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.