PHOTOGRAPH: STOCKSY
Salt has suffered a bit of a bashing in the press over the past few years. Many an article has linked consumption of this king of condiments to a host of conditions, including high blood pressure and degenerative bone health. But let’s take a small step backwards and diffierentiate between ‘bad salt’ and the mineralrich kind that is essential for our health.
Yes, it’s true that processed and junk foods, as well as generic table salt, can be a recipe for disaster. These foods typically contain salt that has been stripped of most of its nutrients, leaving just the sodium chloride part of the equation. This means we are missing out on the abundance of essential minerals and elements present in naturally derived salts. Salt has always been a part of our diet, but where processed foods have taken over, this means we are consuming a lot more of the ‘empty’ kind. Ironically, this has left our diet depleted in nutrients that would naturally be present if we were just seasoning ‘real’ food with pure salt.