You're making a conclusion about cause and effect. It might be the case that the majority of people who take up surfing are extremely healthy since it's a physically demanding sport.
Most of the serfers I know are just generally active people, they were like it long before becoming serfers, most did not become healthy because they are serfers, instead they become serfers because they like active healthy lifestyle.
That was my initial thought as well, basically.
Cystic fibrosis is a deadly genetic disorder that makes one vulnerable to infection. Last I checked, the life expectancy was about 37 in the US, though someone on HN recently said it is now age 40.
People with CF who surfed had such a better prognosis than average that it led to development of a non drug treatment where they inhale nebulized saline solution as a treatment.
I think a better solution is just consume good quality sea salt. That's what I did to good effect. But everyone tells me that's anecdotal, whereas the existence of hypertonic saline solution as a medically prescribed treatment for my deadly condition is sciency or something. (There is probably a better way to say that, but I can't think of it at the moment.)
Which is to say, it’s anecdotal -and- not grounded in an underlying reasoning that makes sense in the context of the disease.
It's not on its face impossible for sea and rock salt to differ in trace minerals, but be aware that the salt itself is the same in both. From the medical stuff you mentioned it sounds like it's the salt itself that's having the beneficial effect and not the other minerals.
Although, I do see an oft-overlooked wrinkle to it: the costs of these minor changes are so small that the odds that there might be something going on unknown to medicine might be worth taking.
Standard table salt typically has iodine added. It also has a chemical added to make it pour easier. This may not have a notable impact on a healthy person, but if you genetically misprocess various things and are medically prescribed a high amount of salt, that double whammy seems significant to me. You are consuming a lot of these extra chemicals and no one is questioning what that does to an already wonky physiology.
I no longer purchase Celtic Sea Salt. It is no longer necessary. But I still avoid standard table salt and favor brands that list sea salt as an ingredient.
Wikipedia: "Worldwide, iodine deficiency affects about two billion people and is the leading preventable cause of intellectual and developmental disabilities."
Wikipedia also lists sources for this claim.
Edit: if anybodys doctor told them to be careful with iodine then they should listen to their doctor instead of listening to random strangers on the internet. I'm just pointing out that there is good reasons why we started adding iodine to salt.
As far as I know, there are no studies on how consuming those additives in high quantities impacts this population with a genetic disorder that causes them to misprocess a number of different things.
People with CF get a high salt diet because the same transporter defect causes an inability to reclaim sodium from sweat. This results in an inability to regulate water content, causing a hypovolemia. It’s not a “treatment modality” in that it directly treats the CF. It mitigates one consequence of CF: losing excess salt in sweat. That has nothing to do with dietary salt intake affecting the course of the disease generally.
And I don’t know where you got the information that surfers are absorbing salt through their skin. As far as I know (https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/0167273892..., https://ac.els-cdn.com/S0022202X15470599/1-s2.0-S0022202X154..., http://www.comprehensivephysiology.com/WileyCDA/CompPhysArti...) that’s not a thing, but if you have any sources to the contrary I’d be interested in reading them.
People with CF are prone to aquagenic wrinkling. In layman's terms, they get extremely pruney when they bath. This suggests they absorb the water at a higher rate than is normal due to their genetic disorder impacting epidermal function.
https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamadermatology/fullarticle...
No one is positing that saline inhalations are going to preserve pancreatic function, but that’s not because they forgot about the pancreas.
What I recall reading is that when people with CF surfed, their general prognosis was overall better. So if no one is positing that it has any impact on pancreatic function, then it seems to me they are viewing the data in highly selective terms and assuming it only impacts lung function and nothing else when the data does not suggest that.
Granted, I haven't dug deeply into the original data because it wasn't important to me. I was only trying to understand the positive results I was getting for my own edification. My recollection is the study was done in Australia if you want to try to find it.
I will add that it isn't actually necessary to prove people with CF absorb it through the skin. The article we are discussing states that surfers swallow a great deal more sea water than swimmers, 10x iirc. So surfers are, in fact, consuming sea salt.
Why would you think of sea salt as the relevant factor instead of the very well known positive effects on breathing and lung capacity caused by swimming?
Exercise also has played a significant role in my improvement. I am not discounting the impact it has. I just am baffled that they found that surfing benefits people with CF and their primary takeaway is that it must be beneficial to breath damp, salty air. There is a lot more going on when you surf than breathing damp, salty air. But that's the piece they turned into a medically prescribed treatment.
It’s not baffling.
Most people have NO idea/sympathy for what its really like to have a disease/condition that medicine doesn't totally understand yet.. including doctors.
The bar for a certain treatment to be scientifically accepted is rightly pretty high - studies/research etc. that takes decades to do.
But as a patient, when medicine has no real treatments to offer you, of course our own bar should be lower! Even if sea salt hasn't been studied in a million people with double-blind placebo-controlled blah-blah studies, this kind of experiment has zero downside and potentially a very high upside - you would have to be crazy not to try it.
Anyways, just want to offer my sympathy and ranting as someone with a rare and ill-understood disease. Tim Ferriss and the whole "bio-hacking" movement also have this idea of "you are an N of 1" - we don't need permission to do basic experiments on ourselves. And for many millions of people for whom medicine has no answers, this really is the best we have.
Please keep talking about what works and what doesn't work for you regardless of haters - anecdotes can help others and the right anecdotes will someday become experiments, which will one day become well-accepted "science". Maybe in a 100 years medicine will recommend sea salt for CF, it will be just as effective then as it is now, and all that will have changed is it will have the "REAL SCIENCE TM" stamp of approval.
As is often the case, the point I was trying to make has been completely ignored while multiple people jump on the personal angle of whether or not I actually know something medically useful and most comments are coming from an assumption of no, she can't possibly know anything medically useful, she is merely crazy. This is always a personally frustrating experience for me.
I'm human. I slept 14 hours last night and I am still tired and it is aggravating that the entire world wants me to either scientifically prove my personal opinions about my firsthand experience or be condemned to never, ever mention them at all. Sheesh.
So it might be time for me to just step away from this derail of a discussion because a. It is off topic and b. Most of it is openly and unnecessarily hostile and dismissive.
I'm not trying to prove anything here. I'm just human and don't always know how to separate my firsthand experience of life from some point I am trying to make and for whatever reason the world at large is often excessively interested in talking about that personal piece, whether the topic is my health or something else. And it is frequently a very negative experience for me.
TLDR: Thanks, but that wasn't the point and if I step away from this discussion it is not an admission that other people are right and I am wrong. It is just evidence that this discussion is off topic, not a positive experience for me and I don't feel like continuing it.
"In the Netherlands a considerable part of PM10 is of natural origin. On a yearly average basis we have quite a large contribution of sea salt: 4 - 7 μg/m3. ... It would be wrong to conclude that this natural contribution does not have any associat- ed health effects. "
These infections are usually confirmed by doctors for the people in their 50s or older, but us younger people are frequently under the weather from what I might now guess is bacterial infections.
Two weeks ago the water was dark brown. Point taken, but... shrug? Like you said, seems like the merits of the exercise outweigh the downsides.