Home > Weight Loss > Salt Types Explained: Choosing the Best for Your Health
Salt is everywhere in our diets, but not all salts are the same. From pink Himalayan crystals to gray sea salt to the shaker on your table, each type comes with big claims about taste and health.
But are they really different in ways that matter? Do some salts supply needed nutrients? Are some unsafe? Is it mostly clever marketing? Let’s clear up the confusion and take a closer look at what sets them apart.
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In discussing concerns around iodine and using salt with less iodine, the question that often comes up is: What am I going to do to replace all of those nutrients?
One of the arguments for sea salt or pink Himalayan salt is that they have nutrients in them besides sodium chloride. It’s true, but we need to add in a few details to make sense of it.
Sea salt provides pretty much every mineral that you could think about, including:
The thinking goes that, because of all these nutrients, we should really consume lots and lots of sea salt. But what we really need to understand is how much of each nutrient we are getting. Is there enough to make a big difference?
The nutrients that are present in the highest amounts of sea salt are going to be magnesium, followed most closely by potassium. And while it’s not none, it’s a pretty meager amount overall.
Key Insight: Sea salt is not a multivitamin. While it may have a lot of nutrients present within it, they are not in amounts that can really move the needle for your health. Even a couple bites of spinach would replace the benefits of thousands of servings of sea salt!
The flip side that we need to think about is contaminants. The best way to think of this is to remember that sea salt is purified seawater. As such, you’ve got everything that is going to be there – both the good and the bad.
In fact, there is much more aluminum in the average serving of sea salt than there is potassium, iron, or zinc. We can also see measurable amounts of:
They are all present because everything is present in sea salt. You get a little bit of everything, with the drawback that you don’t get to pick and choose what you get. And that does not include an overwhelming amount of good things.
While I would never say that there is a massive amount of toxins in sea salt, the key thing to take away is that the amount of toxins is on par with the amount of nutrients. And if you’re going to consume sea salt on a long-term basis, these amounts can become relevant.
We also have some non-nutritive contaminants to think about, with a recent study showing that about 90% of sampled sea salt and pink Himalayan sea salt have microplastics in them. This is the kind of thing you could see even with a low-powered microscope.
When we talk about the best kind of salt, we need to first think about the purpose of salt. Salt has a few purposes that we can turn to, including:
It’s mostly a matter of taste. In that context, the taste is almost exclusively a function of sodium – specifically the sodium chloride molecule.
The thinking goes that the purer the molecule, the better the taste. Many chefs argue that things like iodized salt or sea salt have a slightly bitter taste due to the iodine and potassium, respectively.
Key Insight: For flavor, all of the top chefs encourage the purest forms of salt, specifically those that have the larger, diamond-shaped crystals. This is due to the way that they adhere to food and cause searing to occur and penetrate food surfaces.
When it comes to the question of consumption, we have two sides of a pretty big argument:
The latter is quite popular in the world of natural medicine. I want to start by representing some of the better versions of that argument for getting higher and higher amounts of salt in your diet.
One argument is that, if there are some compromises to your adrenal health, this can cause excessive sodium loss to where salt can be a benefit. This is especially true in the case of something like Addison’s disease.
There are also medical conditions in which the blood pressure is not super well regulated. This is true in postural orthostatic tachycardia syndrome (POTS), where the blood pressure is too low, especially with respect to postural changes.
Given that we know there is a connection between sodium intake and blood pressure, salt could play a role here in helping with that. But in both cases, are either of these true?
There is an important distinction that we need to make here between adrenal insufficiency and adrenal stress. To be frank, insufficiency is pretty rare, where the adrenals are unable to make what the body wants them to make.
Adrenal stress, or adrenal fatigue, is not rare and a real thing. But, it is not that the adrenals cannot make what the body wants them to make. It’s that the body doesn’t want them to make as much. This is a huge distinction that we need to make.
That’s because you could have two individuals with low cortisol levels. If one of them is suffering from adrenal insufficiency, the body is dysregulated. If one has adrenal stress, the body is in its best state of balance, meaning that the low amounts are deliberate and not due to inability.
Any good doctor can differentiate between those cases by simply testing the feedback between the brain and the adrenals. In almost all cases, though, adrenal stress is far more common than insufficiency. This means that extra salt is likely not a benefit here.
The best way to go about this is to be as pragmatic as possible. By the model of how we think this disease works, you could expect that extra salt might work. But when individuals are tested on this premise, it doesn’t seem to really do much.
It turns out that baseline exercise offers way more benefits than added salt. This takes us from the theoretical to the practical, meaning that we could theorize that salt would help due to the blood pressure and sodium relationship, but in practice, it doesn’t offer enough benefit.
You could pull up a few studies and find that people with a lower salt intake often have poor health outcomes. Or that folks on extreme versions of popular diets, like ketogenic or paleo, experience enough electrolyte loss that they need more salt in their system.
First, these studies are outliers. Second, research like this would benefit from a bit more nuance. The issue may come down to how these things are tracked — and, more specifically, the issue with relying on urinary excretion of sodium analysis.
Key Insight: Urinary sodium, isolated samples, and not repeated analysis lead to these studies being less than reliable when it comes to better understanding salt and its relationship to our general health. It’s an error of misusing a certain kind of measurement.
If you expand that study and track over a longer period of time with multiple measuring instruments, what you’ll find is that the harm from low-salt diets simply vanishes. The sum total of the studies tells us that we don’t really need to worry about aggressive electrolyte supplementation.
If we look at the sum total of all the data available to us, it paints a pretty clear picture. Overall, if you’re getting above a teaspoon a day of salt, it’s going to be huge when it comes to affecting blood pressure — and even when it doesn’t, it can still have an effect on cardiovascular risk.
Key Insight: Even if there are no changes to blood pressure, there is still a higher risk for stroke, kidney damage, or cardiac events with being a little over the typical salt intake.
There’s also good evidence that if we could take our intake in America down by about a half a teaspoon a day, we’d likely be able to save somewhere around 90,000 lives per year just like that.
The curious thing about salt is that there are taste buds which respond to it, and the more salt we consume, the more salt we eliminate — this leads to a vicious cycle where things only taste good when they use more and more salt. And they only feel good with more salt.
This isn’t a normal state for your body to be in, it’s simply what your body has adapted and become accustomed to. But, if you feel like you’re a salt “addict,” you can break the cycle.
If you feel like you’re stuck on salt, just know that you can give your body the chance to re-acclimate and break the cycle. Simply take a break and your body will take the opportunity to “reset” that cycle to where you no longer are as dependent on higher and higher amounts of salt.
In the event that you feel like your adrenals play a role here. Please consider taking the “Adrenal Quiz” to learn a bit more about the current state of your adrenals. Beyond relying on salt, the results of the quiz can help chart some next steps to get your adrenals back in a state of balance.
All in all, I hope this discussion helped clarify some of your questions around salt, which types are best, and the associated risks of too much salt. Here’s to your best health!
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Dr. Alan Glen Christianson (Dr. C) is a Naturopathic Endocrinologist and the author of The NY Times bestselling Hormone Healing Cookbook, The Metabolism Reset Diet, and The Thyroid Reset Diet.
Dr. C’s gift for figuring out what works has helped hundreds of thousands reverse thyroid disease, heal their adrenals, and lose weight naturally. Learn more about the surprising story that started his quest.
