Healthy Living Tip - Swap Table Salt for Gourmet Salt
Are You Ready for the Taste of Real Salt in Your Food Again?
If you love the taste of salt but haven’t used it in years, here’s a new healthy idea! You do have options now for enjoying salt and it can even improve your health. If you’re like me, you probably gave up salt long ago because medical experts say it raises blood pressure. While using lots of herbs and spices and reducing the amount of commercial table salt we use is a good thing, one new cooking rage, gourmet salts are actually good for you. 
Recently I read The Baby Boomer Diet by Donna Gates, a book I’d highly recommend if you’re interested in healthy aging. In it, Gates talks about the fact that commercial table salt is refined and is stripped of all it’s mineral content (about 60 minerals vital to our health), then with iodine and other additives put added back in. These additives include fillers, binders and other chemicals our body does not need.
Now we have “gourmet salts” which are unrefined and naturally derived, like sea salt, Hawaiian Pink or Black Salt and Himalayan Pink Salt, which actually loaded with minerals our body desperately needs to stay healthy.
These days, the soil our food is grown in is very depleted in minerals so the food we eat doesn’t supply us with optimum minerals either. Match that to the fact that the Standard American Diet, which is loaded with processed foods, fast foods and restaurant foods, is loaded with sodium from ordinary refined table salt.
In fact too, as we get older, our bodies don’t use nutrients, like minerals, as effectively as they once did so we actually need more of them. The Baby Boomer Diet offers a great plan for helping your body to use the nutrients from the food you eat, and tells you which foods can keep you healthy as you age.
Getting as much sodium in their diet as most Americans do, coupled with the depletion of minerals from food, creates an imbalance in the body which leads to health problems. Luckily, cooks have picked up on flavorful gourmet salts and they are much more readily available than they used to be. Amazon.com sells gourmet salts like the one pictured below or you can pick up gourmet salts in a kitchen store or other places online.
If you do purchase any of these unrefined salts, you’ll probably need a salt grinder as well since they are in rather large chips. You can also get a good salt grinder online, in a kitchen store or a restaurant supply store. I got one recently in a restaurant supply store for just $3.50. At that price I can afford to have one for many different flavors of gourmet salt.
If you’ve given up salts for your health, investigate gourmet salts and rediscover the luscious flavor of salt in your food.
Read more about refined vs unrefined salts on The Body Ecology Website.
In response to a reader’s question, which is the best sea salt for health, The Body Ecology Website recommends Celtic Sea Salt, which is available on their website or through Amazon.com.
Stay tuned for a future article on gourmet salts and how to use them in cooking.
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Properties include being antiseptic, antibacterial, stimulant, healing, promotes cell activity and regeneration.
