i know salt is a vital nutrient in our diet - but do all the salts have the same nutritional compounds? is himalayan pink salt as good as sea salt is as good as regular Morton’s table salt?
I work at a salt plant and do salt purity testing, sea salt and pink Himalayan salt are quite dirty. We don’t do a full break down, we test the salt purity. sometimes we get batches that are 99.2% salt purity and sometimes we will get batches that are the same as our table salt around 99.8% salt purity. We do a filter on each sample and the our table salt is always clean but the sea salt and pink Himalayan turn the filter brown/black. It is approved for consumption though.
They are all basically identical, lots of effective scams about special salts. Pink Himalayan salt contains trace amounts of other minerals but you wont be using enough of it for any of those to be more than ~0mg. They all admit its only trace amounts but then use flowery language to try and say its still better then anybrand salt.
When cooking the only thing that matters to flavor is the size of the crystal. Fine salt dissolves easier and is good for mixing in things, coarse salt doesn’t dissolve as easily and is ideal for coating things (roasts etc).
Salt is salt is salt. Texture and minor mineral differences.
What you have to look out for is iodide, which is a required nutrient not present in many salts but is available in plain old table salt. It’s not the only way to get iodide, but it’s certainly easy that way.
the salt itself is usually sodium chloride. in this case the salt itself will have no nutritional difference– however different salts can contain other micro nutrients like iodine, or the red salt I buy from clay areas with micro iron. whether these micronutrients are beneficial depends on the person, but they can change the taste of the salt and are not needed since those micronutrients can easily by gotten elsewhere. plain table salt is isually man made with no extra flavors or micronutrients (iodine might be supplemented since many people are already low).
so at the core value of intaking sodium chloride itself there is no difference. as a whole there are differences, mostly of taste but slighlty in nutrition.
note that there are a small selection of edible salts that are not sodium chloride such as potassium chloride– these are completely different nutritionally and not interchangeable. usually they exist for people to have a salty taste when they must limit sodium chloride for some reason.
The difference is mainly how the salt is processed and the texture of the salt. There are salts like Pink Salts or other salt that has some better nutrients, but who knows the bioavailability of them. I use pink salt mainly because it’s not bleached.
Both sodium (Na) and chloride (Cl) are essential electrolytes, it does not matter what form of salt (NaCl) you obtain them by. However, the amount that you actually need is minuscule and you do not need to add any additional salt to your diet to obtain enough. There’s more than enough salt naturally occurring in foods to cover the requirement, and considering that the typical diet includes a fair amount of processed foods (which contain massive amounts of salt, far more than the amount needed in the human body) you never have to worry about being deficient in salt. Any claims that a particular salt is “healthier” than another is false. There are culinary differences between them, but that has nothing to do with nutrition.
No. The only relevant difference is particle size. And iodine content in some countries. Mine and many others in EU have a legal obligation that all salt that’s sold for human consumpitons must be iodinated. That includes Himalayan, rock salt, sea salt, low sodium salt, fleur de sel and everything else.
Sea salt is the standard, most common and cheapest one available here. I’ve never understood why it’s considered fancy in some parts of the world, it’s all the same shit and tastes just like salt.
There has always been a difference. As far back as humanity came into existence. There are millions of different kinds of salts. Only a few are actually edible before distillation and filtering. Himalayan pink is one of the naturally occurring salts we don’t need to filter for consumption.
Where as basic lake salts would near to instantly kill us upon ingestion, before refinement. And while we’re talking about it? 90% of our “table salts” actually originate from poisonous sources that have been filtered and refined.
You want organic, pure human consumable salts? You need to go kosher.
Morton is the most commonly known kosher salt brand with or without added iodine.