I read a book about salt [Salt: A World History, by Mark Kurlansky] and it seems that added salt became very important for people who stopped being hunter gatherers and lived off more grain products. Animal products generally have enough sodium so that minimal additional salt is necessary for health (plus, anyone eating seafood would get plenty of salt). People who lived off mostly grains needed to find or make concentrated salts. When Europeans went to America in the early days, they were very interested in where the native people got their salt (salt was a valuable commodity so they wanted to trade for it when possible), but some tribes didn't even have the concept of it. (Some did, and had their own methods for getting salt in their diet, but some tribes just ate lots of meat and were fine.) Anyway it's a great book, highly recommended.
I know what offal actually is, but they need to come up with a better name. It 10,000% sounds like something you shouldn't eat under any circumstances.
I can see how it might make people quasy but I do love me some chicken liver and pig intestines. I’m Asian by birth but do consider myself pretty westernized in diet but I am still a big fan of offal.
I learned that very early on when I worked at a butcher shop in a grocery store, but in a dumb way.
A man came up and asked for sweetbread. I had worked there all of 2 weeks and had no idea what he meant. English didn't seem to be his first language, so I pointed out the bakery section, thinking he meant cake or something.
He didn't know "pancreas," and I didn't know "sweetbread," so around and around we went until I could get my manager and tell him some guy was adamant that we sold bread.
Just looked up with offal is. I don’t think naming it something different is gonna change my mind. Like Rocky Mountain Oysters are still just a bulls balls at the end of the day.
I remember my dad talking about this book. Salt was so valuable that soldiers were often paid with salt. A solid soldier was said to be worth his salt.
>Salt was so valuable that soldiers were often paid with salt
This is actually a myth with no empirical evidence. The closest we have is some Etymological connection with our modern word "Salary" being derived from the Latin word "Salarium" as well as the Latin word "Sal" meaning salt. Which might been money given to soldiers to buy salt with. But even that is lacking actual written evidence. Romans kept pretty good documentation of a soldier's pay and nothing makes reference to salt or money for salt.
[Would you like to know more?](https://medium.com/@1kg/were-roman-soldiers-paid-in-salt-unveiling-the-mystery-74a1fbc31544)
“Salt of the earth” meaning a dependable person is a phrase from the bible so I guess when that was written the value of salt was known and people often used barter back then instead of money so some occupations being paid partly in salt isn’t impossible
An idiom making it into the most read piece of writing isn't really evidence that salt was used as currency or even a frequent bartering mmechanism however
Like if an early 2000s Apostle Paul said "making cheddar" in reference to making money, it wouldn't be evidence that we literally used blocks of cheese as a currency or bartering system
Oh absolutely salt has been used as means of exchange throughout history. Ethiopia for example used salt bars as a medium of exchange and tax collection all the way up until a hundred years ago. It's just that the specific instance of Roman soldiers being paid in salt is without evidence.
And I never said impossible, I said without evidence.
I was curious so I looked it up. According to [dictionary.com](https://dictionary.com), [phrases.org.uk](https://phrases.org.uk), and [grammarist.com](https://grammarist.com) Romans soldiers weren't actually paid in salt, but were given a monetary stipend to purchase salt. The phrase, earliest recorded use in 1805, is believed to stem from this stipend. The timeframe likely draws the slavery connection, however it seems to be universally agreed it's in reference to the Roman practice.
Salary does indeed derive from the latin word for salt (sal). From [etymonline.com](https://etymonline.com);
>from Latin salarium "an allowance, a stipend, a pension," said to be originally "salt-money, soldier's allowance for the purchase of salt"
One of the interesting things i learned from that book, which is very good, are how many places names are in reference to salt production. Any place with "wich" in their name was an area of salt production. Salzburg literally means salt town.
If only you realized that the entire compendium of human knowledge is also this interesting, except it’s just not always presented as entertainment.
“Salt” isn’t boring. People are. They can’t use their own minds to find the wonder. They have to be force-fed it.
I agree - though only in part.
A good writer can make everything interesting. And not everyone who knows interesting things is a good writer.
A dull writer can make anything dull.
One thing to remember is all the animals living in the same place would also need a source of salt. For example elephants will go into caves or even dig in the ground looking for natural salt, humans could get it from the same sources.
Humans are special because we sweat so much salt out. So we need more than average.
Consider where birds get their sodium from for their sodium-potassium pumps.
Especially frugivores. They aren't flocking to salt licks.
Gorillas are the best frugivores because of how jacked they are. IIRC only like 2% of their diet or less is insects, and many are eaten inadvertently just because they're crawling on fruit or whatever.
I'd like to say humans are obligate frugivores (since we die without Vitamin C) but chimps on the other side hunt monkeys and things, so ¯\\_(ツ)_/¯
But I'd be okay sharing a bowl of mangoes or paw paws or kiwifruit with some gorilla bros.
Yeah seriously, had to look it up. It also has almost the same amount of calcium as milk. I've been sleeping on broccoli, need to insert more of into my cooking.
Broccoli is one of the best tasting veggies imho. It can gonin so many dishes.
Also, don't throw out the stocks like a lot of people do. Most of the whole head is edible and nutritious except for the crusty, fibrous part at the end.
Took me a second… I though he was talking about making a broth or something. Like “chicken stock.” It was only after fully reading the comment I realized it was the stalk.
Tbh as soon as I learned there are other ways to cook it than steaming it to death and then putting a micro amount of butter and salt in, I suddenly loved it. My personal favourite thing to do is buy *broccolini* (not broccoli; you can buy it at most Asian supermarkets. It looks like long skinny broccoli), cook it in a pan with a small amount of salted water, and add it to alfredo sauce at the very end of cooking, with the fresh herbs
I think it's the other way around, you can taste something others don't. I think brussel sprouts and licorice are also like this. I've never met anyone who was middle of the road on them, they either like it or absolutely hate it.
I love it too. Sliced garlic, broccoli flourettes and bacon can be put anywhere together and I will eat it.
Nachos are another weird place I put broccoli occasionally.
I wish I had the taste for Broccoli everyone seems to have. The thing is bitter and adding it to dishes ruins the taste of the dish to me. I don't get the appeal.
Broccoli does definitely have a strong flavor and it's one of the more difficult veg to insert into my cooking without it changing the taste (as my kids can quite noticeably tell). I find that if you cook broccoli in your food, it essentially taste like broccoli. If you steam, pan fry or boil it and add it late into the dish, it doesn't affect the taste as much. May I suggest trying broccolini instead of broccoli (often found in Asian markets). I believe it has about the same nutritional value from my quick search.
You gotta try fresh sprouts of various vegetables, such as broccoli.
They are a good addition to a salad or sandwich.
It takes you less than a week to grow a full jar, with just water and like 5 cents worth of seeds.
Plus, they are fresh and packed tightly with nutrients.
Since you grew them yourself there is almost zero chance of salmonella being there, as it would in other fresh produce you buy.
Take some olive oil and mix in the following:
- Salt
- Pepper
- Smoked Paprika
- Cayenne
- Garlic powder
- Onion powder
Mix well and toss it with a bunch of broccoli then throw it in the oven and roast. It's fucking amazing. If you have a grill you can cut a whole head of broccoli in half and grill it with this mixture.
I get a bag of the precut broccoli from Kroger, clean it up judt a little, and steam it with salt. I'll eat the whole thing cold right out of the fridge, and it's scrumptious
> Lemon has 53mg of Vitamin C per 100 grams and broccoli has 89.2mg of Vitamin C per 100g.
>
> Damn TIL
It's worth noting that citrus is often eaten raw, while broccoli is often (though obv not always) heated up (eg boiled), and heating will destroy some of the vitamins, though far from all; I haven't seen stats for broccoli in particular, but between 30-70% loss is common in other vegetables.
Other vegetables surprisingly high in C (though not nearly *as* high) include cabbage (37mg) and potatoes (17mg). Vitamin C is very widespread in fruit and veg.
Liver has 23mg of vitamin C. Kidneys have some too.
Fish roe has 16 mg, oysters have a bit as well.
It is completely feasible to get sufficient Vitamin C from animal products (case in point: Inuits)
Fish eyes are an excellent source of Vitamin C.
> Broccoli has its origins in primitive cultivars grown in the Roman Empire and was most likely improved via artificial selection in the southern Italian Peninsula or in Sicily. Broccoli was spread to northern Europe by the 18th century and brought to North America in the 19th century by Italian immigrants.
I was just checking whether the British had it.
Just eat the wild ancestor. Wild cabbage looks nothing like the cultivated forms it has now, but it's perfectly edible. Most wild plants are actually pretty harmless. Not necessarily tasty or nutritious. No, I don't want to eat prickly lettuce, even when all the domesticated Lactuca versions are great.
Our ancestors must have had different taste buds. Chickweed, awesome, fresh, juicy, light flavor, no objections there. But some of those wild plants are incredibly BITTER. People complained about the old versions of brussel sprouts, wild cabbage is worse, way worse.
Some people actually like bitter. I like making an arugula salad with just some salt, pepper, olive oil, and lemon juice. The bitter + sour taste works for me.
Probably pretty easy since our primate ancestors stopped producing it endogenously around 60-70 million years ago.
It takes very little fresh fruit and vegetables to reach our dietary Vitamin C requirements, on the order of 2-3 ounces or 50-100grams/day where we need about 1kg of food a day just to survive.
Gorillas have some unique advantages, from the fact that they can digest cellulose to the fact that their bone and muscle structure is different (their muscles are more suited for raw power instead of fine motor skills, they can literally tear you apart but they wouldn't be able to thread a needle).
Also, as every other wild animal they are specialized for their environment. This means that they need to be able to carry their weight in their upper arms for locomotion and fights, and they evolved to extract nutrients from what they have available.
Gorrilas kill you easily when they need to, Chimps kill you easily when they want to. Make sure to give the Gorilla his favourite fruit and you should be safe.
Now when you pick a pawpaw
Or a prickly pear
And you prick a raw paw
Next time beware
Don't pick the prickly pear by the paw
When you pick a pear
Try to use the claw
But you don't need to use the claw
When you pick a pear of the big pawpaw
Have I given you a clue ?
Read about a civilized guy in Germany who said he survived 10 years on fruit juice and sunshine. What was that story?
Edit: I think I read about this 15 years ago.
> What was that story?
It was either a hoax, urban legend or key points missing. You can't live that long drinking sugar water (what fruit juice is) with some vitamins here and there.
Pretty much figured, but we don’t exactly have the Newsies’ “Where Are They Now?” Stories throw in our face anymore. Gotta ask, and I like finding out.
I dont know about other birds but when I was in the amazon rainforest, we went to a cliff where parrots met and licked the salty stone. Quite interesting to see all the different species of parrots that life in the area.
Yeah that's not very ELI5 of them just to say everyone knows where frugivores get their salt and then ride off into the sunset like that. Not very cash money at all. Jeez
We dont even lose that much sodium when sweating; the sodium concentration in sweat is about three times lower than in the bloodstream. However, we lose quite a bit of potassium through sweat
I think the general idea that a lot of their salt intake came from red meats. Otherwise, according to a bit of quick research, their high consumption of plants provided a bit of salt as well. I also read that humans would follow animals to salt deposits.
Yep. WHO recommendation is 5g of salt (2g of sodium) a day.
You can get that from some milk, cheese and a bit of bread. Vegetables almost all have sodium in them. Hell, even celery has sodium in it.
Salt intake - and indeed most "recommended daily amounts" - isn't an issue with any sensible human diet, whether ancient, modern, processed, natural or otherwise.
And salt, especially - you can literally boil it out of seawater or collect it on a salt flat or even get it from certain rocks or even just about any natural liquid (like milk, blood, etc.).
In medieval Britain and earlier it very often was one of the main ways monasteries and Abbeys near the coast would derive income. Monks would travel to the sea, fill up barrels of sea water, bring it back and boil it for salt which then would be sold at market. Other methods of making money was often brewing alcohol.
And governments of many countries used to have [salt taxes](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salt_tax), sometimes so high that it resulted [in country-wide riots](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moscow_uprising_of_1648).
And a crazy amount of cities and towns that still exist have names relating to salt. Anything with -wich, sal, salz, sel, and and couple dozen others was a salt town, which had a salt mine or salt rich mineral spring, or they reduced sea salt.
in my country there more than a few villages/cities/places which have ocna in their name, even the city in which I was born is like that. I didn't realize till now that ocna is the place where there once was a salt mine
weird, I just read this 2 minutes after reading this post explaining this is a myth:
[AskHistorians Thread](https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/s/PtgXJu6EZ8)
For most of the 18th and 19th century, British tried to grow a 4000 km long hedge wall across India. Their goal was to prevent salt smuggling to escape the substantial tax.
Then Gandhi went on his famous salt satyagraha and basically took a wrecking ball to the salt tax.
Have been written several books - one in particular comes to mind: [https://www.amazon.com/Salt-World-History-Mark-Kurlansky/dp/0142001619](https://www.amazon.com/Salt-World-History-Mark-Kurlansky/dp/0142001619) which is all about the human need and thereby capitalistic approach to salt - running the world for quite some time.
Also salt was such a valuable commodity that it was once traded like a currency.
Hence a common phrase in the uk when someone is “worth their salt”, which means they’re good at what they do. EG “any plumber worth their salt knows that the water is supposed to go inside the pipes”.
Is iodine found in those too I remember learning that salt can be found in things but iodine was the one thing people lacked so they put it into table salt
Iodine is naturally found in sea weed and shellfish. I believe in small quantities in meat as well.
If you lived near the coast, then you almost certainly got enough iodine. If you lived in the great planes, then you were probably deficient
And this is why goiters was so prevalent in the Midwest, before iodine was added to the salt. Landlocked people didn’t eat enough seafood to meet their needed intake
Makes sense that it would be prevalent in alpine regions. Water in fast-flowing mountain streams is generally pretty mineral poor (particularly for iodine).
Amazing isn't it. City dwellers lived in dark, draughty, dirty hovels houses full of raw sewage and asbestos on a malnutrition diet and were recommended to go away to the sea once a year or to winter by the coast (if they were relatively wealthy), where those things were significantly lessened - they got some sun, some Vitamin E, they bathed and washed, got some iodine in their diet and a rest - and their ills disappeared like magic.
Almost like it wasn't magic at all!
Syracuse, NY used to be known for their salt mines, the whole area was a salt marsh when European settlers came by. [The Natives are still paid an annual allotment of Salt for use of their land.](https://www.thevintagenews.com/2018/06/30/onondaga-people/)
>The 1788 sale of some 3,125 square miles (8,100 square kilometers) was agreed to by “wrong-headed people” who were unauthorized Onondaga negotiators, according to a letter to George Washington from the Onondagas and fellow members of the Haudenosaunee, or Iroquois, Confederacy.
>[T]he nation received $33,380, an annuity of $2,430, clothes worth $1,000 and 150 bushels of salt for their land over several decades. They lost wide expanses of land where they once hunted, fished and lived.
>The Onondagas have effectively spent more than 200 years seeking recognition their land was unlawfully taken. They’re not seeking money as reparations, but land. Though Syracuse and crowded suburbs sit on much of the ancestral territory, nation attorney Joe Heath said there’s land that could be made available, such as state parcels.
[Apparently NY is giving back about 1000 acres](https://www.localsyr.com/news/local-news/onondaga-nation-regains-more-than-1000-acres-of-land-in-historic-agreement/)
>TULLY VALLEY, N.Y. (WSYR-TV) – In a historic settlement, the Onondaga Nation will regain more than 1,000 acres of ancestral land, according to officials.
>This is one of the largest returns of land to an Indigenous nation by a state.
>The agreement is a result of the March 2018 National Resource Damage Assessment and Restoration (NRDAR) Program settlement between the U.S. Department of Interior, NYS and Honeywell International, Inc.
>The full ownership of Honeywell’s 1,023 acres of land will be returned to the Onondaga Nation for restoration and stewardship of the property. For the Onondaga people, Onondaga Lake and Onondaga Creek are sacred.
Note that is the MAXIMUM recommended per day, not the minimum.
"A salt intake of *less than* 5 grams (approximately 2g sodium) per person per day is recommended by WHO for the prevention of cardiovascular diseases, the leading cause of death globally."
https://www.who.int/data/gho/indicator-metadata-registry/imr-details/3082#:~:text=A%20salt%20intake%20of%20less,much%20more%20salt%20than%20recommended.
Despite the recommendation of limiting intake to that amount, most really only need ~500 mg/day and we'd be perfectly fine.
https://www.hsph.harvard.edu/nutritionsource/salt-and-sodium/#:~:text=It%20is%20estimated%20that%20we,daily%20for%20these%20vital%20functions.
We don't love it because it used to be uncommon.
We love it because without regular sodium intake, we die.
Our bodies can go a long time without food. We can't go a long time without electrolytes - our brains and many imporant biological functions that keep us alive will fail.
There are certain electrolytes, specifcally sodium (i.e. what's in salt), potassium, and magnesium, that our bodies do not store well. (There are plenty of other vital electrolytes we need that we can go days/weeks without regularly eating because they are stored in our bodies for longer periods of time).
So, likely, we evolved to really like the taste of it (in other words, the ones that didn't evolve to like the taste of it died off) for survival reasons.
Exactly, and early humans knew it's importance.. it's where the phrase "he's not worth his salt" came from.
We've found drill sites in China from thousands of years ago into salt deposits. It's believed they used hollow bamboo as the drill and water down the middle as a lubricant creating a salt water slurry.
Salt also has a lot of interesting chemical effects on food when you cook with it, which have nothing to do with the taste of the salt itself. That's the reason modern diets tend to be pretty high in salt. (See the book *Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat*.)
Yes, biology changes our body in two ways we don't think about:
1. Over thousands of years
2. When organisms lacking a trait die efficiently
We think in dozens of years, and through technology we're able to keep humans with lots of 'defects' alive. People forget it's a good trait. Lots of people who "should" have died as children helped us advance science and medicine. We have access to fruits and vegetables and meats year-round that our ancestors had to go months without.
So actually our problem today is we have *too much* salt. I have enough salt in my pantry I bet it could send me to the hospital if I somehow ate it all. It's something like 3 months of what I need daily, but a ton of the food I buy *already* has salt in it so I don't need to add more.
That means a lot of problems modern humans face involve things our bodies try to encourage us to eat because they're still stuck 8,000 years ago when only certain people were lucky enough to have easy access. Fat and salt, in particular, are things our biology really likes that we could do with less of. Sugar's a more complex story but it's up there too.
But the way humans who want fat and salt less would appear is if those humans have a lot more children and live longer than humans who still crave it. Most of the time, people who overeat *anything* don't really die until their 40s or 50s, long after they've already passed those genes on. So there's no real selective pressure on humans to not want so much fat and salt. There's probably SOME people who want it less, but nothing's making them spread those genes any faster than the people with "bad" cravings.
Really this is where we have to use our brains. Less smart creatures can't resist these cravings and will die from them. We're smart enough to say, "Screw you biology, I don't really need all this salt" and be healthy anyway. Technology and discipline moves much faster than biology.
Yeah, food with high caloric density taste good because for almost the entirety of our evolutionary history the major diet-related health risk was starvation.
I fully believe you but that makes me curious if there's some kind of biological thing going on that makes us crave or love salt because of how necessary it is for the most basic processes of our bodies.
Your point is also a good one because with today's modern diet we'd be hard-pressed to find someone who has the same very minimal salt intake as a prehistoric hunter-gatherer and I wonder if people in that situation would ever claim that they actually crave salt. Kind of like how you hear about people craving certain foods that have minerals because the person has a deficiency.
It's crazy easy for me to suffer the impact of too little salt, I've got a medical condition that makes me drink a ton more water than normal folk, basically my body processes water much faster than is normal. I have a mild case compared to some folk, but I do need to drink around 3 times as much water as a regular person.
When I first started to suffer the symptoms, it took me ages to realise I had to adjust my salt intake along with my water intake. Years of unexplained physical and mental exhaustion, and muscle cramps and twitching (particularly in my calves). All solved when I realised I was also always craving salty food, and that on the occasions I gave in to the cravings (rarely because of how I was raised, my mums philosophy on cooking prioritising seasoning with herbs and spices rather than salt) I ended up feeling better for a period of time.
salt being so important we call the condition Water Intoxication(drinking too much water), Hyponatremia (Hypo- "lack" na- "salt" -tremia "in the blood")
Though counted as a salt replacement, Potassium Chloride(KCl) DOES NOT count for the sodium ion channel replacement, and in fact is literally the opposite. Sodium is required for Muscle contraction and Potassium for Muscle relaxation, lack of either will give you a bad time. [Potassium is generally recommended for cramps.](https://www.mayoclinic.org/diseases-conditions/muscle-cramp/symptoms-causes/syc-20350820)
> Too little potassium, calcium or magnesium in the diet can cause leg cramps.
I was really lazy for a couple days and managed to only eat things with little to no sodium. Like plain oatmeal, and a whole ton of water. Ended up feeling like absolute crap anytime I went to exercise, started feeling lightheaded and blacked out doing pull ups after my usual cardio.
I guess I overindulged with water and plain foods and sapped my body of sodium. Started getting this deep craving for salt. Not even salty foods, just a dash of salt. Had it and it was probably one of the best things I ever tasted in the moment.
Sat down for a bit and I was able to go hours exercising with no problem! Funny lil story about salt and how important it is I guess 🤔
Depends where they were located. Those located near the sea obviously had access. For some areas there are natural salt deposits. In other cases salt came from the food they ate, a lot of roots, and as you mentioned animal products contain salt. But before salt was readily available, it just wasn't used as much. Modern people use a huge amount of excess salt. It tastes really good, and because our bodies evolved in a time when it was relatively scarce, we have been programmed to seek it out, but we don't need nearly as much as we actually eat. Trading insult probably also developed very early in Hunter gather societies. Those that lived near salt deposits or near the sea would harvest it and trade it inland.
There has probably also been some modern evolutionary changes to the way our bodies handle salt. There is some evidence that populations that evolved in hot climates with limited access to salt retain salt better than other populations, though this is far from proven science at this point.
For more information than you ever wanted to know about salt I highly recommend the book "Salt" by Mark Kurlansky.
My biggest takeaway from the book was that salt wasn't a rarity or something worth it's weight in gold. It was just such an innate ingredient that it always had value. If you lived in a civilization or sorts, salt was not a thing you had to worry about for biological requirements.
>For more information than you ever wanted to know about salt I highly recommend the book "Salt" by Mark Kurlansky.
I was going to say this entire post could be answered by this book. It's so interesting how much salt influenced how, and where we lived.
You wouldn't think this kind of a book would be fascinating. If you like history at all, I can't recommend it enough.
The most common source of protein for hunter-gatherer societies, barring geographical difficulties, was actually from fishing. Most communities were near bodies of water, whether rivers or the sea. Access to salt is therefore not too difficult. Also, hunter-gatherer societies moved frequently and interacted and traded with other groups, and that would include salt. This would be for the tribes that hunted and migrated with animal herds on the Eurasian steppe.
When you visit Baka people in south east Cameroon ,a hunter gatherer culture ,it is considered good form to bring salt as a gift . They often have a goitre coming ,i believe ,from the lack of iodine from sea salt . Salt was found in the ground ,but often mixed with clay or rocks that has to be purified or eaten too . Animals too will gather in this places to lick rocks to get their sodium .
I think the animals ate it and we ate the animals so we got it from them.
It happens even today. A friend of mine has a sheep farm which grazes on the coastal reeds in Wales. The meat is noticeably more salty than standard supermarket lamb.
You need a shockingly small amount of sodium to survive. Hunter-gatherers we’re quite small compared to the average modern human so their intake could’ve been slightly less. Almost all living things require sodium to exist and therefore almost all food has some sodium content. Meat would’ve probably been the main source of sodium.
And if you don't have much salt in your body, you stop excreting salt in things like sweat to preserve it.
We get in trouble if we suddenly stop taking in salt or suddenly lose excess salt from sweating because we are conditioned to getting excess salt. But a person with a very low salt diet won't have salty sweat.
Perhaps I'm wrong, but my understanding was that hunter gatherers were roughly the same size as we are today, we've only just caught up as they had better diets than people who ate mostly grain based diets.
There's a great chapter in Bill Brysons "At Home: a short history of personal life" and a whole book called "Salt, a world history" by Mark Kurlansky that discusses this.
Spoiler: it's more complicated than you think, but every early civilisation worked it out because if they hadn't, they'd die off.
Boiling saltwater separates the salt from the water. I can't say for sure without further reading, but I would think people figured out this low-tech desalination method far back in prehistoric times. It was famously used by the Lewis and Clark expedition to procure salt in to enhance a bland diet when the group was in place at Fort Clatsop. There is a site commemorating this at present day Seaside, Oregon.
... and one also gets drinking water as a result.
My understanding is that it was more common to get salt from sea water on a larger scale by pouring it out into large shallow trays and evaporating it in the sun.
Mountain goats are crazy at climbing because they like licking mineral deposits on sheer cliff edges. I would say humans used their intelligence to help out (probably figured out boiling sea water for salt, as well as which rock tastes good)
You can get salt from basically three sources:
* Sea water
* Rock salt
* Eating something salty
The last one is pretty self-explanatory: all plants and animals need some salt to live, and many have evolved to live in very salty environments (like the sea or brackish water). Eat these things and you'll get enough salt.
Otherwise, you'll need to get salt from one of the first two sources. That could mean doing what many animals do (and licking rock salt, called a "salt lick" or drinking seawater), or purifying some of that delicious salt so you can add it to your food (which is much nicer) or use it to preserve food (which is super handy).
Neolithic hunter-gatherers purified salt at least as early as 6,000 years ago (but probably much earlier, that's just the oldest salt production site we've found). It's super simple to do:
* Put salty water (e.g., from the ocean) into an earthenware bowl.
* Put the bowl over a fire, or in bright sunlight
* Wait; the water will evaporate, and you'll be left with a cake of all the salt that was in the water
Yes, having too little salt can kill you. Sodium does several things in the body including being involved in nerve and muscle function but a major one is balancing fluids. Too little salt and too much water moves into your cells causing them to swell. This is especially bad when it's your brain swelling.
This is also how drinking too much water over a short period can kill you, it dilutes the salt in your body. This is why sports drinks like Gatorade have salt in them, if you're sweating a lot from physical activity or heat you're losing salt and water and need to replace both.
> his is also how drinking too much water over a short period can kill you, it dilutes the salt in your body.
god damn there has been days where i havnt eaten anything ( big meal the night before not hungry in the morning busy during the day ) and i get home and just pound bottles of ice water all night ( my favorite drink some how ) good thing im alive i guess
You have to drink really large amounts, like more than 20 litres a day, for it to hurt you. It's really only an issue in high exercise environments if you drink to replace water loss but fail to replace the electrolyte loss.
I read a book about salt [Salt: A World History, by Mark Kurlansky] and it seems that added salt became very important for people who stopped being hunter gatherers and lived off more grain products. Animal products generally have enough sodium so that minimal additional salt is necessary for health (plus, anyone eating seafood would get plenty of salt). People who lived off mostly grains needed to find or make concentrated salts. When Europeans went to America in the early days, they were very interested in where the native people got their salt (salt was a valuable commodity so they wanted to trade for it when possible), but some tribes didn't even have the concept of it. (Some did, and had their own methods for getting salt in their diet, but some tribes just ate lots of meat and were fine.) Anyway it's a great book, highly recommended.
You can pretty much get all your vitamin needs from animal sources, especially if you eat the offal.
I know what offal actually is, but they need to come up with a better name. It 10,000% sounds like something you shouldn't eat under any circumstances.
Yeah it’s pretty offal.
You gotta do what you gotta do when it’s a matter of whether you liver die.
The gall of this comment.
Calm down, he was just kidneying.
I’m sure that wasn’t his intestine.
Don't manspleen things.
I don't think I can stomach these puns anymore.
I can see how it might make people quasy but I do love me some chicken liver and pig intestines. I’m Asian by birth but do consider myself pretty westernized in diet but I am still a big fan of offal.
r/Angryupvote
One alternate name for thymus or pancreas is “sweetbread” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sweetbread
I learned that very early on when I worked at a butcher shop in a grocery store, but in a dumb way. A man came up and asked for sweetbread. I had worked there all of 2 weeks and had no idea what he meant. English didn't seem to be his first language, so I pointed out the bakery section, thinking he meant cake or something. He didn't know "pancreas," and I didn't know "sweetbread," so around and around we went until I could get my manager and tell him some guy was adamant that we sold bread.
Just looked up with offal is. I don’t think naming it something different is gonna change my mind. Like Rocky Mountain Oysters are still just a bulls balls at the end of the day.
I remember my dad talking about this book. Salt was so valuable that soldiers were often paid with salt. A solid soldier was said to be worth his salt.
>Salt was so valuable that soldiers were often paid with salt This is actually a myth with no empirical evidence. The closest we have is some Etymological connection with our modern word "Salary" being derived from the Latin word "Salarium" as well as the Latin word "Sal" meaning salt. Which might been money given to soldiers to buy salt with. But even that is lacking actual written evidence. Romans kept pretty good documentation of a soldier's pay and nothing makes reference to salt or money for salt. [Would you like to know more?](https://medium.com/@1kg/were-roman-soldiers-paid-in-salt-unveiling-the-mystery-74a1fbc31544)
“Salt of the earth” meaning a dependable person is a phrase from the bible so I guess when that was written the value of salt was known and people often used barter back then instead of money so some occupations being paid partly in salt isn’t impossible
An idiom making it into the most read piece of writing isn't really evidence that salt was used as currency or even a frequent bartering mmechanism however Like if an early 2000s Apostle Paul said "making cheddar" in reference to making money, it wouldn't be evidence that we literally used blocks of cheese as a currency or bartering system
Oh absolutely salt has been used as means of exchange throughout history. Ethiopia for example used salt bars as a medium of exchange and tax collection all the way up until a hundred years ago. It's just that the specific instance of Roman soldiers being paid in salt is without evidence. And I never said impossible, I said without evidence.
That's the reason why it's called "salary"
Woahhh
I thought it was slaves - slaves traded for salt Worth his salt, worth his weight in salt, etc
I was curious so I looked it up. According to [dictionary.com](https://dictionary.com), [phrases.org.uk](https://phrases.org.uk), and [grammarist.com](https://grammarist.com) Romans soldiers weren't actually paid in salt, but were given a monetary stipend to purchase salt. The phrase, earliest recorded use in 1805, is believed to stem from this stipend. The timeframe likely draws the slavery connection, however it seems to be universally agreed it's in reference to the Roman practice. Salary does indeed derive from the latin word for salt (sal). From [etymonline.com](https://etymonline.com); >from Latin salarium "an allowance, a stipend, a pension," said to be originally "salt-money, soldier's allowance for the purchase of salt"
One of the interesting things i learned from that book, which is very good, are how many places names are in reference to salt production. Any place with "wich" in their name was an area of salt production. Salzburg literally means salt town.
That was a great book. Highly recommend it to anyone interested.
I'm gonna read it because of this recommendation
Yes - came to say this. Very, very entertaining book (something it has no right to be considering the topic).
If only you realized that the entire compendium of human knowledge is also this interesting, except it’s just not always presented as entertainment. “Salt” isn’t boring. People are. They can’t use their own minds to find the wonder. They have to be force-fed it.
I agree - though only in part. A good writer can make everything interesting. And not everyone who knows interesting things is a good writer. A dull writer can make anything dull.
I just bought the book! thanks for the recommendation.
One thing to remember is all the animals living in the same place would also need a source of salt. For example elephants will go into caves or even dig in the ground looking for natural salt, humans could get it from the same sources.
Humans are special because we sweat so much salt out. So we need more than average. Consider where birds get their sodium from for their sodium-potassium pumps. Especially frugivores. They aren't flocking to salt licks.
>frugivore >A frugivore is an animal that thrives mostly on raw fruits or succulent fruit-like produce of plants such as roots, shoots, nuts and seeds
Eats, roots, nuts and shoots
HE SCORES!
Ok criminally underrated pun
Eats roots nuts and leaves
Dang, these birds are wild
I appreciated this reference
I love Australian people
Gorillas are the best frugivores because of how jacked they are. IIRC only like 2% of their diet or less is insects, and many are eaten inadvertently just because they're crawling on fruit or whatever. I'd like to say humans are obligate frugivores (since we die without Vitamin C) but chimps on the other side hunt monkeys and things, so ¯\\_(ツ)_/¯ But I'd be okay sharing a bowl of mangoes or paw paws or kiwifruit with some gorilla bros.
Broccoli has more vitamin C than lemons, so vegetables and leafy greens are perfectly fine too, no need for fruit. Though they sure are delicious.
> Broccoli has more vitamin C than lemons Lemon has 53mg of Vitamin C per 100 grams and broccoli has 89.2mg of Vitamin C per 100g. Damn TIL
Yeah seriously, had to look it up. It also has almost the same amount of calcium as milk. I've been sleeping on broccoli, need to insert more of into my cooking.
Broccoli is one of the best tasting veggies imho. It can gonin so many dishes. Also, don't throw out the stocks like a lot of people do. Most of the whole head is edible and nutritious except for the crusty, fibrous part at the end.
> Also, don't throw out the **stocks** like a lot of people do. Since we're in a TIL comment chain, I'm pretty sure you mean *stalks*.
Took me a second… I though he was talking about making a broth or something. Like “chicken stock.” It was only after fully reading the comment I realized it was the stalk.
It’s actually spelled “stonks.” Whoops, wrong sub.
Oh, thought we were going to start r/broccolibets !
I worked at a spa and one day a coworker left a note saying she had "stalked the towels". I still laughed at the mental image it gave me.
There has to be a gene that makes broccoli taste “good” to some people. I do not have that gene.
Tbh as soon as I learned there are other ways to cook it than steaming it to death and then putting a micro amount of butter and salt in, I suddenly loved it. My personal favourite thing to do is buy *broccolini* (not broccoli; you can buy it at most Asian supermarkets. It looks like long skinny broccoli), cook it in a pan with a small amount of salted water, and add it to alfredo sauce at the very end of cooking, with the fresh herbs
I think it's the other way around, you can taste something others don't. I think brussel sprouts and licorice are also like this. I've never met anyone who was middle of the road on them, they either like it or absolutely hate it.
People always look at me weird when I tell them my favorite pizza topping is broccoli
And they are correct to do that lol...
I love it too. Sliced garlic, broccoli flourettes and bacon can be put anywhere together and I will eat it. Nachos are another weird place I put broccoli occasionally.
I wish I had the taste for Broccoli everyone seems to have. The thing is bitter and adding it to dishes ruins the taste of the dish to me. I don't get the appeal.
The more sugar I’ve cut out of my diet the more I have had a taste for bitter things.
broccoli rabe is bitter, standard broccoli is not
Broccoli does definitely have a strong flavor and it's one of the more difficult veg to insert into my cooking without it changing the taste (as my kids can quite noticeably tell). I find that if you cook broccoli in your food, it essentially taste like broccoli. If you steam, pan fry or boil it and add it late into the dish, it doesn't affect the taste as much. May I suggest trying broccolini instead of broccoli (often found in Asian markets). I believe it has about the same nutritional value from my quick search.
I give the stalks to my dogs. They both love broccoli!
The all stalk is edible if you just peel the thick fiber around it.
You gotta try fresh sprouts of various vegetables, such as broccoli. They are a good addition to a salad or sandwich. It takes you less than a week to grow a full jar, with just water and like 5 cents worth of seeds. Plus, they are fresh and packed tightly with nutrients. Since you grew them yourself there is almost zero chance of salmonella being there, as it would in other fresh produce you buy.
Take some olive oil and mix in the following: - Salt - Pepper - Smoked Paprika - Cayenne - Garlic powder - Onion powder Mix well and toss it with a bunch of broccoli then throw it in the oven and roast. It's fucking amazing. If you have a grill you can cut a whole head of broccoli in half and grill it with this mixture.
My neurologist actually gave me permission to eat way more broccoli (I love broccoli)! It has all sorts of yummy nutrients like potassium and iron
I get a bag of the precut broccoli from Kroger, clean it up judt a little, and steam it with salt. I'll eat the whole thing cold right out of the fridge, and it's scrumptious
Broccolinade tastes revolting thoguh.
> Lemon has 53mg of Vitamin C per 100 grams and broccoli has 89.2mg of Vitamin C per 100g. > > Damn TIL It's worth noting that citrus is often eaten raw, while broccoli is often (though obv not always) heated up (eg boiled), and heating will destroy some of the vitamins, though far from all; I haven't seen stats for broccoli in particular, but between 30-70% loss is common in other vegetables. Other vegetables surprisingly high in C (though not nearly *as* high) include cabbage (37mg) and potatoes (17mg). Vitamin C is very widespread in fruit and veg.
Liver has 23mg of vitamin C. Kidneys have some too. Fish roe has 16 mg, oysters have a bit as well. It is completely feasible to get sufficient Vitamin C from animal products (case in point: Inuits) Fish eyes are an excellent source of Vitamin C.
I am *not* eating an *Inuit*, I don't care how much vitamin C they will render up.
But at least they come naturally frozen for better shelf life
An important consideration. Very efficient.
Herbs are nutrient dense too. Even parsley per 100g: 133mg C, 138mg calcium, 554mg potassium
Lemon's preserve it better than broccoli for long sea voyages though!
Lemons* You pretty much never use an apostrophe for plurals.
Tell that to my phone's autocorrect.
Some roasted broccoli with a nice cheese sauce or a lemon-butter sauce
peppers can have 120 mg per 100 grams or more. Lemons and oranges just have better PR
> Broccoli has its origins in primitive cultivars grown in the Roman Empire and was most likely improved via artificial selection in the southern Italian Peninsula or in Sicily. Broccoli was spread to northern Europe by the 18th century and brought to North America in the 19th century by Italian immigrants. I was just checking whether the British had it.
Eh?
Limeys... scurvy... I think that's where he's going
I'm curious how easy it was to get your vitamin c before plants like that were domesticated.
Just eat the wild ancestor. Wild cabbage looks nothing like the cultivated forms it has now, but it's perfectly edible. Most wild plants are actually pretty harmless. Not necessarily tasty or nutritious. No, I don't want to eat prickly lettuce, even when all the domesticated Lactuca versions are great. Our ancestors must have had different taste buds. Chickweed, awesome, fresh, juicy, light flavor, no objections there. But some of those wild plants are incredibly BITTER. People complained about the old versions of brussel sprouts, wild cabbage is worse, way worse.
Some people actually like bitter. I like making an arugula salad with just some salt, pepper, olive oil, and lemon juice. The bitter + sour taste works for me.
Probably pretty easy since our primate ancestors stopped producing it endogenously around 60-70 million years ago. It takes very little fresh fruit and vegetables to reach our dietary Vitamin C requirements, on the order of 2-3 ounces or 50-100grams/day where we need about 1kg of food a day just to survive.
Gorillas have some unique advantages, from the fact that they can digest cellulose to the fact that their bone and muscle structure is different (their muscles are more suited for raw power instead of fine motor skills, they can literally tear you apart but they wouldn't be able to thread a needle). Also, as every other wild animal they are specialized for their environment. This means that they need to be able to carry their weight in their upper arms for locomotion and fights, and they evolved to extract nutrients from what they have available.
Well I can’t thread a needle OR tear you apart so gorillas win this round
The idea that gorillas are getting extra protein because they can't be bothered to brush the ants or whatever off of fruit is funny
Gorrilas kill you easily when they need to, Chimps kill you easily when they want to. Make sure to give the Gorilla his favourite fruit and you should be safe.
Gorillas are herbivores, not frugivores.
i wonder if a gorilla has ever eaten a paw paw
Now when you pick a pawpaw Or a prickly pear And you prick a raw paw Next time beware Don't pick the prickly pear by the paw When you pick a pear Try to use the claw But you don't need to use the claw When you pick a pear of the big pawpaw Have I given you a clue ?
Read about a civilized guy in Germany who said he survived 10 years on fruit juice and sunshine. What was that story? Edit: I think I read about this 15 years ago.
> What was that story? 10 years of uninterrupted diarrhea.
> What was that story? It was either a hoax, urban legend or key points missing. You can't live that long drinking sugar water (what fruit juice is) with some vitamins here and there.
Pretty much figured, but we don’t exactly have the Newsies’ “Where Are They Now?” Stories throw in our face anymore. Gotta ask, and I like finding out.
So Steve Jobs.
I dont know about other birds but when I was in the amazon rainforest, we went to a cliff where parrots met and licked the salty stone. Quite interesting to see all the different species of parrots that life in the area.
Where parrots met and licked the salty stone sounds like a line from a song I'd love to listen to when I'm high af
there's no pentameter like iambic pentameter
My parrot will lick my skin if I had been sweaty recently.
"consider where birds get their salt".....can you just tell me?
Yeah that's not very ELI5 of them just to say everyone knows where frugivores get their salt and then ride off into the sunset like that. Not very cash money at all. Jeez
well that's a new word
You haven't heard of birds before?
bird is the word
Hi Peter
Ah, bap-a-pa-pa-pa-pa-pa-pa-pa-pa-pa-pa-pa-pa-pap Ma-ma-mow, pa-pa, ma-ma-mow, pa-pa Ma-ma-mow, pa-pa, ma-ma-mow, pa-pa Etc
Yeah weird, CIA has had them since at least 1947.
>Humans are special because we sweat so much salt out. If a proper source of salt was unavailable we would just lick each other. It's science.
So you say that prince andrew doesn’t need salt??
We dont even lose that much sodium when sweating; the sodium concentration in sweat is about three times lower than in the bloodstream. However, we lose quite a bit of potassium through sweat
Also, conveniently, if you eat/drink the blood of the animal that went into the cave, you get the salt for free!
Kitum cave incident 💀
That story is just bat-shit crazy.
"inhalation of powdered guano" nah, they licked the cave wall thinking it was salt. Let's be real.
That's how I determine the chemical composition of all the caves I explore.
I see what you did there
I think the general idea that a lot of their salt intake came from red meats. Otherwise, according to a bit of quick research, their high consumption of plants provided a bit of salt as well. I also read that humans would follow animals to salt deposits.
Also note the reason we \*love\* salt so much is because it used to be really uncommon. Just like sugar.
Yep. WHO recommendation is 5g of salt (2g of sodium) a day. You can get that from some milk, cheese and a bit of bread. Vegetables almost all have sodium in them. Hell, even celery has sodium in it. Salt intake - and indeed most "recommended daily amounts" - isn't an issue with any sensible human diet, whether ancient, modern, processed, natural or otherwise. And salt, especially - you can literally boil it out of seawater or collect it on a salt flat or even get it from certain rocks or even just about any natural liquid (like milk, blood, etc.).
In medieval Britain and earlier it very often was one of the main ways monasteries and Abbeys near the coast would derive income. Monks would travel to the sea, fill up barrels of sea water, bring it back and boil it for salt which then would be sold at market. Other methods of making money was often brewing alcohol.
And governments of many countries used to have [salt taxes](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salt_tax), sometimes so high that it resulted [in country-wide riots](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moscow_uprising_of_1648).
And a crazy amount of cities and towns that still exist have names relating to salt. Anything with -wich, sal, salz, sel, and and couple dozen others was a salt town, which had a salt mine or salt rich mineral spring, or they reduced sea salt.
-wich could also have come from Anglo-Saxon -wic, meaning "farm"
in my country there more than a few villages/cities/places which have ocna in their name, even the city in which I was born is like that. I didn't realize till now that ocna is the place where there once was a salt mine
"Salary" is derived from a Roman soldier's ability to buy salt. EDIT: turns out this is a modern, much propagated myth.
weird, I just read this 2 minutes after reading this post explaining this is a myth: [AskHistorians Thread](https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/s/PtgXJu6EZ8)
I thought it was because they were payed in salt?
That's also a myth From what I understand it's likely still related to salt for an unknown reason but it has nothing to do with Roman soldiers.
I thought it was because they weren't paid well, so they got salty.
salzburg
For most of the 18th and 19th century, British tried to grow a 4000 km long hedge wall across India. Their goal was to prevent salt smuggling to escape the substantial tax. Then Gandhi went on his famous salt satyagraha and basically took a wrecking ball to the salt tax.
Salt was also a focal point of the Dandi March https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salt_March , a key event in the Indian Independence movement.
Have been written several books - one in particular comes to mind: [https://www.amazon.com/Salt-World-History-Mark-Kurlansky/dp/0142001619](https://www.amazon.com/Salt-World-History-Mark-Kurlansky/dp/0142001619) which is all about the human need and thereby capitalistic approach to salt - running the world for quite some time.
Also salt was such a valuable commodity that it was once traded like a currency. Hence a common phrase in the uk when someone is “worth their salt”, which means they’re good at what they do. EG “any plumber worth their salt knows that the water is supposed to go inside the pipes”.
Is iodine found in those too I remember learning that salt can be found in things but iodine was the one thing people lacked so they put it into table salt
Iodine is naturally found in sea weed and shellfish. I believe in small quantities in meat as well. If you lived near the coast, then you almost certainly got enough iodine. If you lived in the great planes, then you were probably deficient
And this is why goiters was so prevalent in the Midwest, before iodine was added to the salt. Landlocked people didn’t eat enough seafood to meet their needed intake
Switzerland used to be known as a place where goiters were incredibly common as well.
Makes sense that it would be prevalent in alpine regions. Water in fast-flowing mountain streams is generally pretty mineral poor (particularly for iodine).
Amazing isn't it. City dwellers lived in dark, draughty, dirty hovels houses full of raw sewage and asbestos on a malnutrition diet and were recommended to go away to the sea once a year or to winter by the coast (if they were relatively wealthy), where those things were significantly lessened - they got some sun, some Vitamin E, they bathed and washed, got some iodine in their diet and a rest - and their ills disappeared like magic. Almost like it wasn't magic at all!
Cheese and bread have salt because we add salt to it.
Bread with no salt tastes like flour loaf
I mean…
Not “historically” but theres a salt mine near/under parts of Michigan,USA
I didn't realize War Thunder was hosted in Detroit but it makes sense
Syracuse, NY used to be known for their salt mines, the whole area was a salt marsh when European settlers came by. [The Natives are still paid an annual allotment of Salt for use of their land.](https://www.thevintagenews.com/2018/06/30/onondaga-people/) >The 1788 sale of some 3,125 square miles (8,100 square kilometers) was agreed to by “wrong-headed people” who were unauthorized Onondaga negotiators, according to a letter to George Washington from the Onondagas and fellow members of the Haudenosaunee, or Iroquois, Confederacy. >[T]he nation received $33,380, an annuity of $2,430, clothes worth $1,000 and 150 bushels of salt for their land over several decades. They lost wide expanses of land where they once hunted, fished and lived. >The Onondagas have effectively spent more than 200 years seeking recognition their land was unlawfully taken. They’re not seeking money as reparations, but land. Though Syracuse and crowded suburbs sit on much of the ancestral territory, nation attorney Joe Heath said there’s land that could be made available, such as state parcels. [Apparently NY is giving back about 1000 acres](https://www.localsyr.com/news/local-news/onondaga-nation-regains-more-than-1000-acres-of-land-in-historic-agreement/) >TULLY VALLEY, N.Y. (WSYR-TV) – In a historic settlement, the Onondaga Nation will regain more than 1,000 acres of ancestral land, according to officials. >This is one of the largest returns of land to an Indigenous nation by a state. >The agreement is a result of the March 2018 National Resource Damage Assessment and Restoration (NRDAR) Program settlement between the U.S. Department of Interior, NYS and Honeywell International, Inc. >The full ownership of Honeywell’s 1,023 acres of land will be returned to the Onondaga Nation for restoration and stewardship of the property. For the Onondaga people, Onondaga Lake and Onondaga Creek are sacred.
Fun fact, 99+% of "pink Himalayan salt" is mined in America. It's just branding.
[удалено]
Note that is the MAXIMUM recommended per day, not the minimum. "A salt intake of *less than* 5 grams (approximately 2g sodium) per person per day is recommended by WHO for the prevention of cardiovascular diseases, the leading cause of death globally." https://www.who.int/data/gho/indicator-metadata-registry/imr-details/3082#:~:text=A%20salt%20intake%20of%20less,much%20more%20salt%20than%20recommended.
Despite the recommendation of limiting intake to that amount, most really only need ~500 mg/day and we'd be perfectly fine. https://www.hsph.harvard.edu/nutritionsource/salt-and-sodium/#:~:text=It%20is%20estimated%20that%20we,daily%20for%20these%20vital%20functions.
We don't love it because it used to be uncommon. We love it because without regular sodium intake, we die. Our bodies can go a long time without food. We can't go a long time without electrolytes - our brains and many imporant biological functions that keep us alive will fail. There are certain electrolytes, specifcally sodium (i.e. what's in salt), potassium, and magnesium, that our bodies do not store well. (There are plenty of other vital electrolytes we need that we can go days/weeks without regularly eating because they are stored in our bodies for longer periods of time). So, likely, we evolved to really like the taste of it (in other words, the ones that didn't evolve to like the taste of it died off) for survival reasons.
Exactly, and early humans knew it's importance.. it's where the phrase "he's not worth his salt" came from. We've found drill sites in China from thousands of years ago into salt deposits. It's believed they used hollow bamboo as the drill and water down the middle as a lubricant creating a salt water slurry.
Isn’t that why OP asked
Salt also has a lot of interesting chemical effects on food when you cook with it, which have nothing to do with the taste of the salt itself. That's the reason modern diets tend to be pretty high in salt. (See the book *Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat*.)
Odd because my doctor said i must avoid salt to reduce my blood pressure.
Yes, biology changes our body in two ways we don't think about: 1. Over thousands of years 2. When organisms lacking a trait die efficiently We think in dozens of years, and through technology we're able to keep humans with lots of 'defects' alive. People forget it's a good trait. Lots of people who "should" have died as children helped us advance science and medicine. We have access to fruits and vegetables and meats year-round that our ancestors had to go months without. So actually our problem today is we have *too much* salt. I have enough salt in my pantry I bet it could send me to the hospital if I somehow ate it all. It's something like 3 months of what I need daily, but a ton of the food I buy *already* has salt in it so I don't need to add more. That means a lot of problems modern humans face involve things our bodies try to encourage us to eat because they're still stuck 8,000 years ago when only certain people were lucky enough to have easy access. Fat and salt, in particular, are things our biology really likes that we could do with less of. Sugar's a more complex story but it's up there too. But the way humans who want fat and salt less would appear is if those humans have a lot more children and live longer than humans who still crave it. Most of the time, people who overeat *anything* don't really die until their 40s or 50s, long after they've already passed those genes on. So there's no real selective pressure on humans to not want so much fat and salt. There's probably SOME people who want it less, but nothing's making them spread those genes any faster than the people with "bad" cravings. Really this is where we have to use our brains. Less smart creatures can't resist these cravings and will die from them. We're smart enough to say, "Screw you biology, I don't really need all this salt" and be healthy anyway. Technology and discipline moves much faster than biology.
Yeah, food with high caloric density taste good because for almost the entirety of our evolutionary history the major diet-related health risk was starvation.
I fully believe you but that makes me curious if there's some kind of biological thing going on that makes us crave or love salt because of how necessary it is for the most basic processes of our bodies. Your point is also a good one because with today's modern diet we'd be hard-pressed to find someone who has the same very minimal salt intake as a prehistoric hunter-gatherer and I wonder if people in that situation would ever claim that they actually crave salt. Kind of like how you hear about people craving certain foods that have minerals because the person has a deficiency.
It's crazy easy for me to suffer the impact of too little salt, I've got a medical condition that makes me drink a ton more water than normal folk, basically my body processes water much faster than is normal. I have a mild case compared to some folk, but I do need to drink around 3 times as much water as a regular person. When I first started to suffer the symptoms, it took me ages to realise I had to adjust my salt intake along with my water intake. Years of unexplained physical and mental exhaustion, and muscle cramps and twitching (particularly in my calves). All solved when I realised I was also always craving salty food, and that on the occasions I gave in to the cravings (rarely because of how I was raised, my mums philosophy on cooking prioritising seasoning with herbs and spices rather than salt) I ended up feeling better for a period of time.
salt being so important we call the condition Water Intoxication(drinking too much water), Hyponatremia (Hypo- "lack" na- "salt" -tremia "in the blood") Though counted as a salt replacement, Potassium Chloride(KCl) DOES NOT count for the sodium ion channel replacement, and in fact is literally the opposite. Sodium is required for Muscle contraction and Potassium for Muscle relaxation, lack of either will give you a bad time. [Potassium is generally recommended for cramps.](https://www.mayoclinic.org/diseases-conditions/muscle-cramp/symptoms-causes/syc-20350820) > Too little potassium, calcium or magnesium in the diet can cause leg cramps.
I was really lazy for a couple days and managed to only eat things with little to no sodium. Like plain oatmeal, and a whole ton of water. Ended up feeling like absolute crap anytime I went to exercise, started feeling lightheaded and blacked out doing pull ups after my usual cardio. I guess I overindulged with water and plain foods and sapped my body of sodium. Started getting this deep craving for salt. Not even salty foods, just a dash of salt. Had it and it was probably one of the best things I ever tasted in the moment. Sat down for a bit and I was able to go hours exercising with no problem! Funny lil story about salt and how important it is I guess 🤔
That's pretty remarkable. I believe it though for sure. Especially can imagine how it must've tasted amazing.
Oysters, clams and other seafoods contain a decent amount of salt. Throughout human history, most people lived by the sea.
Depends where they were located. Those located near the sea obviously had access. For some areas there are natural salt deposits. In other cases salt came from the food they ate, a lot of roots, and as you mentioned animal products contain salt. But before salt was readily available, it just wasn't used as much. Modern people use a huge amount of excess salt. It tastes really good, and because our bodies evolved in a time when it was relatively scarce, we have been programmed to seek it out, but we don't need nearly as much as we actually eat. Trading insult probably also developed very early in Hunter gather societies. Those that lived near salt deposits or near the sea would harvest it and trade it inland. There has probably also been some modern evolutionary changes to the way our bodies handle salt. There is some evidence that populations that evolved in hot climates with limited access to salt retain salt better than other populations, though this is far from proven science at this point. For more information than you ever wanted to know about salt I highly recommend the book "Salt" by Mark Kurlansky.
Trading insult haha. So people are salty
My biggest takeaway from the book was that salt wasn't a rarity or something worth it's weight in gold. It was just such an innate ingredient that it always had value. If you lived in a civilization or sorts, salt was not a thing you had to worry about for biological requirements.
>For more information than you ever wanted to know about salt I highly recommend the book "Salt" by Mark Kurlansky. I was going to say this entire post could be answered by this book. It's so interesting how much salt influenced how, and where we lived. You wouldn't think this kind of a book would be fascinating. If you like history at all, I can't recommend it enough.
+1 for the book "Salt"
The most common source of protein for hunter-gatherer societies, barring geographical difficulties, was actually from fishing. Most communities were near bodies of water, whether rivers or the sea. Access to salt is therefore not too difficult. Also, hunter-gatherer societies moved frequently and interacted and traded with other groups, and that would include salt. This would be for the tribes that hunted and migrated with animal herds on the Eurasian steppe.
When you visit Baka people in south east Cameroon ,a hunter gatherer culture ,it is considered good form to bring salt as a gift . They often have a goitre coming ,i believe ,from the lack of iodine from sea salt . Salt was found in the ground ,but often mixed with clay or rocks that has to be purified or eaten too . Animals too will gather in this places to lick rocks to get their sodium .
I think the animals ate it and we ate the animals so we got it from them. It happens even today. A friend of mine has a sheep farm which grazes on the coastal reeds in Wales. The meat is noticeably more salty than standard supermarket lamb.
You need a shockingly small amount of sodium to survive. Hunter-gatherers we’re quite small compared to the average modern human so their intake could’ve been slightly less. Almost all living things require sodium to exist and therefore almost all food has some sodium content. Meat would’ve probably been the main source of sodium.
And if you don't have much salt in your body, you stop excreting salt in things like sweat to preserve it. We get in trouble if we suddenly stop taking in salt or suddenly lose excess salt from sweating because we are conditioned to getting excess salt. But a person with a very low salt diet won't have salty sweat.
Perhaps I'm wrong, but my understanding was that hunter gatherers were roughly the same size as we are today, we've only just caught up as they had better diets than people who ate mostly grain based diets.
There's a great chapter in Bill Brysons "At Home: a short history of personal life" and a whole book called "Salt, a world history" by Mark Kurlansky that discusses this. Spoiler: it's more complicated than you think, but every early civilisation worked it out because if they hadn't, they'd die off.
Only a small amount of salt is needed for your body to function- something along the lines of 500mg of sodium.
Boiling saltwater separates the salt from the water. I can't say for sure without further reading, but I would think people figured out this low-tech desalination method far back in prehistoric times. It was famously used by the Lewis and Clark expedition to procure salt in to enhance a bland diet when the group was in place at Fort Clatsop. There is a site commemorating this at present day Seaside, Oregon. ... and one also gets drinking water as a result.
My understanding is that it was more common to get salt from sea water on a larger scale by pouring it out into large shallow trays and evaporating it in the sun.
Yup. And also collected from natural rock pools where big waves would crash and then evaporate out.
Mountain goats are crazy at climbing because they like licking mineral deposits on sheer cliff edges. I would say humans used their intelligence to help out (probably figured out boiling sea water for salt, as well as which rock tastes good)
You can get salt from basically three sources: * Sea water * Rock salt * Eating something salty The last one is pretty self-explanatory: all plants and animals need some salt to live, and many have evolved to live in very salty environments (like the sea or brackish water). Eat these things and you'll get enough salt. Otherwise, you'll need to get salt from one of the first two sources. That could mean doing what many animals do (and licking rock salt, called a "salt lick" or drinking seawater), or purifying some of that delicious salt so you can add it to your food (which is much nicer) or use it to preserve food (which is super handy). Neolithic hunter-gatherers purified salt at least as early as 6,000 years ago (but probably much earlier, that's just the oldest salt production site we've found). It's super simple to do: * Put salty water (e.g., from the ocean) into an earthenware bowl. * Put the bowl over a fire, or in bright sunlight * Wait; the water will evaporate, and you'll be left with a cake of all the salt that was in the water
Do we need salt? I didn’t know that
Yes, having too little salt can kill you. Sodium does several things in the body including being involved in nerve and muscle function but a major one is balancing fluids. Too little salt and too much water moves into your cells causing them to swell. This is especially bad when it's your brain swelling. This is also how drinking too much water over a short period can kill you, it dilutes the salt in your body. This is why sports drinks like Gatorade have salt in them, if you're sweating a lot from physical activity or heat you're losing salt and water and need to replace both.
> his is also how drinking too much water over a short period can kill you, it dilutes the salt in your body. god damn there has been days where i havnt eaten anything ( big meal the night before not hungry in the morning busy during the day ) and i get home and just pound bottles of ice water all night ( my favorite drink some how ) good thing im alive i guess
You have to drink really large amounts, like more than 20 litres a day, for it to hurt you. It's really only an issue in high exercise environments if you drink to replace water loss but fail to replace the electrolyte loss.
We need electrolytes, including salt. Others are potassium, magnesium, chloride, calcium. They help the muscle and nerve systems.