Lies You've Been Told About Salt
Episode 85: Gutsy Health Podcast
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Show Summary: “We need sodium to help us adequately maintain our blood pressure. We need it to support our brain, our adrenals, and our digestion.”
We need salt in our bodies. Studies from the American Journal of Medicine show that low salt intake causes more cardiovascular disease risk factors than extremely high intake. The adrenal, which produces cortisol, needs sodium to help our bodies adapt to stress.
But we should know which type of salt to consume and not. Like other processed foods, salt can also be manufactured. Sadly, other manufacturers pull out the nutrients from it to make the cost cheaper, which you have to get rid of to avoid certain diseases.
In this episode with Darryl Bosshardt, one of the founders of the Redmond Red Salt, you'll discover what natural whole salt is and its difference from the one you see in the market. In addition, you'll find out how the human body reacts to a salt substitute.
Exceptional Highlight:
- Throw out the idea of looking for sea salt, and start looking for natural whole salt.
- Every single cell in the body requires sodium.
- Salt is a very inexpensive preservative, and it's even cheaper if it's manufactured because they've already pulled out the nutrients. So if you're eating processed foods, you're getting high amounts of processed salt, which is a bad combination.
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Show Highlights:
Is salt really bad for us, and should we eliminate it from our diet?
Darryl 5:00
- Salt's job in the body is to regulate intracellular and extracellular fluids. So when those fluids are out of balance, it does cause, or it can cause problems. So these doctors did a study on rats and fed them copious amounts of sodium, and sure enough, they had some problems. And that'd be true for everything.
Does lack of salt affect your food digestion?
Juanique 9:42
- If you're decreasing your salt intake, you don't have enough sustenance to create hydrochloric acid in the stomach to break down your food. Therefore, you're not absorbing your food and would have malabsorption. Consequently, you start to get sick. So we need this salt to get the chloride to pump it into our stomach to break down our food.
What should we know about the world of iodized salt?
Darryl 20:27
- Most people, especially women, are iodine deficient for several reasons, whether that's halogen toxicity, diet, or many different factors involved. Most people should be going out of their way to seek good sources of iodine, be that food or a good clean iodine supplement. But salt is not the way to get iodine.
Important Links
Iodine : Why You Need It, Why You Can't Live Without It
Transcript (DOWNLOAD)
This is a Gutsy Health Podcast with Juanique and Tristin Roney.
Juanique Roney
Hey guys, welcome back to the Gutsy Health Podcast, this is Juanique Roney, and I don't have my co-host with me, Gina Worful. She's on vacation in Austin, Texas, and I'm so happy for her, but we have a really fantastic guest on today, Darryl Bosshardt. He works with Redmond Real Salt. I'm going to let him introduce you. But today we are going to be unpacking salts and the misconceptions around salt? Darryl, wouldn't you say salt is one of the most misunderstood nutrients out there or substances out there? And it's been so demonized and that's really to our detriment.
Darryl Bosshardt
You're absolutely right. You know, if you look at any of the history books, all civilization started around access to the salt deposits, religious books, historic books and salt has always been essential for life. And yet in the last 30 or 40, 50 years, we've heard that thought, this terrible thing, we have to avoid it so that if we go to the hospital, the first thing they do is they give us an I.V. solutions. So there's obviously a disconnect.
Juanique Roney
It's like such a big disconnect. Oh, my gosh, I'm so glad you brought that up. Darryl, tell us how you got into the salt world. Tell us about you and your life before we start jumping into the juiciness of how salt is actually really great for us.
Darryl Bosshardt
Well, I'm one of those crazy people that just think salt is a fascinating topic. There's a small few of us. There's a couple of great writers who have written on salt, and I just love the topic. So I grew up in central Utah and it just so happens that under my grandfather's farm, there was an ancient seabed. And so in the 1950s, my grandfather and his brother, the farm was kind of struggling and they knew there was salt under their farm because it had been harvested by the Native Americans in this particular central Utah valley before the pioneers and settlers had come through the West. And so they knew there was salt under their farm, and so they got a bulldozer and plowed the alfalfa out of the way and started selling salt to local farmers for their cows and it the cows seem to like it a lot better. In fact, the cows would eat this salt before they eat the processed white salt block then, and it tasted better. But it wasn't until the 1970s when a nutritionist came through and the health food movement was really starting to take off, that this nutritionist wrote about how this ancient mineral salt from Utah was the healthiest and tasty assault on the market, in his opinion.
And so the family sat around and said, what do we call this stuff? It's not processed salt. It's not exalted. It's just real salt. And the name stuck and our real salt was born, and I was kind of born into this amazing industry, at least in my opinion, this amazing salt industry that people are just starting to learn more about.
Juanique Roney
That so amazing. How did they even know that there was this like under ground salt like cave under their farm? I'm so curious about that story.
Darryl Bosshardt
Well, every civilization started around access to salt deposits, so it might have been near the coast where they could take seawater that occurs at about two to three percent sodium chloride, and they could take that seawater and evaporate it into salt crystals or it was around mineral deposits, these ancient seabeds that have been pushed up near the surface. And so there's a spot in Pakistan that the Himalayan pink salt comes from. There's a spot in Bolivia where this Bolivian pink comes from and there's a spot in Utah that has this ancient mineral salt.
And the early man would watch animals because animals need salt like people do. And so the animals would seek out these salt deposits and then humans would follow the animals to the salt deposits. And that's how the early pioneer, the other settlers coming through knew there was salt in this area because it had been eaten by the early animals in the area and had been discovered by the Native American population and then was discovered again by the pioneer settlers moving through the west California region.
Juanique Roney
So so cool. I want to get back to like the different kinds of salt you mentioned, like pink Himalayan salt and that salt bed. But before we do, let's talk about is salt really bad for us? And should we try and eliminate it from our diets? I know the answer to that, but what's the story behind that? And how did salt become demonized in the first place?
Darryl Bosshardt
You know, salt, as I mentioned before, before the invention of the refrigerator, all of this which actually maybe was a big part of our health problems today, but all of us would have eaten more salt because we'd have eaten fermented foods like sauerkraut and kimchi and fermented veggies. We would have eaten meat.
Juanique Roney
Meat, yes.
Darryl Bosshardt
And yet we didn't have all this blood pressure, water retention, you know, all of this problems linked to salt today and so but there was a couple of doctors, there was a doctor two years ago, wrote an article, and I can send you a copy for the show notes if you like.
Juanique Roney
It'd be amazing.
Darryl Bosshardt
The article was called Evidence for Relationship between Sodium Chloride Intake and Human Essential Hypertension. And we know that salt job in the body is to regulate intercellular and extracellular fluids. And when those fluids are out of balance, it does cause or it can cause problems. And so these doctors did a study and they said rats or mice, I can't remember which copious amounts of sodium. I mean, massive amounts.
Juanique Roney
Yes.
Darryl Bosshardt
When you feed them these incredible amounts, sure enough, they have some problems.
Juanique Roney
Yes.
Darryl Bosshardt
The same would be true for everything, even for water.
Juanique Roney
Yes. Yes, exactly. We could do a rat study on water and over hydrate rats and see them die, you know, and we see that a lot with research with like essential oils and research with like resveratrol and research with like V12 and all that jazz. So I'm so glad you brought that bad science to the surface because this happens consistently. And unfortunately, these bad papers create cultural weights and then we can't get rid of it, you know, so keep going.
Darryl Bosshardt
Well, yeah. So once that study was done, everybody thought, well, salt is bad and so we started to create salt substitutes, which are its own set of problems. We started to avoid salt in general and that causes problems because we can talk about digestion and salts important role and sodium is essential to balancing the fluids in the body. And so with this low salt now there's actually studies from the American Journal of Medicine that show that actually low salt intake causes more cardiovascular disease risk factors than extremely high intake. What really is important is the balance of fluids and the balance of the other electrolyte, and not just a single focus on one particular electrolyte.
Juanique Roney
I'm so glad that you mention that, because a lot of times when people actually have and I hope it's OK if I just get a little sciency here, but a lot of time, especially in our standard American diet, we're eating processed foods that are super high in salt, but we don't have those other minerals that counterbalance that like potassium, for instance. So if you're looking at packaged American food, super high sodium, hardly any potassium to balance it out, inflammatory polyunsaturated fatty acids. Whereas when you're looking at a Whole Foods like plant based diet, you have sodium and potassium in those vegetables. And so that potassium tends to help balance out the sodium. What we are seeing in our society is, oh, my gosh, look at when we unbalanced sodium and like we have so much sodium and potassium, we're creating like hypertension. So therefore, just cut back on the sodium. What we really should be saying is actually no, bring up the potassium and actually bring in the Whole Foods to like bring in the other metals to balance that out, because it just seems so counterproductive to cut out a mineral that is so helpful for you. Not only, you know, you mentioned digestion and adrenals and I want to touch on that really fast because most women listening right now, because the majority of my audience are female and have had babies. our adrenals are shot. All right. Our adrenals there is these stress glands. All right. They produce cortisol and they help our bodies adapt to stress. And a lot of times when, you know, we can tell when you have adrenal fatigue, it's like 2:00 p.m. and you want to take a nap. That's adrenal fatigue. Well, the adrenal glands require sodium, potassium and vitamin C, so we're cutting out all this sodium. We're not feeding our adrenals. We're not feeding our adrenals. We want to take naps and we're exhausted throughout the day. But, Darryl, do you care if I keep going?
Darryl Bosshardt
No, you're exactly right, and in addition to that, low sodium also is linked to insulin resistance.
Juanique Roney
Yeah.
Darryl Bosshardt
It cause a whole bunch of problems in addition to the adrenals you're mentioning. So, yeah. Please keep going.
Juanique Roney
Yeah, exactly. Well, and another thing too, and I want to add to brain. Brain health as well, something that Gina taught me the other day. But let's talk about like digestion, for instance, because I always tell listeners and in the Gutsy membership, I teach a whole class on digestion and the Holy Grail to digestion is hydrochloric acid in the stomach. Now, when you look at sodium, it's an A and it's S.L. It's sodium and it's chloride bound together. Right. Well, the body separates that and uses the NA, the salt, the sodium, and then the body will filter out the chloride to create hydrochloric acid in the stomach. So if you're decreasing your salt intake, you don't have enough sustenance to create hydrochloric acid in the stomach to break down your food. Therefore, you're not absorbing your food. Therefore, you have malabsorption. Therefore you start to get sick. So we need this salt to get the chloride to pump it into our stomach, to break down our food. So if you're cutting out and again, Darryl, you mentioned earlier. There's like synthetic salt, there's bad salt, but you're talking about real salt. Real salt that has the sodium the chloride, the minerals, it has the whole shebang. It's like an entourage. It's this entourage effect in the body. We can't hyper isolate them. It's going to create imbalances. One last thing I wanted to mention, too, is blood pressure. If we don't have salt, a lot of women have low blood pressure. So if we have low blood pressure, that actually means because of gravity, we're not getting a super adequate blood flowing to our brain. And if we don't have enough blood flowing to our brain over years, that's going to lead to mental decline. So women who get up really fast and get head rushes or men even. People that get lightheaded. People that you get a little woozy when you get up super fast, like we have low blood pressure and that's not a good thing. Too low blood pressure is bad. Too high blood pressure is bad. So we need that sodium. We need these things to help us maintain our blood pressure in an adequate way so that we can help our brain, so we can help our adrenal, so we can help our digestion. So you guys salt is huge and unfortunately, we demonized it. We took it out of context and we put it in our really toxic American culture and we hyper focused on sodium and not the potassium that we get from fruits and vegetables. And we created this disconnect. So anyways, Darryl, keep going.
Darryl Bosshardt
No, I love how you connect it all to back to get help and stomach help because, you know, we often think of sodium and balancing fluids, which it does. But the gut is such an important part of our immune system. And so when somebody here salt's bad and they switch to a low salt diet.
Juanique Roney
Yes.
Darryl Bosshardt
Or they switch to a salt substitute, they actually start having indigestion problems and a series of immune problems because their bodies are designed to run off sodium chloride and then all these other complex causes as well, potassium chloride, magnesium chloride, calcium chloride. And so if we were to take an orange and we were to suck out the vitamin C and then sell the orange left over, it's not the same as the orange in nature. And salt actually has gone through a similar type change. So we talked about salt, you know, hundreds of years ago, salt was this complex, mostly sodium chloride, but it was the whole food item.
Juanique Roney
Yes.
Darryl Bosshardt
And then years later, now salt companies can take out from seawater, which occurs with potassium chloride, magnesium chloride, calcium chloride. Salt companies can take out the potassium chloride. They can take out the magnesium chloride. They're going to get the calcium chloride and then they can sell the kind of the remaining sodium chloride with the other minerals intact. When you do that, not only does it impact the flavor, because if you look at salt in nature, it has kind of a snowflake. All of the crystals are a little bit different. If you look at the salt coming out of the ocean like the great salt, they lie in that pond with the great clay. And so when they wake up the salt crystals off the bottom of that evaporated pond, you get the mineral rich gray clay with that that helps add to the minerals and added the flavor. Do the same process in Hawaii and you get a kind of a red Hawaiian, kind of a dusty because of that, those minerals and the salt. And so salt has always been more of this complex item instead of this process.
Juanique Roney
Right.
Darryl Bosshardt
And there's two processes that people need to be aware of that happen to a lot of salt. Years ago, we might have said, hey, you know, who has heard sea salt better? And my guess is most people would raise their hand. But today that's not the case. And so I think listeners need to be aware that just because it says sea salt on the label, it might be C grade. And there's a couple of reasons for that.
Juanique Roney
And so you're saying C grade is like the highly processed. Everything that is complementary to it has been pulled out. That's what you're saying, correct?
Darryl Bosshardt
Yeah. There's two processes that salt undergoes today and and taking it away from that holistic natural the way salt was always meant to be savored. And so the first of those are already touched on, and that is that salt companies today can pull out some of those minerals that occur in the seawater or the ancient seabed through a series of evaporation ponds. They can leach out a few of those other electrolytes that are important. The second factor, which is actually a bigger deal, is salt we talked on before. It go in the body of one of the main goals for the sodium side of salt is to regulate moisture, the intercellular and extracellular fluids. Well, salt is a growth topic, meaning if we put a salt crystal on a table in a humid area, that salt crystal is going to get wet and it sucks water kind of dehumidifiers the room and it's that it sucks water, which is why it works in the cells the same. So one of the downsides of that is if you put salt in a shaker and it is wet outside and it's raining or humid, the salt crystals will absorb moisture, and so years ago, scientists got together and said, what can we do to this salt crystal? What can we coat it with to stop salt ability to attract moisture? And at the time, I thought this was a great idea because when it rains outside, your salt gets sticky in the shaker and it won't flow and you could put rice in it or a few different things. But they said, what chemicals we add to the salt to make it more convenient? Well, they didn't stop to ask, should they?
Juanique Roney
Exactly. Yeah, that sounds like a terrible idea because what is happening outdoors is actually happening in your body too.
Darryl Bosshardt
Exactly, but it's not with a list of chemicals that they could quote assault Crystal with to stop its ability to react with moisture in the air. And these chemicals aren't so nice. One of them is called yellow prussiate , the rate of soda, which is sodium cyanide.
Juanique Roney
Cyanide.Wow.
Darryl Bosshardt
Yeah, sodium pellets, which is iron. Another one's called calcium silico illuminate, which is the aluminum element that people worry about bioaccumulation.
Juanique Roney
Right.
Darryl Bosshardt
And these are trace amounts and there's calcium phosphates. Another one there's and then trace amounts it's probably OK and you're not going to immediately notice a problem. But one, it's a chemical that the body's not used to getting. Sodium cyanide is not something he would put on your eggs if you were thinking about it.
Juanique Roney
Right.
Darryl Bosshardt
But you do it when we put it on our salt and then we put the salt on our food. We're transferring this. But the bigger problem is the chemicals purpose is to interact with salt and moisture and stop salts ability to do that. So then you take that salt, which is supposed to interact and balance our fluids, and then we take that cheap, dematerialize salt that's coated with an anti caking agent. And then to make it worse, we put that on cheap demineralized food, we should be eating anyway. Now, I've got a terrible combination.
Juanique Roney
Right. Yeah. What were they thinking? Is what keeps running through my head. I'm just like, why would they even do that? Do they still put that in our salt today? Or was that like just back like 10, 20, 30 years ago?
Darryl Bosshardt
No, but still.
Juanique Roney
It still a thing.
Darryl Bosshardt
You know, this enteric-coated, there's a shelf and there's even sea salt, if you walk to a grocery store and pick up that popular sea salt off the shelf and use the ingredients on that, you'll see things like calcium silicate. You'll see things like yellow prussiate of soda. You might see dextrose added as an ingredient because that stops some of the other additives from turning yellow. So there's and this is, again, on a lot of sea salt products. So I tell people, just throw out the idea of looking for sea salt and look for natural whole salt. And we can talk about my favorite three questions toward the end.
Juanique Roney
Yes.
Darryl Bosshardt
But I think those three questions get you a good clean salt.
Juanique Roney
Awesome.
Darryl Bosshardt
But looking for sea salt is not a good idea anymore.
Juanique Roney
You guys scratch that sea salt isn't good enough. It's processed and has yucky things in it. What is the difference between sea salt and other salts like pink, red and black salts?
Darryl Bosshardt
Well, sea salt so solve for our kitchen table salt, sodium chloride based salt, regardless of what its market as can all be defined as sea salt because it came from a seabed at some point, that seabed today might be the San Francisco Bay. It might be the Gulf of Mexico, the Sea of Japan, Hudson. So but sea, the sea is consistent in all of those, or it could be a dead sea that's been cut off like the Dead Sea in Israel or the Dead Sea here in Utah called the Great Salt Lake, or it could be an ancient sea like the seabed in Pakistan, the Himalayan deposit. It could be the ancient seabed in Bolivia, which is where the Bolivian rose as Bolivian paint comes from, or the ancient seabed in Utah where the red real salt comes from. But seabed is consistent across all of those. So the term sea salt today really doesn't mean much. The difference might be the gray salt, which is a current ocean salt coming from either the Mediterranean or near the coast of Brittany, France, where they take a gray clay and they line that pond. It could be from a current ocean salt where they use a red clay to line that pond in Hawaii. It could be the pink salt, which is an ancient seabed. I typically referred to as the Pakistan deposit in ancient seabed that has minerals and clays that are trapped in it to give it that rosy color. Same with the red mineral salt from Utah or the Bolivian salt. And these ancient seabed geologists put in the range of the Jurassic era, which would be around one hundred and fifty to two hundred and fifty million years ago. Now, I wasn't alive to confirm the actual date, but it was long before we had the microbeads in the plastics and some of the Exxon Valdez and BP stuff that, you know, our oceans have to deal with today.
Juanique Roney
Very cool. So what makes it pink then? And like, it's just different minerals and different locations and different soils and stuff.
Darryl Bosshardt
Yeah, so the red color and like the Hawaiian red comes from the red clay in the red and real salt, that rosy quartz look comes from the other minerals. Real salt, about ninety eight percent sodium chloride, and then you've got two percent that are made up of calcium magnesium chloride and then trace amounts of selenium, zinc, manganese, phosphorous. So there's trace amounts of these other minerals that make up that other two percent, some of those being this kind of a red clay mineral that's trapped within the crystalline NCCL structure that gives it that rosy quartz color, the red mineral salt, and including the little black flecks that the manganese and zinc that a little teeny black flecks.
Juanique Roney
Very cool.
Darryl Bosshardt
It all add to the flavor and as we talked earlier, helped to offset the sodium.
Juanique Roney
I love that. It kind of reminds me of the analogy of if you buy an orange from California and an orange from Florida, they're going to have different nutritional properties and they're going to look different and taste different, even though they're the same thing, and that's because of where they've been grown and the soil content and the mineral in the soils. And so it's the same thing with salt. It just depends on whatever is in that area as far as minerals go and soils. My question about salt substitutes, one, I didn't even know there was a thing. What is a salt substitute and how do we look for it? And I am so sorry if people like Juanique, how do you not know what salt substitute is? I just don't understand why we would substitute salt and how do we substitute salt? Are these things that taste like salt but they're not?
Darryl Bosshardt
No they taste terrible.
Juanique Roney
Yeah, I can't imagine. What are they?
Darryl Bosshardt
Again back when salt was seen as this negative thing, but you still wanted food to taste good. They tried to manufacturers tried to find a way to reduce the sodium chloride content in salt so they would cut the sodium chloride in half and add other things to it.
Juanique Roney
Like what?
Darryl Bosshardt
It might be potassium chloride.
Juanique Roney
Oh, I gotcha.
Darryl Bosshardt
And other additives. Now, what's interesting is if you pick up any salt substitute and it might be called like light salt, no salt, new salt, half salt, things like that in the grocery store and you turn the label over, you'll see a warning that says for a normal, healthy people.
Juanique Roney
Wow.
Darryl Bosshardt
I never see that warning on a normal salt. It's only on the salt substitute. And the reason is a lot of those have refined potassium chloride at it. Now, you and I both know potassium is essential for life, but you don't get that. You don't want that in the form of potassium chloride, especially like in an I.V. situation.
Juanique Roney
Right.
Darryl Bosshardt
The last I.V. in a series of lethal injections is actually potassium chloride because it stops the heart. Oh, my gosh. And so that's why a salt substitute has a warning that says for normal, healthy people can sort of stationer before use because, again, people think that salt's bad. They go to the hospital and they get an idea of salt water.
Juanique Roney
But potassium chloride is way worse than salt. When I think of the people making the rules around, I wish people could see me right now, my hand is on my face and I'm just like, how did we get here? It's like the blind leading the blind when it comes to food, and they're actually not food experts. They're money experts. When they make these things up, you know, you have to think because this is like basic biology, this is basic science, like how did we mess this up so badly where we're putting like toxic substances in food and we're taking away really incredible substances that feed like help your gut and your adrenals and your brain like it. Just me and every single cell in your body. You guys, every single cell in the body requires sodium, every single cell, and if our cells are shriveled up like raisins, they're not working properly. We need salt to make sure that they're plump grapes, not shriveled up raisins.
Darryl Bosshardt
And part of that, you know, when people are making lifestyle changes and they're moving away from a very processed, refined food, whether eating out of cans and boxes. Salt is a very inexpensive preservative, and if it is a manufactured, processed salt, it's even a cheaper because they've already pulled out the nutrients. And so if you're eating processed food, you're getting high amounts of processed salt, which is a bad combination.
Juanique Roney
Yep.
Darryl Bosshardt
Once you switch over and you're eating more fresh foods, either you're fermenting your own veggies and you're heading down to the farmer's market and you're adding avocados and all of this fresh food, you can't get enough sodium based and just eating celery or eating avocados. That's why humans have always had to have salt to add to food. But if you're eating a lot of processed foods, you're getting copious amounts high amounts of processed salt, and that's, again, a bad combination. What's unfortunate is I think we've kind of forgotten how our bodies, our bodies talk to us. If we're low on water, we get thirsty.
Juanique Roney
Yeah.
Darryl Bosshardt
I mean, we're supposed to get a drink. Well, today, because we haven't been used to eating salt when we have a salt craving, we actually think we're craving potato chips craving French fries. We're not we don't need French fries. What we need is the good clean salt, and so our bodies need to kind of retrain them, and when I think I mean, I'm really craving some potato chips or a French fry by taking a salt, crystal, clean, natural sulforaphane sucking on it or putting a little bit under your tongue with a big glass of water, many people find that those cravings for either fatty, salty foods or even sugar, if you can give it a sugar craving, you actually can put a little salt under your tongue and oftentimes that salt and water will satisfy what you thought was your sugar craving, when in fact it was just a salt or fat craving.
Juanique Roney
Exactly. And even better yet, cook up some vegetables to counter balance all that sodium with the potassium and you have the perfect ratio of sodium to potassium in your body and you will crave less food throughout the day and you'll be more satiated because your body's getting exactly everything it needs. There's an image in one of my lectures, my Gutsy health membership lectures, where it shows processed foods, sodium to potassium content and then whole fruits and vegetables, sodium to potassium content. I'm going to try and find that image and post it on Instagram and see if I can put it in the show note somewhere, you guys, because it will blow your mind. It will make so much sense when you see this visual and you'll be like, oh, OK, this is why we have our problem, because man has created an imbalance in minerals when it comes to food, whereas nature packaged our minerals together perfectly, just perfectly. So salt plus vegetables equals happy, healthy lifestyle. I always tell my people, load up and salt, eat all the vegetables you want, load up on the salt. When I was talking about adrenals earlier, something that I always talk about in my stories on Instagram is adrenal cocktail and all that is an adrenal cocktail is sodium, potassium and vitamin C and it's high amounts. When you drink the stuff, it is salty, it's nasty, it's not good. You might want to get it in pill form, but that's the point, and I tell people, take it at ten and take it at two because that's when you get the morning crash and the afternoon crash. And I kid you not, so many people, you guys, so many people messaged me and they're like, I don't drink coffee anymore. I don't take a nap in the middle of the day. I'm energized. I can tell when I don't take my adrenal cocktail. It's literally three ingredients sodium, potassium, vitamin C, we need salt. Our bodies need salt because we grew babies. We need salt because we live in a stressful day and era. We need salt, you guys. So make sure you're eating your salt.
Hey, Darrell, can we talk about iodine? Real quick, because people always ask me about that iodized Salt, should I be doing that because of my thyroid and et cetera, et cetera? What should we know about the world of iodized salt and if it is good for us and if it's not?
Darryl Bosshardt
A great question because no discussion on salt today would be complete without a discussion on iodine because we've come to associate the two. However, if we went back before World War One, nobody would have expected to get their iodine, which is extremely important from salt. And as you're eating foods that are rich and iodine, you're getting the seaweed, fresh fish, it can be rich in iodine because there is iodine in the oceans. So at World War One, though, the draft was started and in the Midwest, particularly, the men that were getting drafted in the Midwest had a goiter issue, which is evidence of an iodine deficiency. And so which made sense because in the Midwest, a lot of people are eating refined flowers and refined sugars, eating out of cans, not eating a much seafood at all, not seaweed, not dolls, and not getting high levels of iodine. And so a bunch of scientists and the government got together and said, look, we have to get people to eat more iodine. I'm hoping that somebody raised their hand and said, hey, let's have a campaign on the importance of dose and how Delp and Dose can add a lot of iodine to the diet that I'm not sure that happened or not, but what they came up with was, let's find a food item that everybody has to eat to live, and let's force the manufacturers to add iodine to that food item. And some municipalities will add fluoride at the water force people to add some fluoride to their diet.
Juanique Roney
That's a topic for another day because I could go on like a two hour tangent about that, but keep going.
Darryl Bosshardt
So they came up with they couldn't add it to the water supply. They tried to add it as a dose conditioner like bromide is added to enriched flour, which is another topic of problems.
Juanique Roney
And interestingly enough, like all of these have to do with the thyroid, like chlorine bromide, you know, like fluoride, it's so funny you mention all three things that like that they either wreck like thyroid health or they help thyroid health. So keep going.
Darryl Bosshardt
Our thyroid love halogens, You've got your major Pottenger bromide, your iodine and fluoride. And in that grew, the thyroid likes all of those. And so if you have Rahmi toxicity, that actually helps or actually prevents iodine absorption. So anyway, so the US government said the salt companies you have to add iodine, potassium iodide must be added to your salt product, and if you decide not to add it, you have to put a warning on the product that says this salt does not supply iodide a necessary nutrient.
Juanique Roney
Wow.
Darryl Bosshardt
Now, what's interesting is natural salt because they come from seabeds and these do have Itanium, which is why Kelp and Dulce and other seaweed has iodine in it. Even if the salt has a small level of natural iodine, the manufacturer must say this salt does not supply iodide a necessary nutrient if they're not adding potassium iodide to the salt. Now, what that did is that actually did help because even though when you add potassium iodide, the salt, that potassium iodide, that that it is less than 10 percent bioavailable. So you could add one hundred and fifty micrograms to your diet via salt, but you're only going to get 15 of that hundred and fifty which is not a very bioavailable form, but 15 micrograms is better than zero.
Juanique Roney
Right.
Darryl Bosshardt
And so it did actually help but it's not a very likely target before. It's not a whole and it's not a very bioavailable or gut friendly version of iodine. And so most people, especially women, as you know, are iodine deficient for a number of reasons, whether that's allergen toxicity, whether that's diet, whether that's a lot of different factors involved. And most people should be going out of their way to seek good sources of iodine, be that food, or even if they can't get enough food, a good clean iodine supplement. But salt is not the way to get iodine.
Juanique Roney
OK, that's really great to know. I would love to talk about the halogens and how you mentioned bromide and fluoride and how those literally block the receptors for the iodine to reach the thyroid. And so if we're drinking tap water and we're eating bread, we are inhibiting our body's ability to absorb iodine, and then we're getting non-bioavailable iodine from our salt, and then we wonder why, you know, a third of women are walking around with thyroid dysfunction.
Darryl Bosshardt
Well, I was just going to say, and the real problem with iodine deficiency is that you will help the tumor grow. All of these are linked to iodine deficiency. So we just can't afford not to get good sources of iodine. And analogy that I like to help people understand with the halogen contamination is if you look on the periodic table of elements, the top of the chart is the larger elements, and then it goes the rest of my atomic weight.
And so if you look at the size of the particle, the atomic weight iodine is actually the biggest of the halogen. That's a really it's a bigger molecule. And as you go smaller to the bromine, the chlorine and the fluorine that are underneath that are that that are smaller, if you were to take a big bucket of steel balls and you put a magnet in there and in this bucket you have big, great big balls of steel and little teeny balls of steel. As you move that magnet around, the little balls will work their way in and push the bigger balls out.
Juanique Roney
That's such a good analogy.
Darryl Bosshardt
And so that's what happens with the iodine. The iodine actually get squeezed out the halogens that the far loves, all of those like the magnet wheel, like any of those steel balls. But the little ones forced their way in and pushed the big ones out. And that big one that gets pushed out is iodine.
Juanique Roney
That's such a brilliant analogy. Holy cow. I'm so glad you shared that with listeners. And it's so important. I mean, I know Carlin did a podcast episode with Dr. Reid on Hashimoto's and thyroids. If you guys want to learn more about thyroid, go ahead and do that. But what Darryl just spoke about right now, you guys, I wish everyone understood that because we are bombarded with those teeny tiny little magnets that are pushing out the big ones and we actually need the big ones, the iodines. So, Darryl, can you tell us a little bit about how salt is generally produced and how is real salt produced?
Darryl Bosshardt
Yeah, so salt comes from a variety of sources. It can come from a current ocean and in the current oceans there, about two to three percent salt. So you take the current ocean water, you evaporate the excess water off, and then you're left with sodium chloride and these other complex fluorides and minerals during the seawater. That's how it's always been done from ocean water. Now, today, with different liner's, you can reach out and precipitate these other elements, these other complex causes can be pulled off. And then you can add a series of chemicals so it doesn't clump together. That's how salt would come from the current ocean.
We also have ancient seabed. So like in the Midwest, under Kansas and under Chicago, there's these ancient sea beds, but they're so far down they're not really economical to mine. And so you can take fresh water pump at thousands of feet into the earth that fresh water will eat away at that seabed that's trapped within the earth. You can pump that solution back up and then you can evaporate that salt water just like you have from a current ocean, but you have sort of a current ocean you've pumped water in. You've made a saline solution and you pump the water back out. When you do that, then you can do the same thing. You can pull off other minerals, then you can add chemicals to it.
The third way would be an ancient seabed where the seabed was trapped, you know, eons ago, and it solidified and created a sedimentary deposit with that salt from that prehistoric sea settled off and evaporated. And then it's been trapped under heat and pressure. And then you've got this, the salt cavern that you can mine, which is what we do with real salt here in Utah. So it's a seabed that's about a quarter mile wide, three miles long, five thousand feet deep. And we just chew the salt with a kind of like a manta stihler, like for your garden. But the carbide tipped that huge the salt off the wall and then we just crush it and we screen it so we don't add anything to it. We don't take anything away. We just leave this ancient seabed in the form that it was in when nature laid it down.
Juanique Roney
That's very, very cool. How did real salt get started?
Darryl Bosshardt
So I kind of mentioned that a little bit earlier. Underneath my grandfather's farm, there was this beautiful salt crystal that just happened to be serendipitously end the farm and the farm wasn't doing that well. So they dug down and started harvesting the salt. And the term real salt was born because they didn't know what else to call it.
Juanique Roney
I love that.
Darryl Bosshardt
It wasn't a genius marketing campaign. Some people think we were geniuses. No, we just were pretty boring and said, what is this? It's just real salt, and the name stuck.
Juanique Roney
Right, and you guys have just grown and grown and grown as far as like a company. How are you guys, if you don't mind me asking, how are you guys associated with redmen? Because isn't it called like redmann real salt? And you guys are now like you have multiple farms. Can you tell us a little bit more about your company?
Darryl Bosshardt
Yeah. So the town that this salt deposit is in is just north of the town in Utah called the Redmond, and it's called Redmann because there's three red mounds that are behind the town. And so the settlers call their redmann because there was Red Mount and so that's where the salt is from, from Redmond and it's salt. And so that's again, it wasn't great marketing, it was just a name and very descriptive marketing term, real salt. And it started out with this idea that we want to create a company to treat people and products like we'd like to be treated. And that's kind of what the companies maintained ever since. And so we try to introduce products that are simple and clean and real and then have a company that we try to encourage our associates to live on purpose and to stay curious and the relationships matter. So we have this tagline that we say, elevate the human experience.
Juanique Roney
Yeah.
Darryl Bosshardt
We try to do that with our products and with activities for our team members. It might sound overly utopian and maybe it is, but we try to have created a family of products and a family of companies that people can connect with and that can add value to our families and to hopefully some other families as well.
Juanique Roney
Can I speak to that for a second? Because it was Julie who invited me over to one of your guys locations in Heber, and I was floored by the family environment of like everyone loves each other. Everyone holds such a high standard and you can feel the love. Darryl, I'm actually super impressed by the culture in your company and how you guys just want to put out good product and you just want to do better for the environment and do better for people's health, and like you said, you want it to be clean and you want it to be simple. And you do have that really great utopian kind of environment, which is is very rare for big companies. And so I do I want listeners to know that because I do speak very highly of your company, not just because your products are amazing, but because the culture is as well. And to me, culture is everything, because, you know, one of my catchphrases is where thoughts go, energy flows, and you guys put out really good energy and you put out a really good product. And we need to elevate more companies like this, more companies that are not just about consumerism and the bottom dollar. It's about how can we put more good mojo into the world, because that creates a really beautiful karmic effect that helps you guys and it helps the planet and it helps our communities. So thank you. Thank you for inviting me out to your guys company and this is like a year ago, you guys, they didn't just invite me out and then they're like, let's get Darryl on your podcast. No, it was like 18 months ago that they invited me out. So I don't want anyone to think like, oh, they're just patting each other on the back. I was really, really, genuinely super impressed.
Darryl Bosshardt
Thank you so much, and I think that's a really good segue way. I kind of teased earlier that I had these three questions that I like to share with people. When people say, hey, Darryl, you know, how do I find a good salt? And obviously I'm a little biased. There's some other really good stuff out there. And I think these three questions apply universally to assault as well as to great veggies. If you're heading down to the farmer's market or the local grocery store to find good veggies, I think these same three questions apply universally. And even if you're going to go buy a backpack for your hike up in the hills, I think these are three great questions.
And so the first one is to know who's producing it. When it comes to salt today particularly, it gets really hard to find the producer of the salt. You might go to the grocery store and there's this canister and it says salt in it, but you don't really know who are the people behind the item. And I think that's really important not only for the mojo and some of that energy that you talked about earlier, but also because it allows you to ask the next two questions.
So once you know who's producing it, then the second one is to know the source, you know, where is it coming from? And salt that can be pretty important because we have things, unfortunately, like the Exxon Valdez spill years ago, this spill. And during those events, I probably would not want to source my salt from areas right around where that took place or the Japan disaster. You know, I don't know that I want my salt out of the Sea of Japan right after radiation spills and.
Juanique Roney
Yes, exactly.
Darryl Bosshardt
And so knowing the source is, I think, really important, whether you're getting goji berries or you're picking out some nice weather let us from the farmers market, you know, what field, what kind of chemicals are in that field and so know who's producing it, know the source. And the final question is, what's the process? What are they doing to it or are they taking anything out and are they putting anything in? And I think you whether you're buying salt or you're buying a supplement or you're buying some veggies, if you can know who's producing it, if you can find out the source and then find out the process, I think we're going to all make better consumer choices, be that our next mountain bike or our next kale chips or our next salt.
Juanique Roney
Well, and the difference between and I want to go back to how ocean salt is, there's tons of pollution in the ocean and, you know, from radiation to these chemical spills, but yours is like an ancient salt cave that's been untouched by civilization, which is, I think, really important to note. There's no chemical spills in there. There's nothing it's just been really protected by nature and continues to be protected.
Can I ask a really controversial question? Because this keeps coming up online and there's a lot of misunderstanding around, like heavy metals where, like people keep saying, well, they found trace amounts of LED here and they found trace amounts of LED there. Can you talk to us, Darryl, about what these numbers mean? And should we be concerned because LED in concentration, yes can be really problematic. But we also need to recognize that it is a natural element too. When are we going too far and we're becoming too anxious about these topics of like contamination?
Darryl Bosshardt
That's a great question, and obviously, we all need to be concerned about heavy metals and nobody should be going and eating LED bars. At the end of the day, LED is still one of the top elements that occur in our planet. And until we leave the planet Earth, all these metals that are on the earth naturally are things that we're going to have to deal with at some point. Whether you buy a bag of organic sunflower seeds or kale chips because there is trace amounts in the soil, there is going to be trace amounts in our environment. Now, that doesn't excuse the pollution from leaded paint and leaded gasoline and contamination.
We obviously want to avoid that as much as possible. But in comparison, I think that we need to look at. So the typical concentration of LED in our soils is around 11 to 17 parts per million. And so just if you went in your backyard and picked up any soil between 17 to even 400 parts per million is what the EPA considers normal. Above four hundred becomes problematic and you don't want to have playgrounds and soil around your house if it's over 400.
In terms of salt, it is a minuscule, minuscule percentage that shows up. And sometimes you'll see it and sometimes you won't because the testing amounts are so small. But in relation, a lot of people will look at LED and they'll look at water. And so they'll say, well, in water supply, the LED safety standard is, you know, X amount parts per billion and above my head, I don't know that number. But when you think about water supply, that's interesting because all of us should be drinking a lot of water in a day. Let's say, you know, one of the ratios that somebody uses is half your body weight in ounces, whether that's the right number or not, maybe that's a different discussion. But if I'm one hundred and fifty pounds, that means I should be using that ratio, should drink about seventy five ounces of water, which is going to be maybe half a gallon or so. So when I'm drinking that, you know, eight pounds per gallon is the weight of water. And so if you're having a quarter teaspoon of salt versus an eight gallon source of water, the ratios of the consumption can be different. That makes sense?
Juanique Roney
Yes.
Darryl Bosshardt
So the parts per million, the actual milligrams per kilogram in eight gallons of water versus, you know, that you're consuming versus consuming a quarter teaspoon of salt is extremely different. And so we need to, first off, not use the water standard for your kale chips because then you're not going to ever eat vegetables again.
Juanique Roney
Right.
Darryl Bosshardt
And then the other thing when it comes to LED is LED isn't LED isn't LED meaning there are minerals that are bound to let him in the soils that are different then then refined, bioavailable LED that you had, you know, you might eat if you were to go and eat LED. So it's just very different. The science is a lot more complex than just in this particular standard is used universally. So when somebody says, hey, I saw a report that the Himalayan salt has a point zero zero parts per million, you know, that doesn't concern me because if they tested their LED us, they would also see something very similar.
Juanique Roney
Yes.
Darryl Bosshardt
And to me, that's very different than LED based paint and leaded gasoline, because as long as we're here on the planet Earth, we will have trace amounts of LED in our environment and in our natural diet. And our bodies are actually designed to process and deal with small amounts of LED because it's done that since the dawn of time, it hasn't been able to deal with high amounts of processed or artificial or refined manufacturing byproducts of LED. But the trace amounts of natural LED in our environment has always been that way and will always be that way until we leave this planet we call Earth.
Juanique Roney
Well, and like you said, the difference between LED paint and LED found naturally is very different, and it's not going to be bioavailable. I always think of like mud or clay. A lot of people will take Clay to do like detoxifying because Clay will bind to certain heavy metals, right? So Clay is not going to go into your body and release the heavy metals is actually going to bind to it and then you're going to poop it out. Go ahead.
Darryl Bosshardt
You're right. Clay is a natural violator and you don't start that way for humans. But if you have a dairy, you actually you feed clay to your pigs and to your chickens and your livestock to reduce the heavy metal toxicity. And there's good studies that show if you feed pigs or feed tilapia clay, it reduces the cadmium, the mercury in the LED levels and so when you have trace amounts of natural clay and salt and within that natural clay structure, there is a small microscopic particle of LED that's bound within the clay particle. That's not like leaded gasoline.
Juanique Roney
Exactly. It's not going to be released into your bloodstream and into your cells and into your brain and cause dysfunction. It's going to stick to the clay and you're just going to poop it out kind of thing. So it's like bioavailable versus like non bioavailable. I did because there's been a lot of talk on the Internet about, you know, LED and heavy metals and people are becoming more and more aware of it, but the issue is when we are taking these natural resources, like you said, LED is a natural resource, but we're mining it and hyper concentrating it and then putting in a product that makes it very observable for us in our bodies at these higher concentrations. That's when it's super problematic.
Darryl Bosshardt
That's similar analogy and it's not exactly true, but it would be somewhat similar is aluminum silicate is something that we take all the time in our environment. It's basically trace amounts of sand essentially. Aluminum silicates are all over in our environment, and aluminum silicate is very different from aluminum or aluminum, depending on if you're from the UK. So aluminum we know is bioaccumulate but if you have silica attached to aluminum, it's actually negative. The silica does not let go of aluminum in the body. So you can take aluminum silica. That's different than eating aluminum that's been processed and LED when it's bound up is different from a refined LED.
Juanique Roney
Yeah. So I hope listeners, I hope that is a really that's a really great concept for people to take into account when they are reading information online about like heavy metals, and it's all of these things that do create problems in our lives. But when we are seeing it in these really, really, really small forms that are not bioavailable, like no need to freak out anything is what I want to say. I hope I said that well.
Darryl Bosshardt
I think another example of that is we know that hydrogen is an explosive gas. They make bomb with it, high explosive. But if you put two hydrogen molecules next to an O.
Juanique Roney
It's water.
Darryl Bosshardt
It's water.
Juanique Roney
Exactly.
Darryl Bosshardt
Chlorine gas. Chlorine is a deadly, very acidic gas used in the concentration camps, and the gas chambers was chlorine gas. We know it's deadly and sodium is a very caustic ally. Actually, if you have refined sodium sitting on a table and you drop a single drop of water on refined sodium, it'll blow up.
Juanique Roney
Yes.
Darryl Bosshardt
Because it's that caustic, but yet you put one sodium with one chloride and now we've got this beautiful thing called salt. And so chemistry is a lot more complex than some on the Internet saying, oh, my gosh, there's this trace amount of LED. It's going to kill everybody. LED is a problem for sure, but we need to look at the chemistry beyond just being PB, which is exactly the whole point of LED and see what is occurring with what the detach too, because chlorine gas is different than sodium chloride.
Juanique Roney
Right.
Darryl Bosshardt
And when you have aluminum that's refined, it's different from an aluminum silicate in nature. And when you have LED that's bound within a clay structure, actually that clay will actually bind additional heavy metals into it.
Darryl Bosshardt
Exactly.
Juanique Roney
It's not going to release the small amount with the clay.
Juanique Roney
Exactly. Exactly. So, listeners, I hope that made sense because that's super, super important to know moving forward because I don't want to create paranoia or fear around these things, because, like Darryl said, chemistry is so complex, and when we try to simplify it and we simplify it too much, then really the truth gets missed. Anyways, what are some great salt resource books that people could read about if they want to know more about salt? One of my favorite ones that I share with my listeners and and on Instagram is The Salt Fix by Dr. James Danakil. How do you say his last name?
Darryl Bosshardt
Danakil Antonio.
Juanique Roney
Danakil Antonio. That's one of my most favorite books. I wish everyone would read that book, but what are some of the resources that people can seek out to learn more about salt?
Darryl Bosshardt
That is one of my favorite, but the great place to start, and then another one is a book called Salt Your Way to Help. It's written by an MD in the Midwest. His name is Dr. David Brounstein. I really like his book on salt and if any of your listeners are interested in exploring iodine a little more in detail, Dr. Brounstein has another great book called Iodine Why You Need It and Why You Can't Live Without It by dr. David Brounstein too, two really good books. And then for any history nerd out there that would like to learn a little more about just salt history and salt in general, there's a great book called Salt a World History, and that's another great book that is just fun to read on salt role in civilization since the dawn of time.
Juanique Roney
Amazing. How can people find your guys' salt? You have your storefront. You can find it on Amazon. If you guys are local, Redmond has like the best restaurants ever. I mean, they went from salt to like raw milk to all these other incredible things to their incredible little buffet place, not a buffet, but restaurant. But how can people find your company if I haven't already mentioned it?
Darryl Bosshardt
So Redmond.Life is the website, not dotcom, dot life is our main consumer product, kind of the business website. So if you go to www.Redmond.life, it has the salt page there, as well as some of our body care products and a few of our electrolyte replacements and if you're interested in just the salt in general, since that was today's major topic, you can just go to real salt as opposed to fake salt, to realsalt.com and we've got our information on this ancient seabed and mineral salt in Utah.
Juanique Roney
Awesome. Darryl, it was so great to interview today and to talk about this really important topic. Thank you so much for your time, because I know you're very busy. Thank you and listeners, thank you for listening and learning about this incredible topic. We're so grateful to have you here listening with us. Darryl, is there any parting words of wisdom you would want to leave listeners with before we close up today?
Darryl Bosshardt
Well, Juanique, I really appreciate you having me on your program today, and I think we've covered pretty much everything that I wanted to cover on salt. If there was one thing that I try to do and I don't always I'm not always successful at it, but I try to live intentionally, more and more and try to put myself in the place of most potential. And so I think by not being item focused, like I'm going to focus on work, I'm going to focus on family. I like the idea of living intentionally and putting my soul in the place the most potential. And on one day that might be with my wife and my family, one day it might be mountain biking on my own. One day it might be in the office. But I think as we all try to live more intentionally, we'll all be happier and probably. All of us all benefit each other more than if we're trying to meet somebody else's preconceived notion of where we should be or what we should be.
Juanique Roney
I love that. Thank you so, so much. That wasn't Sciency at all. That was just like, you know, it kind of goes with my thoughts go and energy flows. Let's be intentional about where our energy goes instead of just being, you know, left for the waves to hit us this way or that way. So thank you, Darryl, and again, thank you listeners. We will be back next week. Take care.
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