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Comment by oseibonsu | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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.

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.

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

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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..."

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.

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