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Comment by mitchtbaum | Hacker News Reader

I'm trying to understand their logic here:

```Iodine is good. Therefore adding iodine to something makes something else that is also good.```

Is that right? Why not add iodine to anything other than salt? Iodized pepper, iodized milk, iodized iodine... Why salt?

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Salt is generally consumed in small quantities and does not spoil, making it a good carrier. You could use anything else, but it's hard to find things that won't spoil without refrigeration and that are widely consumed in small amounts.

Note: I previously worked on an iodated salt program in West Africa for the World Food Programme.

Why do we not add other vitamins/minerals to salt?

Some people already reject iodized salt because of the taste. Most of the recipes that call for "Kosher salt" do so because it is uniodized.

People get away with iodizing salt because the recommended dose is so small, so it can be almost undetectable. If you started adding iron and zinc to salt, it would start tasting like a multivitamin.

I'd argue that most recipes that call for kosher salt do so because

1. Kosher salt has larger granules which are easier to measure between your fingers.

2. Kosher salt is very different from table salt by volume so they're not directly interchangeable

3. Kosher salt has acquired a certain reputation like extra virgin olive oil so it's used even when not necessary

Unless you're fermenting or canning, iodine makes no difference to food.

> Unless you're fermenting or canning, iodine makes no difference to food.

It honestly hadn’t occurred to me that iodine could inhibit fermentation, and I had just recently purchased a box of iodized salt for the first time in years because of the reasons discussed in this thread. But lo, the fermentation blogs all seem to confirm this. I hope the salsa I have fermenting in my cupboard isn’t ruined.

Looking into this further, it sounds like fermentation proceeds just fine, but the brine can be cloudy.

Several European countries add fluoride to salt instead of water.

Wouldn't it make more sense grow spirulina or something else with iodine that people there can produce and consume?

How do you get people to consume spirulina? Preference and taste get involved. Everyone eats salt. Salt was used to preserve things. Salt is used as a flavor enhancer. Salt is consumed far more ubiquitously than anything else. And, it doesn’t spoil if you dont consume it all in a couple weeks.

Again, by that logic, you could justify anything.

"How do you get people to ____" is a fundamental question in life with many approaches to answering it, ie marketing, public relations, missionary studies, theater, etc.

Are you being intentionally obtuse? You asked why salt, he answered with literally the most important reason in public health: people actually use it. It is a known delivery vector that works, period.

And, yes, no shit. How to get other people to do something is a fundamental question in life and it just so happens that in life, public health is about getting people to do stuff that's good for their and society's health.

Your question has been answered explicitly twice. Perhaps you are actually asking something else?

Yes. How can we help improve nutrient availability, generally?

From what I pointed out below, this salt processing seems to have underappreciated trade offs. But most importantly, the overarching picture of nutrient availability, not just for iodine, seems to have a bigger challenge at hand worth solving than simply using salt as a vehicle for one - which spirulina would help with in terms of protein and mercury / biotoxin removal, for example.

You fortify staple foods with nutrients. Such as SALT, bread, milk, etc.

The point is that you don't go looking for a new thing for people to consume to get them the nutrients they need, you fortify what they already eat.

Spirulina is not a good source of iodine anyway. Unlike kelp, which grows in iodine-rich ocean waters (and which is a decent source of iodine), spirulina is generally grown in alkaline inland lakes (read: iodine-depleted).

And it this case it appears that spending a buck to iodize a few tons of salt is probably easier or at least easy enough that it doesn't make sense to go through the effort to switch to something else.

Yeah, but salt, unlike many other alternatives, was almost universally used—no challenges getting people to use it—and is ideal as a vehicle. So salt it was.

And, sure, there may have been some other equally good alternatives, but analysis paralysis helps no one. So, salt.

I don't know what idealistic/philosophical point you are trying to make, but we also do things like water fluoridation. Salt happens to be a very convenient medium for iodine.

Or you could dispense with all the uphill iceskating and simply put it in salt.

>Again, by that logic, you could justify anything.

Nope, you could justify very specific pragmatic approaches, just like the parent did.

Well, this assumes that the local populace will reliably eat the spirulina. The nice thing about salt, is that you only have to solve the problem of getting people to eat the salt that you've iodized. You don't have to solve the additional problem of getting them to eat salt in the first place.

If you're running some sort of anti-malnutrition campaign that involves local cultivation of spiritual then sure, why not add iodine to it? (Assuming that this is technically feasible. Don't know whether it is or not.) But if you are trying to solve the specific problem of iodine deficiency, then I'm not sure why you would start with "first, grow a bunch of spirulina..."

Plants do not produce iodine (it's an element), and they can only accumulate it from the environment. People living in environments rich in iodine, likely, do not need iodine supplementation.

That would make absolutely no sense whatsoever.

Adding a small bag of sodium iodate to a big bag of sodium chloride and mixing requires no skill or special equipment and any idiot, or shall I say cretin, can do it. Whereas running a bioreactor and somehow convince people of eating the gunk that comes out of it is far more complicated and expensive.

Edit: and you'd still have to add iodine to said bioreactor, you might as well add it directly to the salt.

No, because spirulina isn't widely consumed.

Depending on people deciding to eat healthy is a surefire way to fail to meet public health goals.

>Salt is an effective vehicle for distributing iodine to the public because it does not spoil and is consumed in more predictable amounts than most other commodities.

That may be true, but at the same time, iodized salt doesn't have nutrients that mined and farmed salt have.

You can iodize mined / farmed salt. There's plenty in the supermarket for your organic local artisanal salt needs...

I thought iodized salt was just regular salt with iodine added? What nutrients would it lack?

According to [0]: actinium, aluminum, antimony, arsenic, astatine, barium, beryllium, bismuth, boron, bromine, cadmium, calcium, carbon, cerium, cesium, chlorine, chromium, cobalt, copper, dysprosium, erbium, europium, fluorine, francium, gadolinium, gallium, germanium, gold, hafnium, holmium, hydrogen, indium, ##iodine##, iridium, iron, lanthanum, lead, lithium, lutetium, magnesium, manganese, mercury, molybdenum, neodymium, neptunium, nickel, niobium, nitrogen, osmium, oxygen, palladium, phosphorus, platinum, plutonium, polonium, potassium, praseodymium, protactinium, radium, rhenium, rhodium, rubidium, ruthenium, samarium, scandium, selenium, silicon, silver, sodium, strontium, sulfur, tantalum, tellurium, terbium, thallium, thorium, thulium, tin, titanium, uranium, vanadium, wolfram, yttrium, ytterbium, zinc and zirconium.

Whereas, according to [1], iodized salt has these "chemicals used to keep the salt from absorbing water and caking", which dilute the mineral content per gram: magnesium carbonate, calcium silicate, calcium phosphate, magnesium silicate, and calcium carbonate.

0: https://www.livestrong.com/article/534033-what-are-the-84-mi...

1: http://www.madehow.com/Volume-2/Salt.html

The causality actually goes the other way. The Morton Salt Company revolutionized salt by adding minute amounts of clay to prevent caking, which is one of the advantages that allowed them to achieve a near monopoly in salt production at the time iodine deficiency became understood. That meant that iodizing Morton's salt was basically iodizing all the salt.

However, the iodine is independent of the anti-caking additives. You can have iodized salt which still cakes up when it is humid, but why would you want to?

Most of those things are not micronutrients humans need.

Farmed salt of today is contaminated with anything that is in the sea, including microplastics. If you don't want "chemicals" and want "natural" avoid farmed salt.

That's a really good point. I'm definitely in favor of processing, just picky about the end results. Removing microplastics sounds like a great process. Improvements like this to salt farming could have huge benefits.

> Removing microplastics

How do you propose to remove grains of plastic the size of salt crystals from the salt? And once done is it affordable or commercially viable?

Validation of density separation for the rapid recovery of microplastics from sediment ?

http://pubs.rsc.org/en/content/articlelanding/2017/ay/c6ay02...

Also: The presence of microplastics in commercial salts from different countries (nature.com)

253 days ago

223 points

56 comments

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14073368

as the discussion on the article mentions particles > 1mm are still pretty large.

People will absolutely flip shit if this exact same list was titled "84 chemicals you will find in your tap water". I'm still not sure if the article is a brilliant parody.

Speaking of bad stuff in your tap water: http://www.dhmo.org/

You do realize that ``these "chemicals used to keep the salt from absorbing water and caking", which dilute the mineral content`` are most likely contained in Himalayan salt? All their elements appear in the list.

On top of that, not even your [0] claims that most of those elements are necessary nutrients for humans.

So what's the Recommended Daily Allowance for the important nutrient thallium? Or polonium? Half the stuff you've listed are toxins, not nutrients.

I think I'm going to stay home today because I'm feeling polonium deficient.

have you considered bad-mouthing the FSB or KGB?

Also, nitpick, those are elements, not minerals. I mean, some elements can also be minerals (eg, gold) but you show me a list of the elements I'm going to tell you they're elements, not minerals. In fact, they're basically all the elements - they're short most of the transuranics (except for Neptunium and Plutonium), as well as all of the Noble gasses.

If Himalayan sea salt actually contains detectable quantities of basically all the elements naturally occurring in all creation, that's goddamn fascinating (although I'd probably say "bullshit" just on that point), but I'm not sure why it makes the salt good to eat.

Oh no, a nanogram reduction of dietary silicon is going to leave me crippled with malnutrition! Whatever will I do?

Plutonium? Seriously?

Total crap.

You need to take some introductory chemistry and human nutrition classes.

I'll say! If anyone thinks himalayan salt is a source of valuable nutrients like mercury, lead and (radioactive) plutonium, they lack basic scientific literacy.

Is there some sort of advantage to consuming aluminum, cadmium and neptunium? One causes Alzheimer's, one is a battery, and the third is radioactive.

Someone can correct me but I'm going to guess you'd just piss most of that out.

wolfram is an element now? Maybe get your health info from somewhere a little more reliable.

Wolfram is an alternate name for tungsten, and the reason tungsten's chemical symbol is W.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tungsten

Like what?

Magical woo particles found only in the Himalayas.

Some salts, like sea salts, do contain other minerals, although whether they're at nutritionally significant levels is of course another question. And adding iodine to sea salt wouldn't remove whatever other compounds were in it. Wikipedia has this:

Unrefined sea salt contains small amounts of magnesium and calcium halides and sulfates, traces of algal products, salt-resistant bacteria and sediment particles. The calcium and magnesium salts confer a faintly bitter overtone... Algal products contribute a mildly "fishy" or "sea-air" odour, the latter from organobromine compounds. Sediments, the proportion of which varies with the source, give the salt a dull grey appearance. Since taste and aroma compounds are often detectable by humans in minute concentrations, sea salt may have a more complex flavor than pure sodium chloride when sprinkled on top of food.

Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salt

Oh, don't get me wrong, I love me some French grey fleur de sel, which has a bit of a fun flavor from the clay in it. Smoked salt is amazing, too.

It's the people who think thallium is an important nutrient in Himalayan salt that are of concern to me.

... and microplastics.

Dirt?

Sea salt naturally has some iodine in it (less than it has Bromine because of both sedimentation and bio absorption). Iodine is in the same column of the periodic table as chlorine, which makes Sodium Iodide (NaI) a natural cohabitor with Sodium Chloride (NaCl) in solution. What's suggested is only 50grams (2oz) per ton or 50ppm... which is less than Bromine in sea water (65ppm). We mammals probably evolved eating a lot more fish!

Partially it was because potassium iodide (a form of iodine that is convenient) is also a salt, like sodium chloride (table salt). So "put the salt in the salt" is pretty obvious.

It was also wildly successful because at the time, salt was turning from an expensive good of varying quality produced by thousands of companies to an extremely cheap good of uniform quality produced by a near monopoly in the United States. Public health advocates were able to get just a couple of companies on board and iodize basically all the salt, which then reached basically all the people, basically solving the problem completely overnight.

Salt is cheap and already a necessary dietary component.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3509517/#__sec6...

(There are people that don't drink milk, there are people that don't like pepper, the dosing is so small that distributing it separately would be less successful, etc)

I imagine because it's in everything, which means people don't really have to go after a specific food to get their iodine?

In the US you can't really count on companies using iodized salt. For example, among fast food companies as of 2010 [1]:

• Burger King usually uses it

• Subway does not

• McDonald's usually does not

• Taco Bell, Kentucky Fried Chicken, and Panda Express are in the middle.

There's variability from restaurant to restaurant in a given chain because usually minor items like salt, ketchup, etc., are left up to the local franchise owner to buy from a supplier of their choice.

[1] https://www.medscape.com/viewarticle/720930

Which is a problem for people who exclusively eat from McDonald’s, I suppose. Most people use salt at home, though, and salt that you buy in a supermarket is generally iodised.

That logic could be used to add anything to it.

There are a bunch of other nutrients that are commonly added https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salt#Fortified_table_salt

Got anything else that's useful in specific quantities and also doesn't spoil?

Anything helpful should be added to it.

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