I suspect that one of the issues was that most/all food used to be sourced locally, especially eggs and milk, which are good sources of iodine, with seafood probably mostly absent from the Swiss diet.
So if Switzerland imports a lot of those, raw, or in prepared/processed food, or even the animal feed for its hens and cows the Swiss today probably already get much more iodine in their diet than 100 years ago.
0. https://ods.od.nih.gov/factsheets/Iodine-HealthProfessional/
But the point is that Switzerland's environment is especially poor in iodine hence the specific health problems it used to have, and which were much less serious in neighbouring countries.
Link to an academic article discussing how the USA is now in the dangerzone of iodine deficiency.
https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s12011-018-1606-5#....
We just don’t think about it because we’ve defeated it completely by putting iodine in the most popular spice, and also people in the past were afflicted by all sorts of horrible illnesses. It doesn’t stand out from the noise of the past being generally a mess.
The article just read like there were some unusual strange things going on around 1900 in Switzerland.
Iodine had not been seen as a successful cure before because excess iodine causes a horrible condition. The key difference here was that Hunziker proposed regular use in minute quantities, and then Bayard tested the hypothesis with careful measurements and convincing evidence.
Other places in the world had different geology and this different levels of natural iodine.
"The interests of people in the thyroid gland have always been immense because of the widespread prevalence of its diseases. Therefore the earliest references to the gland date back to 1st century AD. The Chinese, Egyptian, Indian, Greek and Byzantine medicines are especially rich in their knowledge on the subject."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goitre#History
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iodized_salt#In_public_health_...
> Worldwide, iodine deficiency affects two billion people and is the leading preventable cause of intellectual and developmental disabilities.[1][2] According to public health experts, iodisation of salt may be the world's simplest and most cost-effective measure available to improve health, only costing US$0.05 per person per year
I don't question the initiative.
The article just read like it was some strange illness that affected Switzers around a certain time.
I think, that Switzerland, and especially those remote mountain regions, stayed more isolated than similar regions in France or Austria well into the early 20th century, making the issue stand out more in comparison.
Austria I don't know. Many Austrian had the reverse problem with too much iodin and basedov eyes.
The word Switzer isn’t in use since a very long time :)
I think it comes from a generalised distrust of governments/big institutions. Which comes from hearing (often heavily distorted) stories about things like Tuskegee Syphilis, MKULTRA, CIA vaccinators in Afghanistan and Thalidomide.
And there are loads of examples through history up till current day that show that blindly trusting authorities is naive. Heck, even in the article, some doctors were poisoning their patients with iodine. It is not far fetched that some people in these areas were informed of these problems. So a tiny amount kills us... and so you are saying any even tinier amount will save us. I'd be pretty skeptical too.
It seems that when presented well and with personally verifiable evidence, people were willing to accept.
I am really flabbergasted when people blindly accept in mass what authorities tell us.
The article makes reference to the Madonna on the Albrecht Dürer’s Dresden Altarpiece having an obvious goiter. That was produced in the late 15th to early 16th century. That’s evidence from the article that the problem was so common then that it was depicted in sacred art.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Congenital_iodine_deficiency...
Oh, and here in Germany it's on place 6?! Wouldn't have guessed!
Maps with goiter prevalence can be found on the WHO's website: https://www.who.int/teams/nutrition-and-food-safety/database...
My main issue with normal salt is the anti-caking ingredient needed to not have it stick together, in general not needed with sea salt and a real grinder.
Also used as a coating in welding among other things. And like other commentor said, a nephew of cyanide.
Now Im sure most of us will be fine, but I prefer not to eat that a few times a day. If you think that makes me foolish, be my guest.
It's also not needed, there are plenty of other sources of Iodine, and sea salt from the grinder is perfectly fine.
Cyanide is so toxic because it has a high affinity for iron ions, so it deactivates iron-containing enzymes that are crucial for respiration. But in ferrocyanide it is _already_ combined with iron.
Ferrocyanide compounds like Prussian blue are even sometimes used as an antidotes for heavy metal poisoning.
We simply don't know, and haven't research the longterm effect of small dosis on a daily intake. Especially combined with other conservatives & chemical additives in small dosis.
You can't deny there are some major diseases in the modern world on a rise and we have no idea why.
Yet here everyone always so sure that everything we're doing with food additives, pesticides and chemical processing is super safe.
There's just no need to eat these things, just eat normal food.
For cyanide? We actually do. Cassava roots contain quite a bit of it, and they are used as a staple in some places in Africa. You can indeed can get chronic poisoning, but it requires A LOT of cyanide.
Also, not sure what the relevance to iodine is?
Incidentally, iodine isn't easily sourced in some countries, due to soils that contain very little of it. My country (NZ) used to have a very real goitre problem until the introduction of iodised salt in the 1920s.
Now that does seem like a bit of a concern, doesn’t it?
>Potassium ferrocyanide is nontoxic, and does not decompose into cyanide in the body. The toxicity in rats is low, with lethal dose (LD50) at 6400 mg/kg.[2] The kidneys are the organ for ferrocyanide toxicity.[11]
[edit] fair enough, I need to qualify that. You pretty much cannot get too much iodine with something that looks like a normal diet, and in any case iodised salt is not what push iodine levels over the top. And in a normal diets, iodine deficiency is much, much more likely than iodine overload.
Based on what reasoning?
e.g. manufacturing error such that a dangerous amount of iodine is accidentally added.
It's probably reasonable for 999 999 people to benefit in exchange for 1 person being very unlucky, but that's a different argument that needs to be made.
And nobody, in this post at least, has made that argument, nor has anyone even linked to such.
You may wish to research the Wolff-Chaikoff effect.
No it doesn't. You're ignoring the context.
You can't have too much iodine when it's obtained from iodized salt.
...because you can't handle that much salt.
From the article: 10x'ing the concentration of iodine in salt had no adverse effects. You'd have to eat salt by the pound daily to reach levels where iodine is harmful, but at that point, that'll be the least of your worries.
There is no scientifically sound reason against it.
Iodized salt with nothing else should be available in most supermarkets.
[EDIT: as pointed out in a child comment, the taste actually comes from chlorine, not fluoride.]
Either way I actually do assume water filter companies lobby to keep public water as subpar an option as possible, there's certainly no incentive not to.
Most of the taste problem that’s in our water “on purpose” is chlorine and it’s not added out of spite, it’s added for sanitary reasons.
I haven't done a lot of research on how to clean water, but e.g. in Germany, tap water isn't chlorinated and thus has a much more neutral taste. And it's very much regulated to a high standard.
https://www.hsph.harvard.edu/magazine/magazine_article/fluor...
That’s a meaningless comparison. The whole point is that people aren’t doing topical application.
A similar debate to this is the adding folate to flour or bread.
Most of Western Europe bans fluoridation. It can make your bones a little less elastic and a little more brittle, and there are a few other known or potential negative effects.
There are also just better ways to prevent cavities.
But people only just getting electricity in the early 1900s easily benefited more than were harmed by such things. Poor dental health gets scary quick.
I guess the question becomes how low do you lower the bar for those who would willingly devoid themselves of sane things to include in their lives. How much freedom does one man have to harm his self, though he thinks as a self, costs to him are more often than not also costs incurred to society (and usually a society that'd prefer to not see people do self harmful things)
At least in the US though, it seems that popular opposition to fluoridation started with cold war era conservative conspiracies (precious bodily fluids). So, you know.
The only favorable effect of fluoride is achieved externally, by replacing the hydroxide ions in the tooth enamel, so tooth paste with fluoride or mouth wash with fluoride are good, but not drinking water with fluoride.
Ingesting fluoride is at best useless and at worst harmful, because too much ingested fluoride causes bone fragility, as it happens in some parts of the world where the drinking water contains naturally too much fluoride.
Moreover, while the amount of salt eaten daily is more or less constant, the amount of ingested water can vary a lot, so it is not possible to predict accurately how much fluoride will be ingested daily, to ensure a safe concentration in the drinking water.
No matter how you analyze it, adding fluoride to drinking water is just stupid and dangerous, like also the alleged justification for it, that most people are so dumb that they cannot be taught to wash their teeth.
If we ignore the whole point of it (reducing dental cavities), what do you think it is added for?
There are natural sources of water that have fluoride levels high enough to cause harm, but these are at levels of fluoride much higher than what is in treated water.
(b/c it is chlorinated)
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3956646/
> Public health approaches for global dental caries reduction that do not involve systemic ingestion of fluoride are urgently needed.
Probably not in swiss salt tho (it's usually mountain salt, not sea salt).
Surely people test before claiming such things?
“Unicef, concerned about the sensitivity of children to odd flavours, commissioned a study in which rice was prepared with salt iodised at ten times the maximum recommended concentration. In double-blind taste tests, the iodine was undetectable.”
> Whatever chefs might claim, this fact is well established: in 1995, Unicef, concerned about the sensitivity of children to odd flavours, commissioned a study in which rice was prepared with salt iodised at ten times the maximum recommended concentration. In double-blind taste tests, the iodine was undetectable.
"Iodine-131 (usually as iodide) is a component of nuclear fallout, and is particularly dangerous owing to the thyroid gland's propensity to concentrate ingested iodine and retain it for periods longer than this isotope's radiological half-life of eight days. For this reason, people at risk of exposure to environmental radioactive iodine (iodine-131) in fallout may be instructed to take non-radioactive potassium iodide tablets... Ingestion of [a] large dose of non-radioactive iodine minimises the uptake of radioactive iodine by the thyroid gland."
This is different than iodine added to salt, or iodine in liquid form for wounds. I believe it is potassium iodine.
It is only taken when the nice person on the radio tells you to do so (you know to tune in from the blaring emergency sirens, tested semiannually). Rather interestingly, the emergency instructions for evacuation state that parents should not go to schools to get their kids, because they'll already be gone: in an emergency, municipal transit buses head to the schools, then take loads of kids to designated areas well upwind of the plant.
All of this info and more is available in a rather well-produced section of the local phone books. Since phone books tend to end up unopened in recycling bins these days, I suspect most newer residents have little idea of what I'm talking about.
https://www.klartext-nahrungsergaenzung.de/wissen/lebensmitt...
[edit]: This one, for the curious, although I get it from Vitamin Shoppe, not direct
https://www.lifeextension.com/vitamins-supplements/item02040...
> A number of words written with œ were borrowed from French and from Latin into English, where the œ is now rarely written. Modern American English spelling usually substitutes e, so diarrhœa has become diarrhea, although there are some exceptions, such as _phoenix_. In modern British English, the spellings generally keep the o but remove the ligature (e.g. diarrhoea).
In the case of _Hors d'oeuvre_, it seems like the english wikipedia keeps the _o_. [2]
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C5%92 [2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hors_d%27oeuvre
I'm always impressed with all these doctors that would question the approach, try new protocols, and end up by finding a cure