or the Himalayan salt to a bath would be a good idea?

Martin: It would absolutely there are many people who do the full salt bath the interesting thing is this you need to create a saline solution that is similar to amniotic fluid you know the solution in the womb which is actually a point nine percent solution so that means that in a typical tub of about twenty five gallons you need to have two or so pounds of salt or if you want to say it metric about a kilo of salt for every hundred litres of water which is quite a bit most people are used to using less but you need to use this much of the salt you know the Himalayan bath salt to create the despotic pressure to start pulling the toxins out of your body.

Scott: So in a typical bath tub would that be a cup of salt or a handful?

Martin: No you need quite a bit it is that one kilo bag two big hands would hold it; it is a big bag of salt. I would say it is about three cups or four cups like that whole kilo bag that we sell. The good thing is that you can share it with as many people as you want because salt itself is sterile so you don’t need to worry about the toxins coming into your body it will only be coming out.

Scott: So you could share your bath?

Martin: Yeah in the same way you would share a hot tub with other people right I mean it is no better or worse than that.

Scott: Right and I was looking at one of the articles on the Life Enthusiast website and I just wanted to mention this because often times I think if we know what some of the symptoms are or the results of not having something it gives us a little bit of an insight. It says low sodium intake may lead to many problems poor digestion leaking to low stomach acid, poor muscle tone and strength, muscle cramping, depression and poor thinking ability when I think of those thing I think wow how many of my friends complain that their digestion isn’t very good.

Martin: Yeah this famous heart burn acid reflex disorder that is more often than not caused by lack of salt in peoples diets.

Scott: Lack of good salt.

Martin: Well if you have just refined salt you end up with sodium deficiency and if you take whole salt less so. I mean some salt is better than no salt I don’t know if you remember the old European children’s story that is titled Salt Above Gold or something.

Scott: No I don’t.

Martin: There is a story where a king asks his three daughters to give him a gift and the first one gives him something made of gold and the second one gives him something made of precious stones and the third one brings him some salt and he casts the young one that gave him the salt into some sort of purgatory like you have insulted me no pun intended so anyway as a rebound the king gets to live without each one of these gifts for a period of time and I forget if it was a month or a year but in no time he was on his sick bed begging for his third daughter to please forgive him because he has now realized what a precious gift salt was, yeah so if you tried to live without salt you would end up in a lot of trouble very quickly and poor thinking ability. Okay dear listeners if you are feeling kind of muddle headed please take the advice and take some Himalayan salts it is good for you.

Scott: That’s right and where can we get some Martin?

Martin: www.life-enthusiast.com and you have the categories there shop by products and we have the categories of minerals and the code that will get you ten percent off for listening here is MIN42 so that is MIN for minerals 42.

Scott: Wonderful and that gets you ten percent off any purchases you make.

Martin: That’s right and the categories included are all of the minerals.

Scott: Yes and I totally recommend that you spend it on the Himalayan crystal salts because that is just an amazing salt product.

Martin: So I would like to thank all of you for your time and listening and if you want to talk to us on the phone dial 1-866-543-3388 or listen to more podcasts at LifeEnthusiast.podomatic.com or come back to the website at www.life-enthusiast.com. I would like to close it up for today this is Martin from Life Enthusiast restoring vitality to you and to the planet.

Scott: Bye-bye everybody.

Author: Martin Pytela