Salt of the Earth: What the Refinery Strips Out

Salt is not a villain. It is one of the oldest and most valuable substances of humankind, essential to life, for thousands of years so precious that people were paid with it. The problem is not the salt. The problem is what industry makes of it: it strips it down to pure sodium chloride and pours in a few chemicals instead. The same pattern as with the grain and the oil.

Salt is essential to life

Without salt no life. Sodium and chloride steer the water balance, the nerve signals, the digestion, the pressure in every cell. The body needs it daily and cannot make it itself. That is exactly why salt was a means of payment for thousands of years. The word salary, the Latin salarium, comes from salt.

The blanket message “salt is unhealthy, eat less” falls short. For most healthy people, natural salt in moderation is no enemy. The real problem is the hidden mountain of salt in ultra-processed products, in frozen pizza, sausage, chips and factory bread. Whoever cooks for themselves and uses natural salt rarely has a problem with the amount. But whoever has high blood pressure, a heart or kidney condition follows their doctor’s advice here. That holds regardless of the type of salt.

From the sea to pure NaCl

Table salt is extracted, washed, recrystallized under heat and refined to about 99 percent sodium chloride. What disappears in the process are the trace minerals that naturally come with it: magnesium, potassium, calcium and dozens of others in small amounts. What remains is a white, uniform, chemically almost pure powder. Clean in the lab, but without everything else the salt once carried.

What goes in: anti-caking agents, sugar, additives

So that the pure salt does not clump, anti-caking agents go in: sodium ferrocyanide (E535) or silicon dioxide (E551). The name ferrocyanide sounds dangerous, and honestly, chemically it is not: the compound is stable and releases no free cyanide under normal conditions. The real question is a different one: why does a synthetic chemical have to go into the salt at all just to make it pour? Natural salt clumps a little, so what.

On top comes iodine, and here honesty is called for: iodine is a real benefit. Iodized salt has spared whole regions from thyroid diseases, that is not an invention of industry but sensible prevention. Only: to stabilize the added iodine, dextrose is often added, that is, sugar, in the salt. And in some countries and products, fluoride wanders in as well. In the end you have a substance that shares with the original salt nothing but the sodium chloride. First everything is taken out, then some of it is artificially built back in.

Sea salt and rock salt: closer to the original

Sea salt forms when seawater evaporates in shallow basins under the sun. Rock salt, including the pink Himalayan salt, comes from ancient seas that dried up millions of years ago. Both are less processed and keep their trace minerals and their natural structure.

Here we stay honest: the amounts of these minerals are small, they do not make salt into medicine. The advertising with “84 minerals” in Himalayan salt is mostly marketing. Two things come on top: sea salt today can contain microplastic, a sad sign of the times. And natural salt contains hardly any iodine, so whoever uses almost only unrefined salt should get their iodine from other real sources, such as fish or algae. The real gain of sea and rock salt is simply this: less processing, no anti-caking chemistry, no sugar, closer to the way it grew.

Salt in the Bible: covenant, preservation, worth

Hardly any substance carries as much meaning in the Bible as salt. Yehoshua says to his followers: “You are the salt of the earth” (Matthew 5:13). Salt seasons, preserves from decay, is precious. Deeper still goes the covenant of salt: every grain offering was to be brought with salt, “with the salt of the covenant of your God” (Leviticus 2:13), and God speaks of an “everlasting covenant of salt” (Numbers 18:19; 2 Chronicles 13:5). Salt stood for what remains, for permanence and incorruptibility. Elisha even healed a bad water source with salt (2 Kings 2:20-21).

In the ancient world salt was above all one thing: the preservative par excellence. It made cheese, butter and meat keep, long before the refrigerator. Even newborns were rubbed with salt for protection (Ezekiel 16:4). Salt stood for life, purity and permanence, no wonder it became the sign of the covenant.

In this lies a quiet image. Salt stands in Scripture for the whole, the preserving, the incorruptible. You can strip it down to the bare sodium chloride and keep it pouring with chemistry. What remains is exactly the opposite of what salt actually means.

Wisdom, not law

This is no rule and no scaremongering. In the New Covenant no food law binds you (Romans 14; 1 Timothy 4:4). It is an invitation. When you have the choice, take a natural sea or rock salt without anti-caking chemistry, season in moderation and, above all, take care of the hidden mountain of salt in convenience food, that is the greater leverage. Get your iodine from real foods. And if your blood pressure or your kidneys require it, listen to your doctor. Take the salt the way it comes from the sea and the mountain.

Scholarly basis among others: T&T Clark Handbook of Food in the Hebrew Bible and Ancient Israel (Bloomsbury 2022).