November 16, 2019 • 43 mins
A Roman senator once said, "Mankind can live without gold, but not without salt." Right he was. The human body needs salt so much we have developed a taste for it specifically. But too much salt can be toxic. Learn about salt's role in human history and how we get it from the Earth in this classic episode.
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Hello everybody, Charles W. Chuck Bryant Here on a lovely
Saturday morning in Atlanta, Georgia. We're going back in time
to February fourteen to talk about salt. Our episode How
Salt Works is one of my all time favorites. I
love salt because I'm from the South. Probably like a
little too much, he asked my doctor. But that salty
salty goodness on food just makes it all pop for me.
(00:22):
But it has a really cool, interesting backstory. How you
get salt, a harvest salt and how salt works on food?
Learn all about it right now. Welcome to Stuff You
Should Know, a production of My Heart Radios How Stuff Works. Hey,
(00:42):
and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark and there's
Charles W. Chuck Bryant and this is Stuff you Should
Know the podcast. Oh yeah, Jerry's over there. She's all
laughy today for some reason. An old salty dogs. Why
did salty calling someone salty? I wonder where that came from.
I meant to look that up. That's the one I'm
(01:02):
did in the book. Cut because you know you're in
a salty mode. Yeah, I've said that plenty And what
if that comes from like a salty dog. Here's here,
this is this is my idea. So salty describe somebody
who is a little coarse, a little rough around the edges,
a little upset. Hear me out because their face is
(01:24):
usually puckered into like a a sour puss face. And
what makes your face pucker eating salt. So there's a
salty person. Okay, I would call them lemony. Well, so
take something with a grain of salt. It's actually ancient.
That's from the romans Um. They would take poison with
a grain of salt. There's something that was hard to
(01:45):
swallow with a grain of salt to make it go
down more easily. Okay, let's go ahead and cover these.
Then somebody not being worth their salt. In this article
it says that um slaves were traded with salt, and
if you got your hands on like a slave that
wasn't worth much Like that, he wasn't worth his salt?
Is that not the origin I found? The first reference
(02:06):
in print came from an eighteen oh five description or
book about an expedition to Guinea Bissau, and it mentions
a guy who wasn't worth his salt. He's a good
man Peter Hale h a y eli um. But he
wasn't worth his salt, the guy said. And I looked
it up, and I couldn't find that whether Hale was
(02:27):
hired or was a slave. But I got the impression that, Um,
what the guy was talking about wasn't that he had
traded salt for hail, but not worth a salt like
in his body. No, he was not worth the salt,
meaning a salary, which supposedly salary is rooted in the
idea of paying someone in salt, same with soldiers salt
(02:50):
dre and to give salt salad to the word salad
comes from the word salt, so salt is a it's
a an important thing. Historically speaking, there's been economies largely
based on salt. There have been um cultures rated by
other cultures because of salt. UM. If you were an
(03:15):
ancient salt producing area, probably the rulers controlled with the
tight grip um that salt production and salt distribution UM.
And that actually carried on into the modern age when
the when Great Britain was occupying India, they had a
tight control on salt production there UM and actually Gandhi
(03:38):
started a revolution or helped along the revolution to overthrow
British imperial power through a salt protest. He walked two
d and forty miles to the coast where the salt
production facilities were and grabbed a bit of salty clay
and boiled it, boiled the salt out of it, which
was an illegal act. That protests burred other similar protests,
(04:03):
and the British were like, oh, hey, you can't do that, mate,
you can't mind your own salt. But he did because
he was Gandhi. It was called the Salt March to
Dandhee by g by Gandhi. Uh. Yeah, salt dates back
to b C. And they actually found evidence of salt
trading in prehistoric times. So obviously it's used to spice
(04:27):
food is great, but it's used to preserve food was
super valuable, yeah, back in the day and still today
because salt is one of these things. You remember, Nature
loves homeostasis, It loves balance. If you introduced salt to
the mix, it kind of throws off that balance. So
to gain homeo stasis, salt is introduced into say meat.
(04:49):
It likes to go into the meat, but it also
draws out the moisture. Whether it's blood water whatever. So
it dries out the meat, it introduces the salt, and
it draws out the moisture. That's right. That's called curing,
which preserves things because anytime bacteria comes in contact with
that salty meat, from that point on the bacteria boom
(05:09):
gets dried out and dies. Yeah, that's why packaged foods
are still loaded with sodium. Unfortunately, I got some stuff
on that later. But it was used as a currency
in Ethiopia up until the twentieth century, and was used
as a form of suicide in China for nobility. They
would o d on salt and kill themselves because it
(05:31):
was expensive and very valuable, so nobility, that's like, it
was like a noble way to go out. And we'll
talk in a minute, like what happens when you have
too much salt. It's not very pleasant. It's not very pleasant.
But you know, in medieval Europe, remember we did the
ten Medieval Torture Devices episode, Well we skipped one called
the goats tongue, and it was apparently a real thing,
a tickle torture. They would dip your feet bringing a
(05:55):
goat and the goat would lick the bottom of your
feet and then they would dip it again. And from
that in the art description, No, I'm saying like it
wasn't in there. Um from the description, apparently being tortured
tickle tortured was not pleasant. I would love to have
my feet licked by a goat. They would do it
(06:17):
until you did not love it. That was the point
of the goat's tongue to it. Sounds like fun to me. Uh.
In the Middle Ages, salt was transported along the notorious
Old Salt Route and northern Germany. I know what I'm
gonna get you for Christmas, now, a goat in some
salt water. I've had both at the same time. I
don't know, I didn't think about it. Uh. It was
(06:38):
played his big role in early America as well. Massachusetts
Bay Colony had the first pattern to produce salt here
in the colonies, saltwater in the comonies, and uh they
did so for two hundred years. Uh. The Erie Canal
opened primarily to transport salt. Yeah, they called it the
ditch that salt built. It sounds like something you just
(06:58):
made up. No, I swear I've been on the Erie Canal.
Oh yeah, yeah, they they have this nice system of locks,
and um, they used to there's still like donkey trails
from where the donkeys used to pull these little flat
bottom boats that would carry salt and whatnot. And now
yuppies walk along those trails. Dog yuppies? Are there still yuppies?
(07:20):
Oh yeah, thanks, Yeah, I heard one the other day.
Uh dual income, large dog owner. Al Right. In the
early eight hundred, salt was apparently four times expensive as
beef because salt was valuable obviously, and we were allows
you with beef. And in Civil War, salt played a
(07:41):
big part in the Union strategy. Um, there were quite
a few battles fault over capturing salt works and salt mines.
Yeah in Saltville, Virginia. Yeah, what they do there. And
it actually had a big effect on the salt shortage
on the Confederate troops. Yeah, not just the troops, but
the people behind the lines back in the Confederate States
(08:02):
were like, we want our salt. And it had a
huge impact on morale apparently, I would say so. And
the reason why salt is so important. If you haven't
gotten the impression that it is important by now, you
should rewind the podcast and just listen to the last
several minutes over again. Salt is extraordinarily important because the
human body requires it. It's something that we need to
(08:23):
survive and to live, so much so that we actually
have a taste sense for it. Yeah, it's the only
you don't need better to live or sour or umami.
As a matter of fact, things like bitter and sour
are there. I think to detect things that we shouldn't
(08:43):
be eating, salt is to detect something we need that's right,
and we can. Actually this is so mind blowing to me.
I love the human body. I think it's amazingly wonderful
in ways that we don't even fully understand yet. But
consider this, When you need salt, your body produces a
craving in you for salt. That is awesome. Like I'm
(09:04):
one of those believers. I I don't follow it necessarily myself,
but in a diet, well no, I think about it.
In a diet where you just eat what you crave.
I think you can go off the rails because I
think that we uh have the wrong things now. Yes, now,
but if you could go back a hundred fifty years,
maybe I would bet you could survive pretty easily and
(09:28):
thrive on a diet where you were just kind of
led by your cravings, like, oh, I need some megs
and eat a couple of eggs, steak. You don't know.
You should pay attention to yourself, listen to what your
body is telling you, and I'll bet you find that
you do have specific cravings for specific moods, foods that
are like very simple, like meat like chuck go eat
(09:51):
a steak, Chuck go eat some eggs, like things that
are basic staples. I'll bet you'll notice you have cravings salt. Uh,
let's let's break it down chemically. Um, it's sodium and
chlorine are the two basic elements. And salt, I think
we all know this, which are electrolytes. That's right, and
we'll get into that in a minute. Um, sodium is
(10:12):
silvery white metal, and it is neither one of these
are like super friendly independently of one another. No, you know,
like especially chlorine. Yeah, sodium reacts violently if you mix
it with water and oxidizes in air. Chlorine exists in
gas at a room temperature. They're both really volatile. But
when you put them together and you have sodium chloride,
(10:33):
they make beautiful music. Makes beautiful halite, uh and beautiful music.
And sodium chloride is about a sixt sodium to chloride,
by the way, is that right? Yeah? Nice? It makes
little cubes, right, Yeah? Is it? The molecules are cubicle, right.
The sodium packs in pretty tight, and then the chlorine
(10:57):
fills in the rest and they make tiny little cubes.
It's actually reversed, That's what I said. Yeah, the chloride
is packed and then the sodium fills in. But you know,
I would have thought the sodium was bigger. Oh well, um,
but what you have is n a c L that's right.
And you mentioned electrolytes. Those are minerals that conduct electricity
(11:17):
in our body and our fluids and tissues, which is
very important, super important. Like a muscle movement, we run
on electricity. Heart, Yeah, involuntary muscle. Um moves through electrical impulse.
I guess all muscles do. Yeah. You want your eyes
to blank, buddy, Yeah, eat some salt. Right, And so
there's two conditions that you can have conceivably, well three,
(11:39):
three would be just all systems are normal. But um,
the other two is too little salt and too much salt.
And too little salt is called hypo atrema. Yeah, that's
what that lady died of the Hold your Way for
a Week contest. Oh is that right? Yeah? Yeah, you
can o d on water, and I guess that's what
you would ultimately die from as hypo into tremea their
(12:01):
water toxicity. Um, if you have too much water, you
probably have too little salt, because water flush is salt
from your system. It's the method that your kidneys use
to maintain the balance of salt and other electrolytes in
your body. And that's why you might drink gatorade if
you're working out, because it has electrolytes in it, right,
exactly salty. You don't want to water your crop plan
(12:23):
with it, though, no, no no, no, As we found from
the movie Idiocracy. Yeah, and I actually found too that
in the nineteen eighties there was a lot of controversy
over salting roads killing roadside vegetation. Well, yeah, for sure.
I mean like that, if you were into conquests and
that kind of thing, and you wanted to make sure
that the land you just occupied couldn't be used to
(12:44):
grow crops to feed an imposing armory army, you would
plow the land with salt. Salt the earth, Yeah, which
is not the salt of the earth, because that means
you're a good fellah, but not a good fella because
those guys are salty. Wow, look at you. That was
that of the team effort. Clever wordplay, my friend. Uh.
If you take diuretics um or you have like a
(13:06):
massive diarrhea for a period of days, or vomiting or
some sort of stomach bug, you might be at risk
for hyponatremia. Yeah, because you're flushing out all of this,
all of your electrolytes. Yeah. This is salt that your
body needs. So if it's out of balance, you're going
to suffer things like, um, well an inability for your
heart to beat, which is often fatal. Yeah, kidney problems yeah. Um.
(13:30):
On the other hand, you can have hypern atrema, which
is too much salt, and like you said, if you're
a Chinese aristocrat, um, you may die from hyperbern netrema. Yeah.
They even had a m man sometimes a blanket on
the word how to manual. Well, it's sort of like
how many grams of salt you needed per pound in
(13:51):
your body? That had like a chart. I guess if
you want to kill yourself in China, yours. You do it.
There's so much salt you need. But that was rough?
Is you like that? Yeah, I'm off today. I'm a
little off. You were on my my microphone just swerved
to the left. Were happening. There's a ghost in here. Um,
so too much sodium, I think you said already is
(14:14):
hypernatremia instead of hypo hyper hyper hypo exactly. It's like glacemia,
but with no tremia exactly, and with hyper in neutremia. Basically,
remember how salt if you um, if you introduce it
to say, a jerky of some sort, it will dry
it out or slug. Yes, it's just a shameful thing
(14:36):
to do. Don't do that. Um, if you introduce it
to a meat or something like that, it's going to
dry it out because through osmosis in search of homeostasis. UM,
it does the same thing to your blood and your
extracellular fluids. That salt will draw out the fluids in
your cells, but will maintain it in your blood. It's
(14:59):
why to retention. Basically, Yeah, your kidneys when it has
too much salt to deal with, kicks it around the
blood supply. Just like remember in the hangover episode when
you why drugs are so fatal when you drink a
lot of alcohol because your kidneys are trying to process
your the alcohol, so it keeps the drugs just going
around and around in your blood supply. Same thing with
(15:22):
too much salt. If your kidneys have too much to
deal with, they just keep the excess going around in
your blood. And since that salt is drawing out all
the excess moisture, it increases the volume of your blood,
which makes your blood pressure rise, which makes your heart beat, Yes,
which supposedly logically would put you at risk for a
stroke or heart attack, and that's how you would die
(15:44):
from hypernatremia, have high blood pressure. Well, supposedly sodium. Cutting
your sodium down isn't gonna help. Yeah, there's a lot
of conflicting data on that for sure. Um, well we'll
get to nutrition, so we'll cover that. M hm. So chuck. Um.
(16:21):
They're like you said, there's a lot of controversy over
how much salt or how little salt you should have
on a daily basis in your diet. Yeah. Um, the
Heart National Heart, Blood and Long Institute say no more
than two point four grams of sodium. It's about a
teaspoon per day. Americans, they found, consume an average of
(16:43):
about three point four per day, So that's one gram
too much on average, And um, you actually don't need
more than about a half a gram a day if
you want to maintain that stasis. So yeah, just for
your electro lighte intake. The thing is, though, um, there
was for many years because it makes sense that if
(17:05):
you're if too much salt increases your blood pressure, then
too much salt should be um, should put you at
risk for strokes and heart attacks. Right. Well, the CDC
panel surveyed material and all and all all sorts of
studies that found no, cutting your sodium intake doesn't really
(17:25):
doesn't decrease your risk of heart attack or stroke. And
as a matter of fact, there is was it just
more hereditary? They don't know what it is. They just
know that basically below three thousand grams or three thousand
milligrams of salt and above seven thousand milligrams of salt
a day were two groups that were at higher risk
(17:48):
of heart attack. So if you have too little salt,
you're at higher risk of heart attack to Okay, so
try to keep it between three thousand and four thousand
milligrams thousand and seven thousand. The thing is is they
they don't They weren't comfortable making any recommendation. They were
just everyone scared. This is what we found. Everyone's scared, like,
go on the record, Yeah, because we just don't know. Like,
(18:10):
it doesn't make any sense that you would have a
heart attack if you ate less than three grams of
sault today. Yeah. That that flies in the face of
of um conventional wisdom, and nobody's figured out why yet. Interesting, Well,
it's something you should monitor at the very least, because
I think a lot of people look at fat grams
and calories and all that stuff is great to look
at nutritionally, but um, when you start poking around on
(18:32):
the soup can and you see, wow, this chicken noodle
soup has milligrams of sodium, but it's so good. And
this one little can which is almost a gram of sodium,
yeah close to it. A quarter pounder with bacon and cheese.
You didn't do Big Max. No, I should have been communist.
I think big Max. Actually I did see. This is
(18:55):
forty milligrams a big mac. I think was around eleven
pounders more with the bacon. I think they have like
a whole bacon onion ranch or something topping that you
can put on quarter pounders. Now I've not yet tried this,
but like I think about it from time to time,
like right now, yeah, right now especially, uh So, at
(19:17):
any rate, just give it a look. Like soups are
notoriously high in sodium. Package foods are notoriously high in sodium. Um,
don't just think about the table salt that you use, Like, oh,
I didn't salt my food that much today? You need
a lot of package food or eating a lot of sodium. Yeah,
and nobody can tell you how much you should be
eating or shouldn't be eating. But like you said, it's
good to just pay attention to that kind of thing
because you probably are eating a lot more than you realize,
(19:40):
and you should be meat in a lot of package food. Anyway,
I'll just go ahead and say that, so, um, chuck, Yes,
what kinds of salt are there? Well, first of all,
I should say I love salt. Salt and pepper are
my favorite two spices. I'm from the South, have a
taste for salt um and pork fat. Yeah that's pretty
(20:01):
southern too, Yeah for sure. Uh So, I love salt.
I like good Mediterranean sea salt. That's what I used
at my house. Uh, and I'm gonna plug this local saltier.
I just made that word up oh later in the show. Okay,
but um, I'm a big salt fan. I like salt too,
I like sweet, I like ummmy, I like um sour.
(20:24):
I'm training myself to like bitter through the use of kompari. Yeah.
Like I I've found out that I'm a bitter super taster.
So like things that seem like normal to other people
are like really bitter to me. Like one example, grapefruit. Yeah,
but it's like like disgustingly bitter to me. Like I
(20:45):
can't understand how the rest of humanity eats grape fruit.
I don't like grapefruit. Well, maybe you're a bitter super
taster too, But I have to tell you this. I've
trained myself to like um, grapefruit and kompari just by exposure,
like I've come to appreciate them. With campari, it's a
bar like a bitter digestif for Apertif you do like
(21:05):
a campari and soda, it's in a negrowning right. Oh.
I think I've seen people like if their stomachs upset
or is that bitters and soda? Well, campari is a
type of bitters. It's not that super compact bitters like angustura,
but it is a type of bitter. I think it's
a digestif. Okay, it's good stuff anyway. I like salt.
What I'm really saying there is I like well seasoned food.
(21:26):
And if you're a chef or a home chef, you
know that salt is important to cooking, super important and
baking obviously, but bland food can't do it. No, what's
the point. What is the point? Agreed types of salt.
Let's start with table salt and and look, man, if
you're if your doctor put you on like a bland
(21:49):
food diet, I feel for you. But there's stuff out
there you can eat. There's Spike, there's Mrs Dash, there's
you should be seasoning your food to some extent like
bland food is, like it's bland life. Yeah. They even
had the imitation salt to the new in New Salt.
I didn't do any research on that, but I've bought
(22:10):
it before. You do you like it? I didn't use
it that much, but it's it exists. In my home
thanks to the empty thing of Mediterranean sea salt. Yeah,
all right, it's the table salts, the first one we
should cover. That's the traditional um either iodized or non iodized,
fine grained salt that you see in many, many homes
(22:33):
and restaurants, and it's IDEs. They did a little research
into this. Did you look up iodie salt? Yeah, well,
I mean I know that they they added it because
at one point it was sort of like fluoride. They thought, well,
we need this in a good place to put us
in salt. Yeah, because most people use salt, and we'll
just put it into table salt because it's an easy additive.
But um, there was a real problem with hyper thyroidism,
(22:57):
things like Goiter's mental retardi shan um just poor fetal
development linked to um iodine deficiency. So they put it
in salt, and apparently there it's considered to be responsible
for this thing called the Flynn effect, which there was
like a three i Q point rise in the middle
(23:18):
of the twentieth century in western nations, and nobody could
figure out what it is, and they think now that
it was because they added iodine as salt, and so
it had the aggregate effect of raising our i Q
by um preventing poor fetal development. Yeah. Well, it's still
a problem in other parts of the world, just not
here in North America, right, other parts of the world
(23:40):
that don't have idi salt. You know, dumb they are.
Oh man, that was terrible. I'm just kidding. You need
to apologize to the rest of the world for I'm
sorry everybody. Uh So, like I said, table salt is
the most common salt. Uh they remove all the impurities. Um.
They have things in there to make it not clump
and stick together, and so it pours freely even when
(24:02):
it rains and poors. Well should we get to that. Yeah,
don't you have something on that? Yeah? The um I
just for some reason thought of the Morton Salt girl,
and like every great advertising story, they were like, how
do we It was sort of a new thing at
the time, in nineteen eleven two package salt this way
in a container with a spout. How they package it
(24:22):
before I don't know, the blocks, probably like a deer
like or something. I'm not sure actually, but I know
that this was a fairly revolutionary product. To package it
like this and process it like this. Um. So the
agency was um in w Air and Company, and Don
(24:42):
Draper walks in and says, I've got twelve proposals for you.
Which one do you like? And Sterling Morton of the
Morton Company. Of course, it's always someone else, like his
son or his wife or something. It was his son
in secretary. UM pointed toward one of the ads with
a little girl whole the umbrella and said this is
the one, and he said, you know what, I think,
(25:04):
you guys are right. The whole story is right there
in the picture. Because the whole point was this salt
doesn't clump, it'll when it rains, it poors, and little
girls can't be trusted to be sent to the store
by themselves because they ruin all the salt keeping the
nozzle open on the way home. Uh. Some of the
different UM slogans they had was flows freely, runs freely, pours,
(25:28):
it never rains, but it pours. And then they finally
settled on when it rains it poors. Yeah, that's the
best one because it never rains but it pors. Doesn't
make any sense. They probably fired that person and she's
been updated one to three, four five times. Really, Yeah,
the last time in nineteen sixty eight and she's been
the same since then. And there was never a real
(25:49):
model for that girl. And that's a question they often get.
She's totally made up. Yeah, because he was like, it's
Morton's granddaughters. What you know, you want to think it's
Selma Selma Morton. So that is the story of the Skein.
That's an old timing name, if ever there was one.
That's a college right, No, it's like a person's name. Well,
(26:11):
it's a college to Okay, had a friend that played
soccer there ke e r s k i Any, there's
a college named Colgate too. It's like crazy to me. Uh,
Sea salt sir is next. Uh, it's gonna cost you
some more money because of several reasons, one of which
(26:31):
if they go old school and in some parts of
France they still harvest the stuff by hand, which is
pretty cool. You might see it called flair de sell,
which is French for flower of salt. And uh, it's
not processed like table salt is. So you're gonna have
a lot of those trace minerals. It's gonna be coarse
and flaky, and it colors it too. It can for sure,
(26:52):
like you can have white sea salt, pink black gray, yeah,
or a combination of them. Pink salts are traditionally associated
him Alayan salt um, and there the pink is often
for the result of things like copper or iron or
apparently um. There's a type that contains an algae, a
(27:13):
salt tolerant algae, which would make it an extreme aphile um.
That gives it has the beta caroteen pigment in it,
and that gives it a pinkish hue at salt. You're
eating algae, pink algae in your salt, which is pretty neat.
That is pretty neat. And that that's Hawaiian, right, A
lot of times Hawaii has a different one and all
(27:35):
ala Oh I read that as algae. Yeah, I did
too a couple of times, and I was like, why
would they separate these two out? There's no g No,
it's a Hawaiian Alaya salt has iron oxide in it
from the volcanoes. Oh, that makes sense. And Hawaii also
produces black salt too from the lava. Yeah, in a
little bit of charcoal. I'll have to try some of
those actually, and yeah, and then there's gray salts to um,
(27:58):
which is Uh, there's cell gree which is from France.
And then smoked salt is also gray where they just
take some salt and smoke it. Yeah, they put it
over a smoky fire and you have smoked salt. Do
you like smoky foods sometimes? Yeah, it can be a
little overbearing for me at times. Yeah, in the hands
of you know, I guess somebody who knows what they're
(28:19):
doing with the smoked It's like, I like a good
smoked meat well day type of thing, but not necessarily
like you know when they add like artificial smoke in
the kitchen to it to a meal, you know what
I'm saying. Although smoked cheese is good. Oh yeah, man,
good smoke. Hey and thanks to fan Hillary Lozar from
(28:40):
for sending us some great cheese. Yeah, that was very
good to you. I had some of that smoked goody yesterday.
Actually when I got home, I haven't had it yet.
Is it good? And as soon as I walked in
the door, I got a knife out. It's like I
gotta try this stuff. Yeah's delicious anyway. Thanks Hilary's m
(29:08):
hm so chefs and Gormond's will say. Sea salt is
what you want to be using because you're gonna get
a unique flavor from those minerals that are not in
table salt. I agree with them, it's tough to bake
(29:29):
with though. Yeah, it's tough to measure. You get a
lot more precise measuring, for sure from table salt. And
they don't recommend you bank with sea salt, no, because
baking is a specific chemical reaction. Cooking is different. Yeah,
they say that they most chefs don't cook with sea salt,
but they will just add it as a topper. But
I've cooked with sea salt and have no plenty of
(29:49):
chefs that cook with se salt, so I disagree with that. Um. Well,
with the topper, they mean like it's a finishing salt.
It brings out like all the flavors if you sprinkle
it on the Yeah, I mean it's definitely right before
you serve it. But I've also seen it used in
the food right, So well, that leads us to kosher salt.
Apparently some people like to cook with kosher salt. And
if you are using following a recipe and you're switching
(30:10):
out the whatever amounts of salt is called for, you
want to double it because kosher salt is larger, coarse
grained salt, and here to me is a fact of
the podcast, one of several Kosher salt is not necessarily
kosher itself. It's used to make things kosher. Didn't know that.
(30:30):
I didn't. I thought kasher salt was like salt that
had been blessed by a rabbi or something. Really I
never understood it, but now I do. It's it's salt
they used to make things kosher. If you use table
salt UH to make something kosher, it's not gonna work.
Koash your salt because it's large and coarse grained. UH
makes meat kosher by drawing the blood out because eating
blood ain't kosher. So if you salt it with kosher salt,
(30:54):
it's gonna draw the blood out of the meat, and
bam you have a kosher cut of steak, baby boom.
And it's not is either by the way. Um. And
then we have the redheaded step child of the salt family,
rock salt, which is used UM. It's got a lot
of impurities, it's unrefined, it's very large grained, and it's
(31:16):
used to melt ice on roads and sidewalks and to
make homemade ice cream. Yeah, and probably some other stuff.
But do you know of any other uses. I think
rock salts used in um some chemical productions. That makes sense. Um,
if you want to make a good industrial brine, rock
salts your your man. Yeah, alright. Salt mining. That's how
(31:39):
you get salt because it is a natural thing that
exists in the earth. Um. The largest producer of salt
these days, no surprise, is China. UM. In two thousand
twelve they produced about sixty five million tons. The US
is not too far behind it forty four million. Then
you've got Germany, India and Australia as the other leading
(32:00):
five salt producers these days. In India gets the profit
from it salt production thanks to Gandhi. I guess so, huh,
that's pretty neat. Didn't think about that their number four
on the list. Yeah, they weren't even allowed to produce it,
not so long ago. No, they were allowed to produce it,
but all the money went to Yeah, okay jerks. So
(32:22):
there's three types of mining main three main types. There's
deep shaft mining, solar evaporation and solution mining. And deep
shaft mining is basically like any other type of mining
where you just um, drill a shaft down into a mine,
which an underground seabed is what where the salt is, right,
(32:44):
that's where you get your salt um. Yeah, that's I
think that's one of the facts of the podcast. Yeah,
they're ancient underground seabed, ancients beds that dried up and
the salt remained and they form um these basically salt
deposits that can be dozens or hundred defeat thick and
massively wide. And you drill down into these things. You
(33:05):
create a couple of shafts, and then they usually use
what's called a room and pillar system, which really helps.
It's very difficult to explain, but if you see a
picture of it, it makes perfect sense. But um, you're
basically creating a checkerboard pattern you going down in mining
the salt deposits, so you leave it right, Yeah, you
(33:28):
blast a room, but you leave a couple of adjacent
rooms for support, and then um, eventually you've you've mined
out all the salt and then you fill it with
industrial waste. That is one thing they do. So that's
deep shaft mining. Yeah, and they'll remove the salt there
and crush it and u haul it to the service
and further process it from there, depending on what kind
(33:50):
of salt you want in the end. Right. And there's
this awesome mine UM called the Wheelishka Salt Mine in Cracow, Poland,
and it has a full on cathedral made out of salt. Amazing.
They have several like chapels, but then a full cathedral um.
And it's all made of salts in this old salt
(34:11):
mine that's not a UNESCO site UM. And they went
to the trouble of boiling salt. It was a table
salt mine. They would boil this raw salt and purify
it and then use that purified salt to make crystal
chandeliers out of salt. Like the whole cathedral is just salt.
It's amazing looking, man. Yeah, check it out. No goats allowed,
(34:34):
they would recap it or no chucks allowed. I just
walk around like licking stuff. They would ask you nothing. Uh.
A deep shaft mining, by the way, I think is
usually rock salt is what they're producing there. Right. And
then there's solution mining. Yeah, that's UM. Basically they take
a well over a salt bed and then inject water
in there and make a brine and then pump it
(34:56):
up from the underground as as a wet solution and
into a vacuum pan which is going to seal it up,
and they're gonna boil it and then evaporate it, which
is you know how they made salt back in the
old days too, They would you know, boil it and
evaporate it and then scrape the pan, so it's kind
of a modern version of that. Then they dry it
(35:17):
out and refine it, and then from there they're gonna
either add anti clumping agents or iodine, depending on what
you want. And then um, with solution mining, you've got
like a salt bed or a salt dome that's exposed
because it's somehow through tectonic action, uh, an ancient seabed
or salt bed has been exposed to the above ground. Yeah,
(35:40):
like the surface of the earth. Right. And then what's
the last one, Well, the old school solar method um
solar evaporation. This is when you have a salt lake
or seawater and wind in the sun cooperate with the
shallow pools and they leave salt behind and you can
only harvested about once a year once it reaches a
certain level of harvest ability um of thickness and uh
(36:05):
something like we said, sometimes it's still done by hand,
even although it is industrialized in other places for sure.
But you know, they wash it, they clean it, they
drain it, but they leave the um a lot of
impurities in there. And this stuff is almost pure sodium chloride.
It's good stuff. And like I said, I used the
Mediterranean version generally, but Australia is big on it too,
(36:28):
on this method. And um, we should probably mention also
that salt has a lot of religious significance. It's just
a it's an ancient important thing to mankind. Yeah, they
would like use it to seal important things. Yeah, in
the Old Testament, which is pretty old. Uh. Lot's wife,
(36:49):
I believe her name is Sarah. Was it Sarah Ruth
who was married a Lot turned into a pillar of
salt when she looked behind her, even though God said,
don't turn around, I'll turn you into a pillar of
salt out and she did. And apparently there's a there's
a salt pillar at Mount ra rat Um that's called
Lot's wife. People are like, that's her right there, and
(37:10):
who who uh is it? Buddhists that board off evil
with salt Yes, um Umi has a little shaker of
salt that her mom put in her glove compartment of
her car. Really like flickr off on the house, just
a protector. Yeah that's nice. See I would have eaten it. Yeah,
well that's why I don't let you ride in Umi's car.
(37:31):
That's right, one of several reasons they out of the
glove bucks. You got anything else? I do? I have
this good thing. And there's a Roman senator named Cassio
Doors and he said quote, mankind can live without gold,
but not without salt. Who is that Cassio key boartists? Yet?
Well you got Jerry again. Yeah, she's giggly today. And
(37:54):
I have a plug because here in Atlanta, there's a
a lady who makes uh salts. But if you go
to Facebook and type in beautiful briny sea salt, go
to her Facebook page and click on the about thing,
you will see her lovely homemade, handcrafted salts. And my
(38:14):
favorite is the magic Unicorn. See if this sounds good,
Sea salt is of course the main ingredient smoked paprika, lemon, garlic, rosemary,
and celery seed. Well it does sound good, it's delicious.
You get some broccoli and some cauliflower, some like beats
and big chunks of garlic. Throw it out the window.
And buy a steak and put this magical unicorn on
(38:36):
it some olive oil, sprinkle it with this stuff, bake
it in the oven. Delicious to go with that steak,
you know. Yeah, magic unicorn is my favorite. Uh. And
the black truffle salt is delicious. And then she has
one called camp fire, which is smoked salt with cumin
and anto chili powder. And uh. If you email info
(38:57):
at Beautiful Briny Sea sawt dot com, you can order
some of this stuff of you. And I told Emily
she's a friend, or as I said, tell her, I'm
gonna plugger, so she better get her little fingers working,
you know, nice start making some salt. Yeah, because the
stuff you should army is a salty crowd. So if
you want to learn more about salt, I don't know
how you possibly could, but if you want to look
(39:18):
into it, you can type the word as a LT
into the search bar how stuff works dot com and
it will bring up this article how salt works. And
since I said search part, that means it's time for
listener mail. I'm gonna call this. We should apologize to cops.
What do we do now? Well, this cop rot in
and it well, I'll just read it. Is it? The
(39:39):
police chase is one? Yeah? Yeah, they didn't like that one.
Hey guys, my name is Glenn. I'm a police officer
in southern California. I've been enjoying the podcast for years.
I suspect our political leanings made different times, but I
always enjoy learning and listening to different points of view.
Listen to the December Sehunt podcast. That's not the police
chase one. You're right, but I think it involves something
(40:01):
like that. I felt it was very accurate, with the
exception of some information you provided about the l A
p D. Um. We've bashed the l a p D
before for their history of corruption. They have a pretty
thick history of corruption, but they're not all bad ladies
and men. Well, no, of course not. Um. You mentioned
that officers were super jumpy during the man hunt for
Christopher Dorner, which was a fair assessment. But here's where
(40:24):
you got something kind of wrong. Um. You stated that
the l a p D fired on two uninvolved vehicles.
It was the l A p D who shot at
one in the Torrents Police Department shot at the other
I could see how someone not from the area might
think they were l A p D. So it's not
the big of a deal. However, the bigger mistake is
that you stated that these shootings killed two people. Nobody
(40:44):
was killed, so I need to go back. I saw
in several places that at least two people were killed. Really, yeah,
accidentally from those shootings. I'll go back and look again. Okay,
but Glenn Josh takes issue, Sir, Well, he's not the
only one who's written in I just haven't gotten around
going back and looking and double checking. But I mean,
while we were researching, I came across that, and it
(41:06):
wasn't like on a forum or message board or something.
I think they were in articles. Okay, well, well we'll
get to the bottom of it. Uh he was, Glenn says,
I'm very surprised you would make such a statement without
doing your own work. I did my homework. You typically
appear to go to great links to fact check. Sometimes
you get the feeling you guys are not the biggest
fans of law enforcement. Um not. And I even recognize
my professions shortcomings for sure, just like you, though I
(41:28):
want facts um influencing the show, not personal opinions, and
this email was not intended to justify the actions of
those two police departments. Just to set the record straight. Understood,
And despite the goof and the cop bashing ha ha,
I still love the show. That's from Glenn Um and Glenn,
I don't hate cops. I love cops. Um. We've done
(41:48):
a lot of like super supportive shows on Law Enforced.
My name talks like the law enforcement dude. But I
don't like jerks, and I think a lot of times
people's experience with cops or when they're pulled over and
not being helped by a cop, which is unfortunate because
they do so much great work. But you know, when
you get pulled over and you're hassled by a jerk cop,
(42:09):
you think, Man, what a jerk cop. It's like eating
at a bad restaurant, you know what I'm saying. Like
a restaurants bad. You tell one or two people you
have a bad experience at a restaurant, you tell like
twenty people. It's like fifty fold with cops. So we
have a lot of respect for law enforcement for sure,
for all they do. So I hope that doesn't across,
come across is any differently? Nice? Check? Yeah, thanks Glenn, Yeah,
(42:33):
thank you Glenn. I'll go back in double check. If
I'm wrong, I'll admit it. I just haven't had a
chance to look again. We'll give him twenty licks off
of a block of sault from a goat, and I
might die of hyper natremia. Man. That wrapped it all
up right there. If you want to get in touch
with me and chuck to correct us, take issue with
something we said, whatever um, you can tweet to us
(42:56):
at s y s K podcast. You can join us
on Facebook dot com, slash do you Should Know? You
can send us an email to stuff Podcasts at how
stuff Works dot com, and as always, hang out with
us at our home on the web. Stuff you Should
Know dot Com. Stuff you Should Know is a production
of I Heart Radio's How Stuff Works. For more podcasts
for my heart Radio, visit the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts,
(43:18):
or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
Hello everybody, Charles W. Chuck Bryant Here on a lovely
Saturday morning in Atlanta, Georgia. We're going back in time
to February fourteen to talk about salt. Our episode How
Salt Works is one of my all time favorites. I
love salt because I'm from the South. Probably like a
little too much, he asked my doctor. But that salty
salty goodness on food just makes it all pop for me.
(00:22):
But it has a really cool, interesting backstory. How you
get salt, a harvest salt and how salt works on food?
Learn all about it right now. Welcome to Stuff You
Should Know, a production of My Heart Radios How Stuff Works. Hey,
(00:42):
and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark and there's
Charles W. Chuck Bryant and this is Stuff you Should
Know the podcast. Oh yeah, Jerry's over there. She's all
laughy today for some reason. An old salty dogs. Why
did salty calling someone salty? I wonder where that came from.
I meant to look that up. That's the one I'm
(01:02):
did in the book. Cut because you know you're in
a salty mode. Yeah, I've said that plenty And what
if that comes from like a salty dog. Here's here,
this is this is my idea. So salty describe somebody
who is a little coarse, a little rough around the edges,
a little upset. Hear me out because their face is
(01:24):
usually puckered into like a a sour puss face. And
what makes your face pucker eating salt. So there's a
salty person. Okay, I would call them lemony. Well, so
take something with a grain of salt. It's actually ancient.
That's from the romans Um. They would take poison with
a grain of salt. There's something that was hard to
(01:45):
swallow with a grain of salt to make it go
down more easily. Okay, let's go ahead and cover these.
Then somebody not being worth their salt. In this article
it says that um slaves were traded with salt, and
if you got your hands on like a slave that
wasn't worth much Like that, he wasn't worth his salt?
Is that not the origin I found? The first reference
(02:06):
in print came from an eighteen oh five description or
book about an expedition to Guinea Bissau, and it mentions
a guy who wasn't worth his salt. He's a good
man Peter Hale h a y eli um. But he
wasn't worth his salt, the guy said. And I looked
it up, and I couldn't find that whether Hale was
(02:27):
hired or was a slave. But I got the impression that, Um,
what the guy was talking about wasn't that he had
traded salt for hail, but not worth a salt like
in his body. No, he was not worth the salt,
meaning a salary, which supposedly salary is rooted in the
idea of paying someone in salt, same with soldiers salt
(02:50):
dre and to give salt salad to the word salad
comes from the word salt, so salt is a it's
a an important thing. Historically speaking, there's been economies largely
based on salt. There have been um cultures rated by
other cultures because of salt. UM. If you were an
(03:15):
ancient salt producing area, probably the rulers controlled with the
tight grip um that salt production and salt distribution UM.
And that actually carried on into the modern age when
the when Great Britain was occupying India, they had a
tight control on salt production there UM and actually Gandhi
(03:38):
started a revolution or helped along the revolution to overthrow
British imperial power through a salt protest. He walked two
d and forty miles to the coast where the salt
production facilities were and grabbed a bit of salty clay
and boiled it, boiled the salt out of it, which
was an illegal act. That protests burred other similar protests,
(04:03):
and the British were like, oh, hey, you can't do that, mate,
you can't mind your own salt. But he did because
he was Gandhi. It was called the Salt March to
Dandhee by g by Gandhi. Uh. Yeah, salt dates back
to b C. And they actually found evidence of salt
trading in prehistoric times. So obviously it's used to spice
(04:27):
food is great, but it's used to preserve food was
super valuable, yeah, back in the day and still today
because salt is one of these things. You remember, Nature
loves homeostasis, It loves balance. If you introduced salt to
the mix, it kind of throws off that balance. So
to gain homeo stasis, salt is introduced into say meat.
(04:49):
It likes to go into the meat, but it also
draws out the moisture. Whether it's blood water whatever. So
it dries out the meat, it introduces the salt, and
it draws out the moisture. That's right. That's called curing,
which preserves things because anytime bacteria comes in contact with
that salty meat, from that point on the bacteria boom
(05:09):
gets dried out and dies. Yeah, that's why packaged foods
are still loaded with sodium. Unfortunately, I got some stuff
on that later. But it was used as a currency
in Ethiopia up until the twentieth century, and was used
as a form of suicide in China for nobility. They
would o d on salt and kill themselves because it
(05:31):
was expensive and very valuable, so nobility, that's like, it
was like a noble way to go out. And we'll
talk in a minute, like what happens when you have
too much salt. It's not very pleasant. It's not very pleasant.
But you know, in medieval Europe, remember we did the
ten Medieval Torture Devices episode, Well we skipped one called
the goats tongue, and it was apparently a real thing,
a tickle torture. They would dip your feet bringing a
(05:55):
goat and the goat would lick the bottom of your
feet and then they would dip it again. And from
that in the art description, No, I'm saying like it
wasn't in there. Um from the description, apparently being tortured
tickle tortured was not pleasant. I would love to have
my feet licked by a goat. They would do it
(06:17):
until you did not love it. That was the point
of the goat's tongue to it. Sounds like fun to me. Uh.
In the Middle Ages, salt was transported along the notorious
Old Salt Route and northern Germany. I know what I'm
gonna get you for Christmas, now, a goat in some
salt water. I've had both at the same time. I
don't know, I didn't think about it. Uh. It was
(06:38):
played his big role in early America as well. Massachusetts
Bay Colony had the first pattern to produce salt here
in the colonies, saltwater in the comonies, and uh they
did so for two hundred years. Uh. The Erie Canal
opened primarily to transport salt. Yeah, they called it the
ditch that salt built. It sounds like something you just
(06:58):
made up. No, I swear I've been on the Erie Canal.
Oh yeah, yeah, they they have this nice system of locks,
and um, they used to there's still like donkey trails
from where the donkeys used to pull these little flat
bottom boats that would carry salt and whatnot. And now
yuppies walk along those trails. Dog yuppies? Are there still yuppies?
(07:20):
Oh yeah, thanks, Yeah, I heard one the other day.
Uh dual income, large dog owner. Al Right. In the
early eight hundred, salt was apparently four times expensive as
beef because salt was valuable obviously, and we were allows
you with beef. And in Civil War, salt played a
(07:41):
big part in the Union strategy. Um, there were quite
a few battles fault over capturing salt works and salt mines.
Yeah in Saltville, Virginia. Yeah, what they do there. And
it actually had a big effect on the salt shortage
on the Confederate troops. Yeah, not just the troops, but
the people behind the lines back in the Confederate States
(08:02):
were like, we want our salt. And it had a
huge impact on morale apparently, I would say so. And
the reason why salt is so important. If you haven't
gotten the impression that it is important by now, you
should rewind the podcast and just listen to the last
several minutes over again. Salt is extraordinarily important because the
human body requires it. It's something that we need to
(08:23):
survive and to live, so much so that we actually
have a taste sense for it. Yeah, it's the only
you don't need better to live or sour or umami.
As a matter of fact, things like bitter and sour
are there. I think to detect things that we shouldn't
(08:43):
be eating, salt is to detect something we need that's right,
and we can. Actually this is so mind blowing to me.
I love the human body. I think it's amazingly wonderful
in ways that we don't even fully understand yet. But
consider this, When you need salt, your body produces a
craving in you for salt. That is awesome. Like I'm
(09:04):
one of those believers. I I don't follow it necessarily myself,
but in a diet, well no, I think about it.
In a diet where you just eat what you crave.
I think you can go off the rails because I
think that we uh have the wrong things now. Yes, now,
but if you could go back a hundred fifty years,
maybe I would bet you could survive pretty easily and
(09:28):
thrive on a diet where you were just kind of
led by your cravings, like, oh, I need some megs
and eat a couple of eggs, steak. You don't know.
You should pay attention to yourself, listen to what your
body is telling you, and I'll bet you find that
you do have specific cravings for specific moods, foods that
are like very simple, like meat like chuck go eat
(09:51):
a steak, Chuck go eat some eggs, like things that
are basic staples. I'll bet you'll notice you have cravings salt. Uh,
let's let's break it down chemically. Um, it's sodium and
chlorine are the two basic elements. And salt, I think
we all know this, which are electrolytes. That's right, and
we'll get into that in a minute. Um, sodium is
(10:12):
silvery white metal, and it is neither one of these
are like super friendly independently of one another. No, you know,
like especially chlorine. Yeah, sodium reacts violently if you mix
it with water and oxidizes in air. Chlorine exists in
gas at a room temperature. They're both really volatile. But
when you put them together and you have sodium chloride,
(10:33):
they make beautiful music. Makes beautiful halite, uh and beautiful music.
And sodium chloride is about a sixt sodium to chloride,
by the way, is that right? Yeah? Nice? It makes
little cubes, right, Yeah? Is it? The molecules are cubicle, right.
The sodium packs in pretty tight, and then the chlorine
(10:57):
fills in the rest and they make tiny little cubes.
It's actually reversed, That's what I said. Yeah, the chloride
is packed and then the sodium fills in. But you know,
I would have thought the sodium was bigger. Oh well, um,
but what you have is n a c L that's right.
And you mentioned electrolytes. Those are minerals that conduct electricity
(11:17):
in our body and our fluids and tissues, which is
very important, super important. Like a muscle movement, we run
on electricity. Heart, Yeah, involuntary muscle. Um moves through electrical impulse.
I guess all muscles do. Yeah. You want your eyes
to blank, buddy, Yeah, eat some salt. Right, And so
there's two conditions that you can have conceivably, well three,
(11:39):
three would be just all systems are normal. But um,
the other two is too little salt and too much salt.
And too little salt is called hypo atrema. Yeah, that's
what that lady died of the Hold your Way for
a Week contest. Oh is that right? Yeah? Yeah, you
can o d on water, and I guess that's what
you would ultimately die from as hypo into tremea their
(12:01):
water toxicity. Um, if you have too much water, you
probably have too little salt, because water flush is salt
from your system. It's the method that your kidneys use
to maintain the balance of salt and other electrolytes in
your body. And that's why you might drink gatorade if
you're working out, because it has electrolytes in it, right,
exactly salty. You don't want to water your crop plan
(12:23):
with it, though, no, no no, no, As we found from
the movie Idiocracy. Yeah, and I actually found too that
in the nineteen eighties there was a lot of controversy
over salting roads killing roadside vegetation. Well, yeah, for sure.
I mean like that, if you were into conquests and
that kind of thing, and you wanted to make sure
that the land you just occupied couldn't be used to
(12:44):
grow crops to feed an imposing armory army, you would
plow the land with salt. Salt the earth, Yeah, which
is not the salt of the earth, because that means
you're a good fellah, but not a good fella because
those guys are salty. Wow, look at you. That was
that of the team effort. Clever wordplay, my friend. Uh.
If you take diuretics um or you have like a
(13:06):
massive diarrhea for a period of days, or vomiting or
some sort of stomach bug, you might be at risk
for hyponatremia. Yeah, because you're flushing out all of this,
all of your electrolytes. Yeah. This is salt that your
body needs. So if it's out of balance, you're going
to suffer things like, um, well an inability for your
heart to beat, which is often fatal. Yeah, kidney problems yeah. Um.
(13:30):
On the other hand, you can have hypern atrema, which
is too much salt, and like you said, if you're
a Chinese aristocrat, um, you may die from hyperbern netrema. Yeah.
They even had a m man sometimes a blanket on
the word how to manual. Well, it's sort of like
how many grams of salt you needed per pound in
(13:51):
your body? That had like a chart. I guess if
you want to kill yourself in China, yours. You do it.
There's so much salt you need. But that was rough?
Is you like that? Yeah, I'm off today. I'm a
little off. You were on my my microphone just swerved
to the left. Were happening. There's a ghost in here. Um,
so too much sodium, I think you said already is
(14:14):
hypernatremia instead of hypo hyper hyper hypo exactly. It's like glacemia,
but with no tremia exactly, and with hyper in neutremia. Basically,
remember how salt if you um, if you introduce it
to say, a jerky of some sort, it will dry
it out or slug. Yes, it's just a shameful thing
(14:36):
to do. Don't do that. Um, if you introduce it
to a meat or something like that, it's going to
dry it out because through osmosis in search of homeostasis. UM,
it does the same thing to your blood and your
extracellular fluids. That salt will draw out the fluids in
your cells, but will maintain it in your blood. It's
(14:59):
why to retention. Basically, Yeah, your kidneys when it has
too much salt to deal with, kicks it around the
blood supply. Just like remember in the hangover episode when
you why drugs are so fatal when you drink a
lot of alcohol because your kidneys are trying to process
your the alcohol, so it keeps the drugs just going
around and around in your blood supply. Same thing with
(15:22):
too much salt. If your kidneys have too much to
deal with, they just keep the excess going around in
your blood. And since that salt is drawing out all
the excess moisture, it increases the volume of your blood,
which makes your blood pressure rise, which makes your heart beat, Yes,
which supposedly logically would put you at risk for a
stroke or heart attack, and that's how you would die
(15:44):
from hypernatremia, have high blood pressure. Well, supposedly sodium. Cutting
your sodium down isn't gonna help. Yeah, there's a lot
of conflicting data on that for sure. Um, well we'll
get to nutrition, so we'll cover that. M hm. So chuck. Um.
(16:21):
They're like you said, there's a lot of controversy over
how much salt or how little salt you should have
on a daily basis in your diet. Yeah. Um, the
Heart National Heart, Blood and Long Institute say no more
than two point four grams of sodium. It's about a
teaspoon per day. Americans, they found, consume an average of
(16:43):
about three point four per day, So that's one gram
too much on average, And um, you actually don't need
more than about a half a gram a day if
you want to maintain that stasis. So yeah, just for
your electro lighte intake. The thing is, though, um, there
was for many years because it makes sense that if
(17:05):
you're if too much salt increases your blood pressure, then
too much salt should be um, should put you at
risk for strokes and heart attacks. Right. Well, the CDC
panel surveyed material and all and all all sorts of
studies that found no, cutting your sodium intake doesn't really
(17:25):
doesn't decrease your risk of heart attack or stroke. And
as a matter of fact, there is was it just
more hereditary? They don't know what it is. They just
know that basically below three thousand grams or three thousand
milligrams of salt and above seven thousand milligrams of salt
a day were two groups that were at higher risk
(17:48):
of heart attack. So if you have too little salt,
you're at higher risk of heart attack to Okay, so
try to keep it between three thousand and four thousand
milligrams thousand and seven thousand. The thing is is they
they don't They weren't comfortable making any recommendation. They were
just everyone scared. This is what we found. Everyone's scared, like,
go on the record, Yeah, because we just don't know. Like,
(18:10):
it doesn't make any sense that you would have a
heart attack if you ate less than three grams of
sault today. Yeah. That that flies in the face of
of um conventional wisdom, and nobody's figured out why yet. Interesting, Well,
it's something you should monitor at the very least, because
I think a lot of people look at fat grams
and calories and all that stuff is great to look
at nutritionally, but um, when you start poking around on
(18:32):
the soup can and you see, wow, this chicken noodle
soup has milligrams of sodium, but it's so good. And
this one little can which is almost a gram of sodium,
yeah close to it. A quarter pounder with bacon and cheese.
You didn't do Big Max. No, I should have been communist.
I think big Max. Actually I did see. This is
(18:55):
forty milligrams a big mac. I think was around eleven
pounders more with the bacon. I think they have like
a whole bacon onion ranch or something topping that you
can put on quarter pounders. Now I've not yet tried this,
but like I think about it from time to time,
like right now, yeah, right now especially, uh So, at
(19:17):
any rate, just give it a look. Like soups are
notoriously high in sodium. Package foods are notoriously high in sodium. Um,
don't just think about the table salt that you use, Like, oh,
I didn't salt my food that much today? You need
a lot of package food or eating a lot of sodium. Yeah,
and nobody can tell you how much you should be
eating or shouldn't be eating. But like you said, it's
good to just pay attention to that kind of thing
because you probably are eating a lot more than you realize,
(19:40):
and you should be meat in a lot of package food. Anyway,
I'll just go ahead and say that, so, um, chuck, Yes,
what kinds of salt are there? Well, first of all,
I should say I love salt. Salt and pepper are
my favorite two spices. I'm from the South, have a
taste for salt um and pork fat. Yeah that's pretty
(20:01):
southern too, Yeah for sure. Uh So, I love salt.
I like good Mediterranean sea salt. That's what I used
at my house. Uh, and I'm gonna plug this local saltier.
I just made that word up oh later in the show. Okay,
but um, I'm a big salt fan. I like salt too,
I like sweet, I like ummmy, I like um sour.
(20:24):
I'm training myself to like bitter through the use of kompari. Yeah.
Like I I've found out that I'm a bitter super taster.
So like things that seem like normal to other people
are like really bitter to me. Like one example, grapefruit. Yeah,
but it's like like disgustingly bitter to me. Like I
(20:45):
can't understand how the rest of humanity eats grape fruit.
I don't like grapefruit. Well, maybe you're a bitter super
taster too, But I have to tell you this. I've
trained myself to like um, grapefruit and kompari just by exposure,
like I've come to appreciate them. With campari, it's a
bar like a bitter digestif for Apertif you do like
(21:05):
a campari and soda, it's in a negrowning right. Oh.
I think I've seen people like if their stomachs upset
or is that bitters and soda? Well, campari is a
type of bitters. It's not that super compact bitters like angustura,
but it is a type of bitter. I think it's
a digestif. Okay, it's good stuff anyway. I like salt.
What I'm really saying there is I like well seasoned food.
(21:26):
And if you're a chef or a home chef, you
know that salt is important to cooking, super important and
baking obviously, but bland food can't do it. No, what's
the point. What is the point? Agreed types of salt.
Let's start with table salt and and look, man, if
you're if your doctor put you on like a bland
(21:49):
food diet, I feel for you. But there's stuff out
there you can eat. There's Spike, there's Mrs Dash, there's
you should be seasoning your food to some extent like
bland food is, like it's bland life. Yeah. They even
had the imitation salt to the new in New Salt.
I didn't do any research on that, but I've bought
(22:10):
it before. You do you like it? I didn't use
it that much, but it's it exists. In my home
thanks to the empty thing of Mediterranean sea salt. Yeah,
all right, it's the table salts, the first one we
should cover. That's the traditional um either iodized or non iodized,
fine grained salt that you see in many, many homes
(22:33):
and restaurants, and it's IDEs. They did a little research
into this. Did you look up iodie salt? Yeah, well,
I mean I know that they they added it because
at one point it was sort of like fluoride. They thought, well,
we need this in a good place to put us
in salt. Yeah, because most people use salt, and we'll
just put it into table salt because it's an easy additive.
But um, there was a real problem with hyper thyroidism,
(22:57):
things like Goiter's mental retardi shan um just poor fetal
development linked to um iodine deficiency. So they put it
in salt, and apparently there it's considered to be responsible
for this thing called the Flynn effect, which there was
like a three i Q point rise in the middle
(23:18):
of the twentieth century in western nations, and nobody could
figure out what it is, and they think now that
it was because they added iodine as salt, and so
it had the aggregate effect of raising our i Q
by um preventing poor fetal development. Yeah. Well, it's still
a problem in other parts of the world, just not
here in North America, right, other parts of the world
(23:40):
that don't have idi salt. You know, dumb they are.
Oh man, that was terrible. I'm just kidding. You need
to apologize to the rest of the world for I'm
sorry everybody. Uh So, like I said, table salt is
the most common salt. Uh they remove all the impurities. Um.
They have things in there to make it not clump
and stick together, and so it pours freely even when
(24:02):
it rains and poors. Well should we get to that. Yeah,
don't you have something on that? Yeah? The um I
just for some reason thought of the Morton Salt girl,
and like every great advertising story, they were like, how
do we It was sort of a new thing at
the time, in nineteen eleven two package salt this way
in a container with a spout. How they package it
(24:22):
before I don't know, the blocks, probably like a deer
like or something. I'm not sure actually, but I know
that this was a fairly revolutionary product. To package it
like this and process it like this. Um. So the
agency was um in w Air and Company, and Don
(24:42):
Draper walks in and says, I've got twelve proposals for you.
Which one do you like? And Sterling Morton of the
Morton Company. Of course, it's always someone else, like his
son or his wife or something. It was his son
in secretary. UM pointed toward one of the ads with
a little girl whole the umbrella and said this is
the one, and he said, you know what, I think,
(25:04):
you guys are right. The whole story is right there
in the picture. Because the whole point was this salt
doesn't clump, it'll when it rains, it poors, and little
girls can't be trusted to be sent to the store
by themselves because they ruin all the salt keeping the
nozzle open on the way home. Uh. Some of the
different UM slogans they had was flows freely, runs freely, pours,
(25:28):
it never rains, but it pours. And then they finally
settled on when it rains it poors. Yeah, that's the
best one because it never rains but it pors. Doesn't
make any sense. They probably fired that person and she's
been updated one to three, four five times. Really, Yeah,
the last time in nineteen sixty eight and she's been
the same since then. And there was never a real
(25:49):
model for that girl. And that's a question they often get.
She's totally made up. Yeah, because he was like, it's
Morton's granddaughters. What you know, you want to think it's
Selma Selma Morton. So that is the story of the Skein.
That's an old timing name, if ever there was one.
That's a college right, No, it's like a person's name. Well,
(26:11):
it's a college to Okay, had a friend that played
soccer there ke e r s k i Any, there's
a college named Colgate too. It's like crazy to me. Uh,
Sea salt sir is next. Uh, it's gonna cost you
some more money because of several reasons, one of which
(26:31):
if they go old school and in some parts of
France they still harvest the stuff by hand, which is
pretty cool. You might see it called flair de sell,
which is French for flower of salt. And uh, it's
not processed like table salt is. So you're gonna have
a lot of those trace minerals. It's gonna be coarse
and flaky, and it colors it too. It can for sure,
(26:52):
like you can have white sea salt, pink black gray, yeah,
or a combination of them. Pink salts are traditionally associated
him Alayan salt um, and there the pink is often
for the result of things like copper or iron or
apparently um. There's a type that contains an algae, a
(27:13):
salt tolerant algae, which would make it an extreme aphile um.
That gives it has the beta caroteen pigment in it,
and that gives it a pinkish hue at salt. You're
eating algae, pink algae in your salt, which is pretty neat.
That is pretty neat. And that that's Hawaiian, right, A
lot of times Hawaii has a different one and all
(27:35):
ala Oh I read that as algae. Yeah, I did
too a couple of times, and I was like, why
would they separate these two out? There's no g No,
it's a Hawaiian Alaya salt has iron oxide in it
from the volcanoes. Oh, that makes sense. And Hawaii also
produces black salt too from the lava. Yeah, in a
little bit of charcoal. I'll have to try some of
those actually, and yeah, and then there's gray salts to um,
(27:58):
which is Uh, there's cell gree which is from France.
And then smoked salt is also gray where they just
take some salt and smoke it. Yeah, they put it
over a smoky fire and you have smoked salt. Do
you like smoky foods sometimes? Yeah, it can be a
little overbearing for me at times. Yeah, in the hands
of you know, I guess somebody who knows what they're
(28:19):
doing with the smoked It's like, I like a good
smoked meat well day type of thing, but not necessarily
like you know when they add like artificial smoke in
the kitchen to it to a meal, you know what
I'm saying. Although smoked cheese is good. Oh yeah, man,
good smoke. Hey and thanks to fan Hillary Lozar from
(28:40):
for sending us some great cheese. Yeah, that was very
good to you. I had some of that smoked goody yesterday.
Actually when I got home, I haven't had it yet.
Is it good? And as soon as I walked in
the door, I got a knife out. It's like I
gotta try this stuff. Yeah's delicious anyway. Thanks Hilary's m
(29:08):
hm so chefs and Gormond's will say. Sea salt is
what you want to be using because you're gonna get
a unique flavor from those minerals that are not in
table salt. I agree with them, it's tough to bake
(29:29):
with though. Yeah, it's tough to measure. You get a
lot more precise measuring, for sure from table salt. And
they don't recommend you bank with sea salt, no, because
baking is a specific chemical reaction. Cooking is different. Yeah,
they say that they most chefs don't cook with sea salt,
but they will just add it as a topper. But
I've cooked with sea salt and have no plenty of
(29:49):
chefs that cook with se salt, so I disagree with that. Um. Well,
with the topper, they mean like it's a finishing salt.
It brings out like all the flavors if you sprinkle
it on the Yeah, I mean it's definitely right before
you serve it. But I've also seen it used in
the food right, So well, that leads us to kosher salt.
Apparently some people like to cook with kosher salt. And
if you are using following a recipe and you're switching
(30:10):
out the whatever amounts of salt is called for, you
want to double it because kosher salt is larger, coarse
grained salt, and here to me is a fact of
the podcast, one of several Kosher salt is not necessarily
kosher itself. It's used to make things kosher. Didn't know that.
(30:30):
I didn't. I thought kasher salt was like salt that
had been blessed by a rabbi or something. Really I
never understood it, but now I do. It's it's salt
they used to make things kosher. If you use table
salt UH to make something kosher, it's not gonna work.
Koash your salt because it's large and coarse grained. UH
makes meat kosher by drawing the blood out because eating
blood ain't kosher. So if you salt it with kosher salt,
(30:54):
it's gonna draw the blood out of the meat, and
bam you have a kosher cut of steak, baby boom.
And it's not is either by the way. Um. And
then we have the redheaded step child of the salt family,
rock salt, which is used UM. It's got a lot
of impurities, it's unrefined, it's very large grained, and it's
(31:16):
used to melt ice on roads and sidewalks and to
make homemade ice cream. Yeah, and probably some other stuff.
But do you know of any other uses. I think
rock salts used in um some chemical productions. That makes sense. Um,
if you want to make a good industrial brine, rock
salts your your man. Yeah, alright. Salt mining. That's how
(31:39):
you get salt because it is a natural thing that
exists in the earth. Um. The largest producer of salt
these days, no surprise, is China. UM. In two thousand
twelve they produced about sixty five million tons. The US
is not too far behind it forty four million. Then
you've got Germany, India and Australia as the other leading
(32:00):
five salt producers these days. In India gets the profit
from it salt production thanks to Gandhi. I guess so, huh,
that's pretty neat. Didn't think about that their number four
on the list. Yeah, they weren't even allowed to produce it,
not so long ago. No, they were allowed to produce it,
but all the money went to Yeah, okay jerks. So
(32:22):
there's three types of mining main three main types. There's
deep shaft mining, solar evaporation and solution mining. And deep
shaft mining is basically like any other type of mining
where you just um, drill a shaft down into a mine,
which an underground seabed is what where the salt is, right,
(32:44):
that's where you get your salt um. Yeah, that's I
think that's one of the facts of the podcast. Yeah,
they're ancient underground seabed, ancients beds that dried up and
the salt remained and they form um these basically salt
deposits that can be dozens or hundred defeat thick and
massively wide. And you drill down into these things. You
(33:05):
create a couple of shafts, and then they usually use
what's called a room and pillar system, which really helps.
It's very difficult to explain, but if you see a
picture of it, it makes perfect sense. But um, you're
basically creating a checkerboard pattern you going down in mining
the salt deposits, so you leave it right, Yeah, you
(33:28):
blast a room, but you leave a couple of adjacent
rooms for support, and then um, eventually you've you've mined
out all the salt and then you fill it with
industrial waste. That is one thing they do. So that's
deep shaft mining. Yeah, and they'll remove the salt there
and crush it and u haul it to the service
and further process it from there, depending on what kind
(33:50):
of salt you want in the end. Right. And there's
this awesome mine UM called the Wheelishka Salt Mine in Cracow, Poland,
and it has a full on cathedral made out of salt. Amazing.
They have several like chapels, but then a full cathedral um.
And it's all made of salts in this old salt
(34:11):
mine that's not a UNESCO site UM. And they went
to the trouble of boiling salt. It was a table
salt mine. They would boil this raw salt and purify
it and then use that purified salt to make crystal
chandeliers out of salt. Like the whole cathedral is just salt.
It's amazing looking, man. Yeah, check it out. No goats allowed,
(34:34):
they would recap it or no chucks allowed. I just
walk around like licking stuff. They would ask you nothing. Uh.
A deep shaft mining, by the way, I think is
usually rock salt is what they're producing there. Right. And
then there's solution mining. Yeah, that's UM. Basically they take
a well over a salt bed and then inject water
in there and make a brine and then pump it
(34:56):
up from the underground as as a wet solution and
into a vacuum pan which is going to seal it up,
and they're gonna boil it and then evaporate it, which
is you know how they made salt back in the
old days too, They would you know, boil it and
evaporate it and then scrape the pan, so it's kind
of a modern version of that. Then they dry it
(35:17):
out and refine it, and then from there they're gonna
either add anti clumping agents or iodine, depending on what
you want. And then um, with solution mining, you've got
like a salt bed or a salt dome that's exposed
because it's somehow through tectonic action, uh, an ancient seabed
or salt bed has been exposed to the above ground. Yeah,
(35:40):
like the surface of the earth. Right. And then what's
the last one, Well, the old school solar method um
solar evaporation. This is when you have a salt lake
or seawater and wind in the sun cooperate with the
shallow pools and they leave salt behind and you can
only harvested about once a year once it reaches a
certain level of harvest ability um of thickness and uh
(36:05):
something like we said, sometimes it's still done by hand,
even although it is industrialized in other places for sure.
But you know, they wash it, they clean it, they
drain it, but they leave the um a lot of
impurities in there. And this stuff is almost pure sodium chloride.
It's good stuff. And like I said, I used the
Mediterranean version generally, but Australia is big on it too,
(36:28):
on this method. And um, we should probably mention also
that salt has a lot of religious significance. It's just
a it's an ancient important thing to mankind. Yeah, they
would like use it to seal important things. Yeah, in
the Old Testament, which is pretty old. Uh. Lot's wife,
(36:49):
I believe her name is Sarah. Was it Sarah Ruth
who was married a Lot turned into a pillar of
salt when she looked behind her, even though God said,
don't turn around, I'll turn you into a pillar of
salt out and she did. And apparently there's a there's
a salt pillar at Mount ra rat Um that's called
Lot's wife. People are like, that's her right there, and
(37:10):
who who uh is it? Buddhists that board off evil
with salt Yes, um Umi has a little shaker of
salt that her mom put in her glove compartment of
her car. Really like flickr off on the house, just
a protector. Yeah that's nice. See I would have eaten it. Yeah,
well that's why I don't let you ride in Umi's car.
(37:31):
That's right, one of several reasons they out of the
glove bucks. You got anything else? I do? I have
this good thing. And there's a Roman senator named Cassio
Doors and he said quote, mankind can live without gold,
but not without salt. Who is that Cassio key boartists? Yet?
Well you got Jerry again. Yeah, she's giggly today. And
(37:54):
I have a plug because here in Atlanta, there's a
a lady who makes uh salts. But if you go
to Facebook and type in beautiful briny sea salt, go
to her Facebook page and click on the about thing,
you will see her lovely homemade, handcrafted salts. And my
(38:14):
favorite is the magic Unicorn. See if this sounds good,
Sea salt is of course the main ingredient smoked paprika, lemon, garlic, rosemary,
and celery seed. Well it does sound good, it's delicious.
You get some broccoli and some cauliflower, some like beats
and big chunks of garlic. Throw it out the window.
And buy a steak and put this magical unicorn on
(38:36):
it some olive oil, sprinkle it with this stuff, bake
it in the oven. Delicious to go with that steak,
you know. Yeah, magic unicorn is my favorite. Uh. And
the black truffle salt is delicious. And then she has
one called camp fire, which is smoked salt with cumin
and anto chili powder. And uh. If you email info
(38:57):
at Beautiful Briny Sea sawt dot com, you can order
some of this stuff of you. And I told Emily
she's a friend, or as I said, tell her, I'm
gonna plugger, so she better get her little fingers working,
you know, nice start making some salt. Yeah, because the
stuff you should army is a salty crowd. So if
you want to learn more about salt, I don't know
how you possibly could, but if you want to look
(39:18):
into it, you can type the word as a LT
into the search bar how stuff works dot com and
it will bring up this article how salt works. And
since I said search part, that means it's time for
listener mail. I'm gonna call this. We should apologize to cops.
What do we do now? Well, this cop rot in
and it well, I'll just read it. Is it? The
(39:39):
police chase is one? Yeah? Yeah, they didn't like that one.
Hey guys, my name is Glenn. I'm a police officer
in southern California. I've been enjoying the podcast for years.
I suspect our political leanings made different times, but I
always enjoy learning and listening to different points of view.
Listen to the December Sehunt podcast. That's not the police
chase one. You're right, but I think it involves something
(40:01):
like that. I felt it was very accurate, with the
exception of some information you provided about the l A
p D. Um. We've bashed the l a p D
before for their history of corruption. They have a pretty
thick history of corruption, but they're not all bad ladies
and men. Well, no, of course not. Um. You mentioned
that officers were super jumpy during the man hunt for
Christopher Dorner, which was a fair assessment. But here's where
(40:24):
you got something kind of wrong. Um. You stated that
the l a p D fired on two uninvolved vehicles.
It was the l A p D who shot at
one in the Torrents Police Department shot at the other
I could see how someone not from the area might
think they were l A p D. So it's not
the big of a deal. However, the bigger mistake is
that you stated that these shootings killed two people. Nobody
(40:44):
was killed, so I need to go back. I saw
in several places that at least two people were killed. Really, yeah,
accidentally from those shootings. I'll go back and look again. Okay,
but Glenn Josh takes issue, Sir, Well, he's not the
only one who's written in I just haven't gotten around
going back and looking and double checking. But I mean,
while we were researching, I came across that, and it
(41:06):
wasn't like on a forum or message board or something.
I think they were in articles. Okay, well, well we'll
get to the bottom of it. Uh he was, Glenn says,
I'm very surprised you would make such a statement without
doing your own work. I did my homework. You typically
appear to go to great links to fact check. Sometimes
you get the feeling you guys are not the biggest
fans of law enforcement. Um not. And I even recognize
my professions shortcomings for sure, just like you, though I
(41:28):
want facts um influencing the show, not personal opinions, and
this email was not intended to justify the actions of
those two police departments. Just to set the record straight. Understood,
And despite the goof and the cop bashing ha ha,
I still love the show. That's from Glenn Um and Glenn,
I don't hate cops. I love cops. Um. We've done
(41:48):
a lot of like super supportive shows on Law Enforced.
My name talks like the law enforcement dude. But I
don't like jerks, and I think a lot of times
people's experience with cops or when they're pulled over and
not being helped by a cop, which is unfortunate because
they do so much great work. But you know, when
you get pulled over and you're hassled by a jerk cop,
(42:09):
you think, Man, what a jerk cop. It's like eating
at a bad restaurant, you know what I'm saying. Like
a restaurants bad. You tell one or two people you
have a bad experience at a restaurant, you tell like
twenty people. It's like fifty fold with cops. So we
have a lot of respect for law enforcement for sure,
for all they do. So I hope that doesn't across,
come across is any differently? Nice? Check? Yeah, thanks Glenn, Yeah,
(42:33):
thank you Glenn. I'll go back in double check. If
I'm wrong, I'll admit it. I just haven't had a
chance to look again. We'll give him twenty licks off
of a block of sault from a goat, and I
might die of hyper natremia. Man. That wrapped it all
up right there. If you want to get in touch
with me and chuck to correct us, take issue with
something we said, whatever um, you can tweet to us
(42:56):
at s y s K podcast. You can join us
on Facebook dot com, slash do you Should Know? You
can send us an email to stuff Podcasts at how
stuff Works dot com, and as always, hang out with
us at our home on the web. Stuff you Should
Know dot Com. Stuff you Should Know is a production
of I Heart Radio's How Stuff Works. For more podcasts
for my heart Radio, visit the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts,
(43:18):
or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
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