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> The only thing dangerous about salt is table salt that is bleached and has chemicals added. If you can get good salts like himalayan pink salt and celtic sea salt, you are in the money.

You're mixing paranoias here. Pink/sea salt differ from table salt primarily in that they have more chemicals - that's what gives them more color/flavor. If you're concerned with the iodine supplementation, enjoy your goiter...

Fearmongering about bleach in salt is a little weird considering its chemical formula is NaClO and its primary component is used to make your tap water safe to drink. When used, it degrades to water and salt as the oxygen pops off to oxidize impurities.

>When used, it degrades to water and salt as the oxygen pops off to oxidize impurities.

Are you saying that the chlorine in drinking water turns to salt through oxidization? How is the Na added, specifically? I'm asking because when I moved to NYC from Denmark, I initially had a hard time even eating salad at restaurants because I could taste the chlorine from the tap water it was rinsed in. Is it just because there will always be pure chlorine remnants in the water?

I'm genuinely curious.

The water supply around here uses sodium hypochlorite, not pure chlorine gas.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sodium_hypochlorite#Water_treat...

You need to learn to read. My comment says chemicals added. And also says salt has many minerals.

> edit: Pink salt is not pink because more chemicals were added.

It is pink because there are more chemicals in it than just sodium chloride (pink salt gets it from iron oxide (rust), grey sea salt is usually from clay). Those chemicals occur naturally, but they're still chemicals. There are more chemicals in pink salt than table salt, regardless of their source.

> Check out this link

Completely lacks sources, and the site's a bunch of "mercury causes autism!" pseudoscience. That specific article makes false claims. For example, "Unadulterated sea salt usually contains more iodide than iodized table salt does."

http://pubs.acs.org/doi/full/10.1021/es0719071

> It is a myth (often also false advertising) that “natural” sea salt contains significant amounts of iodine. The iodide content of seawater is only 64 µg/kg or 2.1 mg I/kg NaCl. In evaporatively prepared salt, the iodide/chloride ratio is even lower because of iodine loss; crystallization processes leave iodide selectively in the mother liquor.

> The only thing dangerous about salt is table salt that is bleached and has chemicals added.

> Provides essential minerals as well as a sleuth of other positive health properties.

Plain table salt provides you exactly two elements: sodium and chlorine.

Iodized table salt provides you exactly three elements: sodium, chlorine, and iodine.

Please explain where all these beneficial and harmful substances are.

Nothing to do with the OP, but where did you come up with this? Table salt is NOT composed of exactly two elements. NaCl is. The two are not the same. Table salt often contains additional anti-caking agents (e.g. calcium silicate) and stabilizers such a dextrose. Iodized table salt doesn't contain elemental iodine, which is lethal at 30mg/kg, but some salt such as potassium iodide.

FWIW, most chefs recommend using coarse kosher salt and not iodized salt (which as pointed out, has iodine and additives). In Rhulman's "Twenty" he writes, "It's important to use the same brand of salt or your won't be able to teach yourself how to season consistently. Diamond Crystal is flakier than Morton's so that the same volume is saltier than Diamond Crystal; a tablespoon of Morton's weighs more." Morton's coarse kosher is 1 tbsp = 1/2 ounce = 15 grams.

> The only thing dangerous about salt is table salt that is bleached and has chemicals added.

> Salt is the most efficient nutrient for the body.

Are both pretty strong claims. Do you have anything other than your cramping anecdote to back that up?

People are downvoting you because they think that they know that salt is only NaCl.

They refuse to understand that nature does not provide NaCl. Chemistry made people think they could purify non-edible salt. They removed all trace elements and people got diseases caused by a lack of those elements. So companies readded iodine to cure the obvious problems.

I agree completely with you, I will only take proper natural salt, not bogus purified chemical salt.

Nothing wrong with enjoying your sea salt - you'll probably get plenty of iodine from water, flour, milk, eggs, seafood, etc. - but goiters and other mineral deficiency-related diseases happened long before we started making purified salt with chemistry.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goitre

> Chinese physicians of the Tang Dynasty (618–907) were the first to successfully treat patients with goitre by using the iodine-rich thyroid gland of animals such as sheep and pigs—in raw, pill, or powdered form.

> Goitre was previously common in many areas that were deficient in iodine in the soil. For example, in the English Midlands, the condition was known as Derbyshire Neck. In the United States, goitre was found in the Great Lakes, Midwest, and Intermountain regions. The condition now is practically absent in affluent nations, where table salt is supplemented with iodine. However, it is still prevalent in India, China Central Asia and Central Africa.

> Nothing wrong with enjoying your sea salt - you'll probably get plenty of iodine from water, flour, milk, eggs, seafood, etc.

Seaweed an even more potent source of iodine, and the Japanese eat a lot of it. The concentration of iodine in these marine plants ranges from 0.5-8.0 mg/g. Terrestrial plants, in contrast, contain only trace amounts of iodine, 0.001 mg/g.

In 1964, the Nutrition Section of Japan's Bureau of Public Health found that people in Japan consumed a daily average of 4.5 g of seaweed with measured iodine content of 3.1 mg/g, or 13.8 mg of iodine. Saltwater fish and shellfish contain iodine, but one would have to eat 15-25 pounds of fish to get 13 mg of iodine.

[Nutrition Section, Bureau of Public Health. Nutrition in Japan, 1964. Tokyo, Japan: Ministry of Health and Welfare; 1965. ]