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Comment by mytailorisrich | Hacker News Reader

With the complex supply chains and processed/ready-made food we have nowadays I am wondering how much iodine makes its way into the diet of the Swiss today even without ioded table salt.

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.

Edit: apparently nowadays, and taking animal feed into account, Switzerland imports about 50% of its food.

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Most processed food uses uniodized salt iirc, which is actually becoming a problem in parts of the USA where populations eat nothing but processed food.

My understanding is that in general there no need for supplements with a normal, balanced diet, especially with eggs, dairy products, grains, and others if iodine is naturally present in the environment.

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.

I was curious about your point about normal diet and have just looked it up. According to tables 1 and 2 in this article [0], it may be hard for some people to get enough (RDA) iodine from normal, not fortified foods.

0. https://ods.od.nih.gov/factsheets/Iodine-HealthProfessional/

People have been struggling to get enough iodine for a hundred+ years. That’s why it’s added to salt. This isn’t a 21st century problem.

Isn't that what the whole article is about?

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.

While the cases were high in switzerland, they were not unique.

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#....

Of course they were not unique (though perhaps extreme). I must say I don't get how the replies in this thread relate to my comments...

Definitely if they live in an inland region. Seaweed and fish have abundant iodine.

Aromat uses iodised salt, so despite Zweifel the swiss have nothing to fear

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