The Story on Salt, Part III

The Bloody Truth
Our blood must always be slightly alkaline. For optimal health you need for 25% of the foods you eat to digest acidic and 75% of the foods that you eat to digest alkaline.

Let’s break this down. We are talking about the process that occurs after food leaves your stomach. And you can’t go by taste. A lemon tastes acidic but has an alkalizing effect on your blood. Meat doesn’t taste acidic but has a very acidic effect on your blood. If the food you eat is overly acidic, it cannot leave your body without being neutralized. Unfortunately, the typical American diet is highly acidic. When you eat a meal that is overly acidic, your body must neutralize the acid and regulate the alkalinity of the blood. Your body neutralizes acids with organic sodium from its alkaline reserves.

Acidic Foods vs Alkaline Foods: What’s the Difference?
Well that is another blog entry…for now, to keep it simple let’s just say that all vegetables and most fruits digest alkaline. Most grains, all meats, cheeses, beans and nuts digest acidic.

So we need unrefined salt to help our body maintain alkaline blood right?
Not exactly. Your body needs organic sodium to neutralize acid in the blood, but the best source of organic sodium is fruits and vegetables. The average adult needs to eat about 10 pounds or so of fruits & vegetables a week. This is crucially important. Some of us will not eat one piece of fruit in a week! Unrefined sea salt is a wonderful addition to our diets…it requires no effort to digest, gives our food flavor and neutralizes acids. And unrefined salt is so potent, that you only need a very small amount of it. It will not cause edema or make you thirsty when used properly. Let it be your back up to fruits and vegetables.

Salty Fun Facts
These fun facts come from one of my favorite books on salt by Dr. Hendel and Peter Ferreira, Water and Salt…The Essence of Life.

1. Salt has a crystalline structure that is electric not molecular.
2. Salt can neutralize acids in our bodies, but it can also cancel out harmful electromagnetic vibrations in our environment.
3. Without potassium (which is stripped from table salt) and sodium, we could not think or act.