4 incredible facts about sea salt

2024 Author: Seth Attwood | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-16 15:55

It is believed that sea and ordinary table salt are different substances. And the first is much healthier and more natural than the second. Salt is actually obtained from two different sources: underground mines and sea water. But this fact alone does not make them fundamentally different.

1. Extraction

We inherited underground salt deposits from dried up ancient seas that disappeared at one stage or another in the history of our planet - from several million to hundreds of millions of years ago. Then, due to geological processes, some salt deposits were closer to the surface of the earth, and now they exist in the form of peculiar domes. Other salt deposits are hundreds of meters deeper and therefore more difficult to mine.

Rock salt is crushed by large machines in cavities cut in the thickness of the salt massifs. But rock salt is not suitable for human consumption, because during drying, the ancient seas retained silt and various organic remains.

Therefore, edible salt is mined differently: water is pumped into the shaft of the mine to dissolve the salt, salt water (saline solution) is pumped to the surface, all impurities are defended and, finally, the now pure saline solution is evaporated using a vacuum. The result is the tiny crystals of table salt we are familiar with.

In coastal regions where sunny weather prevails, salt can be obtained by allowing the sun and wind to evaporate water from shallow ponds or "islands" of seawater. There are many types of sea salt, extracted from the watery expanses of the planet and purified in one way or another.

Known, for example, are gray and pinkish-gray types of sea salt from Korea and France, as well as black sea salt from India, the color of which is determined by the local varieties of clay and seaweed present in the evaporation ponds, and not at all by salt (sodium chloride), which is in them.

The black and red types of sea salt from Hawaii owe their color to the occasional splash of fine black lava and red fired clay. These rare and exotic types of salt are sold in specialty stores and are eagerly used by adventurous chefs. Naturally, they have an undeniably unique taste, similar to a mixture of salt with different types of clay and algae. Each of these types of salt has its supporters.

2. Minerals

If you evaporate all the water from the ocean (after removing the fish from there), then a sticky, gray and bitter mass of silt will remain, 78% consisting of sodium chloride - ordinary salt. The remaining 22% is 99% composed of magnesium and calcium compounds, which are responsible for the bitterness. In addition, at least 75 more chemical elements are present in very small quantities. It is this last fact that is the basis for the ubiquitous claims about the "mass of nutrient minerals" in sea salt.

However, chemical analysis will diminish our enthusiasm: minerals, even in such raw and untreated sludge, are present in small quantities. For example, you would have to eat two tablespoons of this mass to get the amount of iron that you get from a single grape.

The sea salt that ends up in stores contains only a tenth of the minerals compared to untreated sludge. And here's why: during the production of edible sea salt, the sun is allowed to evaporate water from ponds, but by no means all - and this is an important clarification. As the water evaporates, its residue becomes an increasingly concentrated sodium chloride solution. When the concentration of salt in ponds exceeds that in seawater by about nine times, the salt begins to transform into crystals. The crystals are then scooped up or scraped off for subsequent washing, drying and packaging. (How can you rinse salt without dissolving it? It is washed with a solution that already contains so much salt that it can no longer dissolve it. Scientists call it a saturated solution.)

Most importantly, this "natural" crystallization is itself an extremely effective purification process. Evaporation and subsequent crystallization from heating by the sun makes sodium chloride 10 times purer - that is, freer from other minerals - than it was in the ocean.

Whatever aqueous solution you take, if one chemical predominates in it (in our case, sodium chloride) along with many other minerals, albeit in much smaller volumes (in our case, other mineral substances of salt), with the evaporation of salt the predominant substance will take the form of a crystal, and all other components will remain dissolved. This is the purification process that is always used in chemistry. For example, Maria Sklodowska-Curie used it to separate pure radium from radium ore.

The salt obtained by solar evaporation of seawater contains 99% pure sodium chloride, and no additional processing is required. The remaining 1% consists almost entirely of magnesium and calcium compounds, and all those other 75 "valuable minerals" are practically absent. To get the amount of iron contained in one grape, you now have to eat about 100 g of this salt.

In this regard, the idea that sea salt already initially contains iodine is a myth. Because certain types of marine vegetation are rich in iodine, some people consider the ocean to be a kind of "iodized broth." As for the chemical elements present in seawater, it contains 100 times more boron than iodine, but at the same time, we have never heard an advertisement for sea salt as a source of boron.

3. Salt dressings even cure cancer

This story was found in an old newspaper. It talks about the amazing healing properties of salt, which was used during the Second World War to treat wounded soldiers.

During the Great Patriotic War, I worked as a senior operating nurse in field hospitals with surgeon I. I. Shcheglov. Unlike other doctors, he successfully used a hypertonic solution of sodium chloride in the treatment of the wounded.

On the vast surface of the contaminated wound, he applied a large napkin, abundantly moistened with saline. After 3-4 days, the wound became clean, pink, the temperature, if it was high, dropped to almost normal values, after which a plaster cast was applied. After another 3-4 days, the wounded were sent to the rear. The hypertonic solution worked great - we had almost no mortality.

10 years after the war, I used Shcheglov's method to treat my own teeth, as well as caries complicated by granuloma. Good luck came in two weeks.

After that, I began to study the effect of saline solution on diseases such as cholecystitis, nephritis, chronic appendicitis, rheumatic heart disease, inflammatory processes in the lungs, articular rheumatism, osteomyelitis, abscesses after injection, and so on. In principle, these were isolated cases, but each time I got positive results pretty quickly. Later, I worked in a polyclinic and could talk about a number of rather difficult cases in which a dressing with saline solution was more effective than all other drugs. We managed to heal hematomas, bursitis, chronic appendicitis.

The point is that the saline solution possesses absorbent properties and extracts the liquid with pathogenic flora from the tissue.

Once, during a business trip to the district, I stopped at an apartment. The hostess's children suffered from whooping cough. They coughed incessantly and painfully. I put saline bandages on their backs at night. After an hour and a half, the cough stopped and did not appear until the morning. After four dressings, the disease disappeared without a trace.

At the polyclinic in question, the surgeon suggested that I try saline solution for treating tumors. The first such patient was a woman with a cancerous mole on her face. She drew attention to this mole six months ago. During this time, the mole turned purple, increased in volume, a gray-brown liquid was released from it. I started making salt stickers for her. After the first sticker, the tumor turned pale and decreased. After the second, she turned even more pale and seemed to shrink. The discharge has stopped. And after the fourth sticker, the mole acquired its original appearance. With the fifth sticker, the treatment ended without surgery.

Then there was a young girl with a breast adenoma. She had an operation. I advised the patient to have saline bandages on her chest for several weeks before the operation. Imagine the operation was not required. Six months later, she also developed an adenoma on the second breast. And again she was cured with hypertensive dressings without surgery. I met her nine years after the treatment. She felt well and did not even remember her illness.

PRACTICE OF SALT BAND APPLICATION.

1. Table salt in an aqueous solution of not more than 10 percent is an active sorbent. It draws out all impurities from the diseased organ. But the therapeutic effect will be only if the dressing is breathable, that is, hygroscopic, which is determined by the quality of the material used for the dressing.

2. Salt dressing acts locally - only on a diseased organ or on a part of the body. As the fluid is absorbed from the subcutaneous layer, tissue fluid rises into it from deeper layers, carrying with it all the pathogenic principles: microbes, viruses and organic matter. Thus, during the action of the dressing in the tissues of the sick organism, the fluid is renewed, the pathogenic factor is cleared and, as a rule, the pathological process is eliminated.

3. The dressing with a hypertonic sodium chloride solution acts gradually. The therapeutic result is achieved within 7-10 days, and sometimes more.

4. The use of a sodium chloride solution requires certain caution. For example, I would not recommend applying a dressing with a solution of more than 10 percent concentration. In some cases, even an 8% solution is better. (Any pharmacist can help you prepare the solution.)

The question arises: where do the doctors look, if a dressing with a hypertonic solution is so effective, why is this method of treatment not widely used?

It's very simple - doctors are in the captivity of drug treatment. Pharmaceutical firms offer more and more new and more expensive drugs. Unfortunately, medicine is also a business. THE HYPERTONIC SOLUTION'S PROBLEM IS THAT IT'S TOO SIMPLE AND CHEAP.

4. Does salt speak of a different atmosphere in the past?

According to some researchers, the human need for salt is due to the need to equalize the osmotic pressure in the body, which in turn indicates that in the not so distant past on our planet there was a completely different atomic pressure …

It is not for nothing that in the underwater "city" of Jacques Yves Cousteau's Hydropolis, due to the increased pressure in the participants of the experiment, the wounds on the body were healed literally overnight, and the beards and mustache practically stopped growing. Could it be that our body is designed for a different atmospheric pressure?

Here is what researcher Alexei Artemiev writes in his article:

Organisms of animals, like humans, on our planet are adapted to life under conditions of higher atmospheric pressure than we have today (760 mm Hg). It is difficult to calculate how much more it was, but according to estimates, not less than 1.5 times. However, if we take as a basis the fact that the osmotic pressure of blood plasma averages 768.2 kPa (7.6 atm.), Then it is likely that initially our atmosphere was 8 times denser (about 8 atm.). As crazy as it sounds, this is possible. After all, it is known that the pressure in the air bubbles that amber contains, according to various sources, is from 8 to 10 atmospheres. This just reflects the state of the atmosphere at the moment of solidification of the resin from which the amber was formed. Such coincidences are hard to believe.