Many health conscious people avoid and/or limit salt in in packaged and processed foods and avod adding salt to foods and recipes. However, many of these same people who put effort into avoiding salt, are mislead into using sea salt, thinking it is a healthier alternative. But, in spite of the marketing and advertising behind it, sea salt is not a better choice.

Sodium chloride is sodium chloride and it does not matter if it comes from salt mines on land, or from the sea. While it is true that sea salt has slightly less sodium per gram and has a few minerals, these are all completely irrelevant when you step back and put the claims in to perspective.

The Institute of Medicine, a branch of the National Academy of Sciences, recommends healthy people limit their sodium intake to no more than 1200-1500 mgs per day. The set an upper limit of 2300 mgs, meaning that if you go over that on a regular basis, it can be harmful. They also recognize that a healthy human only needs less than 500 mgs a day, which is easily obtainable from the amount that occurs naturally in foods.

Now, lets put all this in persepctive.

A tsp of table salt has 2200 mgs of sodium. A tsp of Sea Salt has around 2000 mgs. Less, but as you can see, still a lot of sodium

Now according to one of the leading promoters of Sea Salt, Celtic Salt, and based on the percentages they post on their website of the analysis of their product, 1 tsp of Celtic Sea Salt also contains...

12 mgs of calcium
7 mgs of potassium
27 mgs of magnesium

The recommended amounts we need are

1000 mgs of calcium
4700 mgs of potassium
400 mgs of magnesium

So, in order for us to get in any significant amount of (less say 25% of the recommended amount)

Calcium, we would need to also take in 41,000 mgs of sodium
Potassium, we would need to also take in 335,000 mgs of sodium
Magnesium, we would need to also take in 7,407 mgs of sodium

So, in other words, the amount of sodium in the sea salt we would take in to get any significant amount of those minerals, would be extremely dangerous if not toxic.

And, if we reduce our consumption to small amounts of sea salt, it would offer no benefit form the minerals as the amount would be trivial at best.

So, should you use sea salt?

My recommendations, which are inline with the IOM recommend a limit on total sodium, regardless of the source.

If you choose to use sea salt as the source of your sodium, that is up to you, but it is not any healthier, safer, and/or more toxic than table salt.

In Health
Jeff Novick MS, RD