Saturday, November 21, 2009

Sail Away to a Healthier You with Sea Salt

Why use Kosher Celtic Sea Salt over your everyday table salt? There are many reasons why sprinkling this sea salt over your food is healthier that using your average iodized salt. It also tastes much better! Once you’re used to the flavor of sea salt, you can certainly taste the difference when you eat something that contains regular salt. The regular salt will taste like pure chemicals and you will not want to go back to using it. Celtic Sea Salt is significantly more expensive than, say, Morton’s but you will use less. You can sprinkle regular salt on your food and a few seconds later not be able to taste it at all, then you’ll add more and more until the flavor finally suits your palette. Sea salt has slightly bigger granules that soften on your food but do not completely dissolve in shape or flavor.

Why is sea salt the healthier alternative? First of all, let’s clear a few things up. Sea salt doesn’t cause high blood pressure and can actually work to fight it. Mixed with water a small amount of sea salt will calm a racing heart. Those with mild asthma may find that after drinking a few glasses of water, putting sea salt on your tongue will give you a similar effect to using an inhaler. You will want to do the same method if you have a nagging dry cough since sea salt acts as and antihistamine, it will break down mucus in the lungs allowing you to have a more productive cough. Just a few glasses of water and a few sprinkles of sea salt on your tongue right after helps you get a great night’s sleep and wake up rested in the morning!

Sea salt helps your body avoid becoming too acidic. This is a wonderful weapon against Alzheimer’s disease because it balances the acid in your brain. It also regulates blood sugar level- this is a necessity for diabetics in particular. Sea salt does wonders for people with certain psychological disorders. Lithium, which is used to treat people with bipolar disorder, is actually a salt substitute! It helps to regulate the neurotransmitters in the brain that regulate our sleep-wake cycles and aid in our emotional well-being. Sea salt is therefore a wonderful and natural way to reduce stress since it is a gentle antidepressant! Some doctors even believe that sea salt is one of the essentials for fighting cancer. It promotes the mobility of immune cells in the blood to reach all of the areas in the body allowing them to destroy cancerous tissue.

Even though sea salt has many benefits, we need to be careful with how much we consume. Each person requires a large amount of water to a small amount of sea salt to maintain hydration. We don’t want to overdo the salt and become dehydrated! To reap the many benefits of sea salt, all that is recommended is one quarter of a teaspoon of sea salt per quart of water each day!

Why should you not consume your everyday table salt from the grocery store? Sea salt is as it sounds- directly from Mother Nature and into a bottle since it is derived from evaporated seawater! Iodized salt does not contain magnesium, potassium or calcium. It is mined from salt deposits that have formed underground and is processed with anti-caking agents. It has no health benefits; in fact, it does just the opposite of sea salt. According to UMASS Medical Center, your average table salt can contribute to high blood pressure as well as stroke. Other researchers claim that table salt helps cause kidney disease, eczema, heart problems, osteoporosis and even stomach cancer.

Be sure to buy sea salt that is not washed or boiled because it will not have the benefits that I mentioned as the essential minerals are destroyed in the processing. Don’t be afraid of the sea salt, as it is not as white as your typical salt but rest assured that it tastes much better and does not debilitate your health but greatly improves it. I prefer Celtic Sea Salt but there are also more reasonably priced sea salts that are almost as good for when you need to cut cost.

Check out BBC America with Dish Network Satellite TV for more information on health related topics!

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