Salt is bad for you! You’ve heard this before right?
Well if you haven’t, it’s possible you live in a cave, in the middle of the rain forest, or you’re not that interested in health or nutrition. But I’m going to assume that most parents are interested for the sake of their children’s health.
I’ve heard time and again that salt is bad for you and that you should be careful to only have maximum 6g a day. And so my kids’ food has always been prepared without salt. What we, adults, do is we sprinkle some table salt on the plate after the food’s been served.
Miss Z, inquisitive as she is, asked me the other day why is salt bad and why couldn’t they have it. I tried to explain as best as I could (coming from a place of ignorance myself) that salt makes you dehydrate and that food already has enough salt so if we eat more of it then it’s bad for us.
I’m sure my explanation didn’t sit quite right with her because it didn’t address the fact that we were eating it and they couldn’t. But she didn’t pursue it at the time. Phew!
I was relieved mostly because that gave me a chance to find out why salt is bad for you and as it happens the answer landed on my lap. I was browsing through my Facebook newsfeed and there was a video from an American nutritionist talking about the goodness of salt, which I was intrigued about.
Basically the reasons why table salt as we know it are bad for you are that standard table salt has a high amount of sodium (which is bad for your body) and through refining/process has lost most of the goodness, e.g. other minerals. Moreover, it is heated to high temperatures and has stuff added to it.
This nutritionist, Christa Orecchio, then goes on to explain the benefits of eating unrefined natural salts like Himalayan pink salt or Celtic salt.
I did a bit more research and while there are some nay sayers, the consensus among nutritionists seems to be that these salts are good for you and your kids, even when they’re babies and have just started to eat, because our body actually needs good quality salt for good functioning, as salt is rich in minerals which are essential to the body.
There were so many health benefits mentioned that I’ve gone out and bought a big 5Kg bag of the Himalayan pink salt. We will use it for bathing and for eating from now on. But as Patrick Holford says in the article, we will still use it in moderation. I’ll let you know if there’s some evidence that things like resistance of the immune system to colds, eczema, energy levels, etc. have visible improvements š