Dr. Schmidt explains the world: Rock salt is ultimately just sea salt

We talked about salt in medicine a while ago. But above all, you need salt for cooking. Is sea salt actually tastier or healthier? or just more stylishly packaged?

Sea salt can have a slightly less aggressive taste. But that has more to do with the shape of the crystals. With Fleur de Sel you sometimes have very fine flakes, which seems milder to me. But basically rock salt is just sea salt. It is made from seas that dried up a few million years ago, was then later covered by stones, arched up with our mountains and was found again at some point.

Will these supplies ever run out?

Pfff, I would find that rather unlikely. Of course, certain deposits will no longer be attractive at some point if it becomes too expensive to get the salt out of them. But if in doubt, there is still enough sea water.

Is ocean pollution a problem for salt production?

It is certainly a question of whether you should use the sea salt that you scoop directly from these ponds or whether you should subject it to a further cleaning process. If you look closely: The salt packs in the square boxes in the supermarket not only contain salt from the Alps or where rock salt is mined, but also sea salt. When you open them, one looks the same as the other. And that is because it has undergone various cleaning processes. This means that it is mixed with water several times, perhaps filtered and evaporated again. Until it is just pure table salt.

There is also Himalayan salt. That seems like something very special.

Himalayan salt, which often doesn’t even come from the Himalayas themselves but from neighboring countries like Pakistan, costs more because it has traveled a little further and because the marketing is appropriate. But other than that, the biggest difference is that it contains iron compounds that color it a bit pink. But this has practically no effect on the taste or nutritional value.

So for the people there, salt is nothing special at all.

Nope. Although it’s not necessarily healthier there either. The people live pretty far away from all the seas; They almost certainly have the same problem that people in the Alps used to have with us. Namely iodine deficiency and therefore thyroid diseases.

And us here on the Spree? Do we need iodized salt?

It’s not wrong. Fluorine in salt is also useful if you don’t already brush your teeth with fluoridated toothpaste.

There is toothpaste with salt that says “without fluoride” on the label.

With fluoride it is like with iodine: there is an almost religiously heated debate in which scientific studies hardly make an impression, because they could only have been commissioned by the other side anyway. The film “Dr. Strange or: How I learned to love the bomb”. That’s when a crazy general at an air force base embraced the conspiracy theory that the evil communists wanted to make Americans sterile by making them fluoridate their drinking water. And to prevent that, he starts the third world war.

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