Walking with Salt

I am currently reading a book called, In Defense of Israel. Yes, that is a strange sentence to start a blog post about salt. While I was reading through this book, I came across an interesting habit that Jewish folk in ancient days – and perhaps in this day and age – practiced to alleviate muscle cramps.

While going about their business of the day, Jews would carry a small pouch on their waist that contained grains of salt. As they began to perspire from the heat of the sun, they would take a pinch of that salt and ingest it. You could call it the ancient equivalent of Gatorade.

As someone who plays a lot of sports and rarely goes easy in any of them, I tend to perspire a lot and need a means of replenishing those minerals. I do take a multi-mineral supplement, but sometimes you need a soluble form that can be used quickly and does not require a small meal to keep the balance. I have found that putting about a teaspoon of REAL salt in my water bottle takes care of any muscle soreness while I run around on the ball field.

You may have noticed that I put REAL in all caps when describing the salt we use in our home. That is because most table salt you find in a restaurant, or sodium in our food, is processed salt. It may come as no surprise that if something is processed, it does not have the same nutritional qualities it had in its raw form.

This is the main beef I have with doctors or individuals that say we have to eliminate salt from our diets. If we are removing salt from our diet, we are removing a building block of our bodies. To be fair, too much of anything is a bad thing, and sodium in our foods is often a harmful idea. However, that sodium is not the same as Himalyan salt, sea salt or any other variations of salt in its raw form.

I had a conversation the other day with a gal that was having high blood pressure issues. She was on multiple medications for not only that symptom but also a few others to combat the side effects of the blood pressure medicine. When she acted on my suggestion to use real salt in her diet in place of processed salts, her blood pressure came down.

That result was a beautiful thing to see, and it makes me believe in what I do all the more. It also reminds me of a quote from Augustine on how we can interact with truth and people. We don’t have to be militaristic in our approach - we just need to share what we know.

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