Danger in the Use of Salt
THAT there is much more harm than most people suspect in the free use of common salt, is asserted by a writer in Physical Culture, who substantiates the assertion by the following reasons:— “1. Unorganized minerals (salt, iron, lime, etc.) can not be assimilated by and used in rebuilding the body. Only when organized into living grains, fruits, nuts, and other foods can these minerals become a vital part of our organism. “2. On the other hand, we can not live long, perhaps only a few weeks, unless the exhausted salts of our systems are renewed. This is a vitally important necessity, though the amount needed is small. All the minerals which the body can utilize to any advantage are abundantly supplied in natural foods. “Hutchinson’s Physiology says: ‘Salt is usually taken into the system in sufficient quantities in our food. Even the water we drink has traces of it. The habitual use of much salt in cooking or as a seasoning at the table is a bad habit in itself, and leads to the desire for other and more injurious condiments.’ “M. René Laufer, in Revue Scientifique, writes that, ‘the taste for salt is not innate or instinctive; it is acquired. The mother’s milk contains very little salt. Cow’s milk has at least four times as much, but even with this amount the adult who should live on milk alone—say three quarts a day—would take more chlorides than he needs. Man in a state of nature does not salt his food. Primitive people who lead a pastoral and nomadic life do not add salt to what they eat. The same is true of animals. Dogs and cats do not like salt. Even the domestic herbivores get along very well if salt is not added to their food. The tales of disease resulting from lack of salt are not trustworthy.’ (From translation in Literary Digest.) “3. Salt destroys the natural delicacy of taste, as does alcohol. The palate becomes so dulled that no food seems to have any taste without high seasoning. This entails the loss of much real pleasure in eating, for the divinely imparted flavors are perfectly delicious, but the salt- or pepper-depraved tongue is too numb to enjoy or even detect them. “4. The use of salt with food tends strongly to overeating. More food is eaten because it is ‘salted to taste’ than the system requires. “5. Salt has a specially harmful effect upon the blood and its circulation. On a damp day observe the moisture on the metal cap of your salt shaker. Witness, too, how a brick of salted butter will ‘sweat.’ Salt has the property of drawing the moisture from the air to the perforated cap; out of the butter to the surface of the mass, and it draws the moisture from your blood, and leaves it far too thick to circulate freely through the infinitely small capillaries that connect the arteries with the veins. These capillaries are so minute that it takes three hundred and thirty-five of them to make an inch. They are finer than baby’s softest hair, and hollow, too. The blood flows through the arteries to the capillaries; but it must be thin enough to go through easily. Then it goes back to the heart by the venous circulation. But the blood is too thick. It does not pass from artery to vein readily. The hands and feet grow cold. The heart wearies of trying to force it through, and the whole being, clogged and impure, cries out, Water, water! That is exactly why you are so thirsty after eating heartily of salt fish. “Try this experiment: Take the brightest red piece of beefsteak you can buy. Salt it thoroughly. Now look at it in three days. Where has all the redness gone? Precisely where the rosy complexion of your childhood has gone, my dear salt seasoner. It takes the healthy redness from the beef blood, and from yours, too. “6. Salt interferes with digestive processes. Vinegar and salt are good embalmers—the first of vegetables, the other of dead carcasses. A piece of meat salted so that it will keep is simply embalmed. It keeps well out of the stomach. It keeps better inside of it than were it unseasoned. Any food treated to a fixation of its condition is thereby made less digestible. It is preserved, pickled, cured, embalmed (or anything you please) against the atmosphere and against the gastric juice.”