Monday, January 9, 2012

Real Food on a Real Budget - Salt

Did you know that the word salary is based on salt? In Latin, the word salarium is loosely translated as the payment an ancient Roman soldier received in salt, or the equivalent amount of gold to purchase salt. Even the word salad means salted vegetables!

Now, I am not a doctor, and I don't play one on TV, so this blog post is by no means making any diagnosis, or health claims. What I want to share with you is how we changed the way we looked at salt, as one of the very first steps to applying what I learned in researching Nourishing Traditions.

The salt we had been using at our house was Hain's Sea Salt with added iodine, because that is what I always thought was healthy. Come to find out, I was right about iodine being an important mineral, but, table salt with added iodine, from a laboratory, can be extremely dangerous! Yikes. Why oh why does something that worked just fine for thousands of years, need to be improved upon? For the past century, most table salt has been stripped of  any of it's natural occurring iodine and other minerals, so another form has to be chemically added back to it.


Your average (I am thinking the one with the girl holding an umbrella) table salt has sugar, fluoride, aluminum, bleach, and a plethora of other nasties added to it. To make it more what, I don't know. More profitable? More available? More easily able to come out of a shaker? It certainly is not more beneficial! Hence the reason everyone has probably heard of a "low sodium" diet. Hence the reason aliments from ingesting salt, that has been de-mineralized and chemically altered, are on the rise.

Where we live in the Rockies, we are fortunate enough to have a (somewhat) local salt quarry in Central Utah, called Real Salt .
So for the past two years, that is what I have been buying. 

Now for the real budget part -- Real Salt does cost more than Hains, or your basic everyday salt.  But because I feel it is that important not to buy salt that has lost it's worth, I do not even think twice about spending a few dollars more on a product that I can trust.  Plus, all the dollars I save by not buying anymore junk food, more than makes up the difference.  When my supply starts running low I will watch for a sale and/or free shipping, direct from the source, and purchase in a 25 pound bag instead of the smaller bags, which too will save me money.  Direct link to Real Salt

Have you changed the salt you were using? Know of any good sales on Real Salt?   I would love to hear your thoughts!

Until next time, thank you for stopping by and may you be richly blessed,
~Roxanne

This post is shared at realfoodforager's fat tuesday and Simple Lives Thursday

5 comments:

  1. We switched from the regular old nasty table salt to sea salt probably about 2 years ago. I have a Penzey's Spices within shopping distance and normally buy their French sea salt. Once, when I ran out of salt and couldn't get to Penzey's, I bought some Real Salt and was very impressed with the price and that it was from the US. I didn't know that you could buy it in bulk like that, though. I'll have to look into that. Do you just go to their website for that? I actually think sea salt tastes much better than the stuff I grew up on - it's not bitter. Thanks for the great heads up on buying in bulk!

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  2. Hi, Pam. I just added a direct link to the Real Salt website in my post. I have been purchasing my smaller bags locally at my grocery store too. Thanks for stoppin by. :)

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  3. Thanks for linking your great post to FAT TUESDAY. This was very interesting! Hope to see you next week!

    Be sure to visit RealFoodForager.com on Sunday for Sunday Snippets – your post from Fat Tuesday may be featured there!
    http://realfoodforager.com/fat-tuesday-january-10-2012/

    Share your great fermented food recipes at my Probiotic Food Linky – open through Februray 6, 2012.
    http://realfoodforager.com/probiotic-food-challenge-linky/

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  4. I have tried Real Salt on three different occasions and each time we get some "crunchy" bits in our food--ground-up rock? I would love to use it since it's a USA product and it's less expensive than Celtic sea salt. Anybody else have this problem?

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