A really pleasant to read story. It's funny because I live in Switzerland and some of my friends debate the "ioded salt", and prefer to consume "natural salt" without the additives. Funny how history can repeat itself.
I'm always impressed with all these doctors that would question the approach, try new protocols, and end up by finding a cure
What are the arguments used against iodised salt? Where would they get their iodine?
Pretty much the same as against fluorine in water in the States: it’s unnatural/a globalist conspiracy/killing our traditional way of life/a plot to subdue the people for <reasons>.
There is no scientifically sound reason against it.
There’s scientifically sound reasons for not wanting to drink fluorine, namely that the science is still out for whether it’s useful when used alongside regular topical applications. Not to mention excessive fluorine can stain or pit the teeth, and that it may even destroy nerve tissue.
https://www.hsph.harvard.edu/magazine/magazine_article/fluor...
That’s a meaningless comparison. The whole point is that people aren’t doing topical application.
A similar debate to this is the adding folate to flour or bread.
Don't most (all?) toothpastes contain fluoride?
The LD50 of fluoride in drinking water is actually lower than the LD50 of water itself - drink enough fluoridated water to die from fluoride poisoning and you'll die from water poisoning first
Things can have negative health effects without killing you, so the LD50 is not particularly helpful in this context.
Only the measurable decrease in IQ from municipal water fluoridation, which can seen when comparing Portland, where they do not fluoridate, to similar large cities in the PNW where they do.
Well, fluoridated water tastes really… well, special, and it almost feels like an indirect subsidy for the water filter industry. Iodine in salt is (to my taste) pretty neutral in comparison.
[EDIT: as pointed out in a child comment, the taste actually comes from chlorine, not fluoride.]
Isn't that taste chlorine from the sanitation process?
Either way I actually do assume water filter companies lobby to keep public water as subpar an option as possible, there's certainly no incentive not to.
Yes, you're right, I mixed up fluoride and chlorine. And thus my previous comment doesn't make sense any more. My apologies!
It doesn't bother me for drinking, but I've gotten in the habit of keeping an open (loosely covered would probably work too) pitcher of water in the fridge for making coffee, so it sits at least overnight before use, and dissipates some (having already served its purpose.)
Somehow I doubt “Big Filter” has the kind of money and clout they would need to pull that off. I’d accept being proven wrong, but I just doubt it in the absence of seeing proof.
Most of the taste problem that’s in our water “on purpose” is chlorine and it’s not added out of spite, it’s added for sanitary reasons.
You forgot "sap and impurify all of our precious bodily fluids"
I deny them my essence.
We’re still not sure what that last bit means.
That's why I use ed, the standard text editor
This from a country where tapwater unfortunately typically tastes like crap?
(b/c it is chlorinated)
Unless it is significantly over chlorinated tasting like crap isn't because of the chlorine, in general the causation will be reversed here. Places that use a lot of chlorine are typically trying to kill off things that both taste bad and will try to kill you.
In Deutschland, the iodized salt is nearly always iodized+fluoridated, whereas the only other option is plain salt with neither.
https://shop.rewe.de/p/bad-reichenhaller-marken-jodsalz-500g...
Iodized salt with nothing else should be available in most supermarkets.
There is scientific reason against it, just not matching many of the conspiracy nuts’ rhetoric.
Most of Western Europe bans fluoridation. It can make your bones a little less elastic and a little more brittle, and there are a few other known or potential negative effects.
There are also just better ways to prevent cavities.
This seems like the sane, boring reality. People with modern dental routines probably don't benefit from the original purposes of fluoridation the same way people in the early 1900s only just getting electricity did.
But people only just getting electricity in the early 1900s easily benefited more than were harmed by such things. Poor dental health gets scary quick.
I guess the question becomes how low do you lower the bar for those who would willingly devoid themselves of sane things to include in their lives. How much freedom does one man have to harm his self, though he thinks as a self, costs to him are more often than not also costs incurred to society (and usually a society that'd prefer to not see people do self harmful things)
At least in the US though, it seems that popular opposition to fluoridation started with cold war era conservative conspiracies (precious bodily fluids). So, you know.
Not to argue about dosing water, but fluoride has no value ingested and is poisonous at low doses. It's best to moderate your arguments against the anti-fluoride mob or you're too easily dismissed yourself.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3956646/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fluoride_toxicity
Some people dislike the flavor of iodized salt. But what would you expect from future cretins?
There's literally no way anyone can taste the difference between iodized and non iodized table salt blind to the source. There's just so little there, it seems the Swiss standard is something like 25 mg/kg. There's probably more plastic in the salt than iodine at this point.
Probably not in swiss salt tho (it's usually mountain salt, not sea salt).
I thought it was clear that I meant that in jest. My point was that the amount of iodine is imperceptibly small.
But microplastic in sea salt is a real thing (and might be a bit worrying, personally I now always go for mountain salt, deposited pre-anthropocene era)
What an absurd thing to fixate on. There are a million other things you consume that are going to have more microplastics in them.
Haha, I totally agree.
Sure. Even still you’re talking about a highly abrasive product often packed in plastic. But none of that is material to my point.
People almost certainly confuse iodine with anticaking agents.
Sadly, this is the argument that people give ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
The article mentions that blind taste testing couldn’t detect it at 10x the strength.
Surely people test before claiming such things?
“Unicef, concerned about the sensitivity of children to odd flavours, commissioned a study in which rice was prepared with salt iodised at ten times the maximum recommended concentration. In double-blind taste tests, the iodine was undetectable.”
Iodized salt is almost always the industrially produced variety, pure NaCL and much more salty than the natural varieties - either sea or mountain salts that typically include other minerals and are milder in flavor.
That is more about crystal size and roughness than anything else. Some companies are working on nanoscale crystals of salt that allow you to use significantly less salt for the same saltiness profile based on these properties.
Cool! Where do I sign up for the salt innovation newsletter? I want to try this when it comes out.
Just run regular salt for a few seconds in a blender. I'm not joking, I prefer using powdered salt when seasoning sliced tomatoes and the like, and it does make a difference in perception vs. dose.
We have iodised sea salt around here, and it’s not more nor less industrial than standard sea salt. It’s true that the flavour is different than hand-processed sea salt or fleur de sel because of those impurities (which include microplastics and other less-than-ideal compounds, though, even though I love and use mostly barely-processed sea salt), but it is neither more nor less salty.
FWIW, that was addressed in the article:
I'm just repeating what people have told me.
In this instance it seems you should avoid this habit.
In your head, did that sound wittier than it reads?
Certainly wittier than the repetition of ignorant nonsense.
I've 100% switched to kosher salt & various sea salts with my own cooking. Not because I'm anti-iodine, but because I like those salts better for cooking purposes. Given how much attention was paid to using kosher salt in cooking by people like Alton Brown over the last 20 years I would expect I'm far from an outlier.
Isn't kosher salt literally just regular salt but in a particular particle size? I also use Himalayan and kosher salt but thats because I eat a ton of junk food which has iodised salt. If you're health conscious and don't do that, it's probably not a bad idea to keep iodised salt and add it in times it's not that important you need to pinch the exact right amount in your fingers or whatever.
You pretty much cannot have too much iodine. It is a good idea to use iodised salt in general.
[edit] fair enough, I need to qualify that. You pretty much cannot get too much iodine with something that looks like a normal diet, and in any case iodised salt is not what push iodine levels over the top. And in a normal diets, iodine deficiency is much, much more likely than iodine overload.
Based on what reasoning?
In reference to iodized salt, you would die of salt overdose before there are ill effects from iodine.
What's stopping salt from having a much higher concentration of iodine than the normal advertised value?
e.g. manufacturing error such that a dangerous amount of iodine is accidentally added.
I guess the same mechanisms that stop manufactures accidentally adding poison to their product.
Which is nothing? There's a clearly non-zero rate of dangerous contamination in food products, in a market as large as the US, that nobody is able to fully prevent.
Simply never way anything and you'll be safe!
Like I mentioned to the other replier, a probabilistic argument is fine, and I would even agree it's reasonable for 999 999 people to benefit in exchange for 1 person being very unlucky, but that's a different argument that needs to be made.
And nobody, in this post at least, has made that argument, nor has anyone even linked to such.
I benefit from a very robust set of regulatory controls ensuring that food products are as advertised and generally safe for me to consume?
'generally safe' implies that some small number of folks still suffer from excess iodine due to contamination, manufacturing errors, etc...
It's probably reasonable for 999 999 people to benefit in exchange for 1 person being very unlucky, but that's a different argument that needs to be made.
The article states otherwise
No it doesn't. You're ignoring the context.
You can't have too much iodine when it's obtained from iodized salt.
...because you can't handle that much salt.
From the article: 10x'ing the concentration of iodine in salt had no adverse effects. You'd have to eat salt by the pound daily to reach levels where iodine is harmful, but at that point, that'll be the least of your worries.
I think that depends on the concentration of the iodine in the salt
Right, but that's a standardized fortification so any iodized salt you get anywhere in the world now would make that statement true.
To be fair to the interlocuters, kergonath left the salt out of his or her or their comment.
Well, the article brings up iodine overdose from popular medications at the time, but you pretty much can't get too much iodine from iodized salt without having consumed way too much salt.
You may wish to research the Wolff-Chaikoff effect.
Sea salt and kosher salt also come iodized, it's an independent feature.
That’s fine for people who have a balanced diet rich enough in iodine. Which, to be fair, should be most people bothering about sea salt in the first place. For those who do not, it’s unfortunate, though. There is a reason why adding iodine is a good idea in the first place.
Depends on the salt, there are few that hardly contain more then dairy, but some salts contain enough to make it make sense.
My main issue with normal salt is the anti-caking ingredient needed to not have it stick together, in general not needed with sea salt and a real grinder.
You hate sand, huh.
The anti caking I commonly see in salt is potassium cyanide [ferrocyanide, actually, see below].
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Potassium_ferrocyanide
Skipped High School Chemistry huh? Read the Wiki
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
That is not potassium cyanide.
Yes, sorry, shouldn't post in a hurry. I amended my post. I'm not worried about the stuff at all, I buy salt with it all the time. But it's not sand, that's all I wanted to say.
I'm sure you're aware that ferrocyanide is not the same thing as cyanide - the cyanide is bound so tightly to the iron center that it is nontoxic.
Now that does seem like a bit of a concern, doesn’t it?
Most common one used here is Sodium Ferrocyanide : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sodium_ferrocyanide
Also used as a coating in welding among other things. And like other commentor said, a nephew of cyanide.
Now Im sure most of us will be fine, but I prefer not to eat that a few times a day. If you think that makes me foolish, be my guest.
It's also not needed, there are plenty of other sources of Iodine, and sea salt from the grinder is perfectly fine.
You can actually consume a _lot_ of cyanide without negative consequences, your body can detoxify it easily in small quantities. You can dissolve a lethal dose of cyanide in a bottle of water, and you'll be fine if you drink it in small sips over the course of a day.
Cyanide is so toxic because it has a high affinity for iron ions, so it deactivates iron-containing enzymes that are crucial for respiration. But in ferrocyanide it is _already_ combined with iron.
Ferrocyanide compounds like Prussian blue are even sometimes used as an antidotes for heavy metal poisoning.
Yeah, just because it doesn't directly harm a human in small dosis, doesn't mean it's a good idea to just add it to the daily diet of a human.
We simply don't know, and haven't research the longterm effect of small dosis on a daily intake. Especially combined with other conservatives & chemical additives in small dosis.
You can't deny there are some major diseases in the modern world on a rise and we have no idea why.
Yet here everyone always so sure that everything we're doing with food additives, pesticides and chemical processing is super safe.
There's just no need to eat these things, just eat normal food.
For cyanide? We actually do. Cassava roots contain quite a bit of it, and they are used as a staple in some places in Africa. You can indeed can get chronic poisoning, but it requires A LOT of cyanide.
they're afraid it'll give them 5G or whatever shite they make up on the spot
I always heard if you eat seafood, you get enough iodine and can stick to plain salt. It looks like milk and eggs are a good source as well.
https://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/iodine-rich-foods
How come that the disease wasn't widespread earlier?
I am always flabbergasted when people question incredibly effective public health initiatives.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goitre#History
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iodized_salt#In_public_health_...
Can I get some benefits of doubt please? :D
I don't question the initiative.
The article just read like it was some strange illness that affected Switzers around a certain time.
The article mentions comments from the 19th century about the same subject.
I think, that Switzerland, and especially those remote mountain regions, stayed more isolated than similar regions in France or Austria well into the early 20th century, making the issue stand out more in comparison.
French alps had the very same problem.
Austria I don't know. Many Austrian had the reverse problem with too much iodin and basedov eyes.
The country: Switzerland The people: Swiss
The word Switzer isn’t in use since a very long time :)
Sorry, I was lazy and just translated Schweizer without checking :D
It may not be a question of the initiative itself, rather, what conditions in Switzerland at the time led to an uptick in iodine deficiencies.
Maybe they should just RTFA
There was no uptick, CIDS was endemic to the alps as far back as roman times. Its consequences literally slipped into linguistic vernaculars (e.g. french as the insult "crétin des alpes", lit. "cretin from the alps", and "cretin" was the original term for CIDS-induced mental impairment).
Tiktok mind and some angry people can't comprehend how hard it was to actually get to the cause and solution to a lot of diseases
I think it comes from a generalised distrust of governments/big institutions. Which comes from hearing (often heavily distorted) stories about things like Tuskegee Syphilis, MKULTRA, CIA vaccinators in Afghanistan and Thalidomide.
I think it was.
We just don’t think about it because we’ve defeated it completely by putting iodine in the most popular spice, and also people in the past were afflicted by all sorts of horrible illnesses. It doesn’t stand out from the noise of the past being generally a mess.
Ah, okay.
The article just read like there were some unusual strange things going on around 1900 in Switzerland.
Goethe wrote in 1779 about his travels to Switzerland: “Die scheußlichen Kröpfe haben mich ganz und gar üblen Humors gemacht (“The horrible goiters have given me a very bad sense of humour”). Definitely plenty of earlier historic evidence.
Is that a pun in German as well or is it just funny coincidence of translation?
Swiss geology (retreat of the glaciers 10000 years ago) meant that the normal local products that would give a population iodine (milk and eggs) were themselves iodine-poor. A few parts of Switzerland which were not glaciated (i.e. Jura) did not have iodine deficient populations.
Other places in the world had different geology and this different levels of natural iodine.
The article referenced mentions of goitre in Switzerland from Victor Hugo in 1839, Mark Twain in 1880, a medical survey in 1883, and Roman authors like Vitrivius and Pliny the Elder. It also mentioned that the iodine idea had been going around for a hundred years before the activities of the heroes of our story.
Iodine had not been seen as a successful cure before because excess iodine causes a horrible condition. The key difference here was that Hunziker proposed regular use in minute quantities, and then Bayard tested the hypothesis with careful measurements and convincing evidence.
In Slovakia, another landlocked country with lack of natural iodine from rainfall or diet, dementia became part of the culture. 30% (!!!) of population suffered from dementia. Iodizing salt raised IQ by 10 point every 10~ years but the damage is irreparable…
In Slovakia dementia is on place 2 of the most common death causes. In Slovenia it's on place 19. Crazy.
Oh, and here in Germany it's on place 6?! Wouldn't have guessed!
Why do you say it wasn't present earlier?
The article made that impression on me.
This might interest you: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3169859/
"The interests of people in the thyroid gland have always been immense because of the widespread prevalence of its diseases. Therefore the earliest references to the gland date back to 1st century AD. The Chinese, Egyptian, Indian, Greek and Byzantine medicines are especially rich in their knowledge on the subject."
It was widespread but has always been particularly worse in inland mountainous regions. To this day, efforts remain to eliminate iodine deficiency worldwide.
Maps with goiter prevalence can be found on the WHO's website: https://www.who.int/teams/nutrition-and-food-safety/database...
The article makes reference to the Madonna on the Albrecht Dürer’s Dresden Altarpiece having an obvious goiter. That was produced in the late 15th to early 16th century. That’s evidence from the article that the problem was so common then that it was depicted in sacred art.
It was. Cretinism was one of the manifestations of iodine deficiency. The trope of crétin des Alpes (lit. cretin from the Alps) existed for a reason. The manifestation was goitres and stunted development, with people who seemingly stopped growing up around 14. Pretty much the story’s subject. It was a public health problem before iodised salt.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Congenital_iodine_deficiency...
What makes you think it wasn't? The article doesn't claim so.
They probably get plenty of iodine from packaged food since it doesn't all come from the same region any more.
Unclear but Germany is monitoring iodine intake and insufficiency is on the rise.
https://www.klartext-nahrungsergaenzung.de/wissen/lebensmitt...
Iodized salt use is decreasing in the US as well. I take a lot of supplements and vitamins and I rarely see iodine as an ingredient so I have placed iodized salt next to my sea salt as I know I do not get enough iodine rich foods in my diet. It's easy to forget about and while I may take things like St Johns and Turmeric daily, I can live without them, iodine not so much.
Morton makes an iodized sea salt
Eat some sushi regularly. Nori has a lot of iodine.
I take a specific D/K supplement that also has iodine for this reason. It was surprisingly difficult to find one that had it.
[edit]: This one, for the curious, although I get it from Vitamin Shoppe, not direct
https://www.lifeextension.com/vitamins-supplements/item02040...
The salt used in processed and prepared foods usually isn't iodized, contributing to declining iodine intake given the increasing consumption of these foods.
Depends on the country. That's the case in the USA but I'm not sure if it applies in Europe.
industrially farmed cattle are often fed iodized salt, which can make their dairy products a good source of iodine. depends on the farm's practices though
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/29221567/
Good point. I'd hope that there are other sources of iodine than salt in regions that have higher iodine content -- after all, salt was just the vehicle chosen for the supplement. But I can also see what you say about prepared foods.
One interesting use of iodine supplementation is during nuclear accidents, where it is given to flood the thyroid and prevent unstable iodine isotopes from being taken up.
"Iodine-131 (usually as iodide) is a component of nuclear fallout, and is particularly dangerous owing to the thyroid gland's propensity to concentrate ingested iodine and retain it for periods longer than this isotope's radiological half-life of eight days. For this reason, people at risk of exposure to environmental radioactive iodine (iodine-131) in fallout may be instructed to take non-radioactive potassium iodide tablets... Ingestion of [a] large dose of non-radioactive iodine minimises the uptake of radioactive iodine by the thyroid gland."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iodine#Other_formulations
One interesting use of iodine supplementation is during nuclear accidents, where it is given to flood the thyroid and prevent unstable iodine isotopes from being taken up.
This is different than iodine added to salt, or iodine in liquid form for wounds. I believe it is potassium iodine.
That's correct. Our local public heath department, like many others in communities located near nuclear power plants, has a program for utility-funded distribution of KI to households in designated areas.
It is only taken when the nice person on the radio tells you to do so (you know to tune in from the blaring emergency sirens, tested semiannually). Rather interestingly, the emergency instructions for evacuation state that parents should not go to schools to get their kids, because they'll already be gone: in an emergency, municipal transit buses head to the schools, then take loads of kids to designated areas well upwind of the plant.
All of this info and more is available in a rather well-produced section of the local phone books. Since phone books tend to end up unopened in recycling bins these days, I suspect most newer residents have little idea of what I'm talking about.
I-131 also has some interesting history as the very first application of radioactive isotopes in a medical setting. It's used to treat hyperthyroidism and thyroid cancer.
With the complex supply chains and processed/ready-made food we have nowadays I am wondering how much iodine makes its way into the diet of the Swiss today even without ioded table salt.
I suspect that one of the issues was that most/all food used to be sourced locally, especially eggs and milk, which are good sources of iodine, with seafood probably mostly absent from the Swiss diet.
Edit: apparently nowadays, and taking animal feed into account, Switzerland imports about 50% of its food.
Most processed food uses uniodized salt iirc, which is actually becoming a problem in parts of the USA where populations eat nothing but processed food.
My understanding is that in general there no need for supplements with a normal, balanced diet, especially with eggs, dairy products, grains, and others if iodine is naturally present in the environment.
So if Switzerland imports a lot of those, raw, or in prepared/processed food, or even the animal feed for its hens and cows the Swiss today probably already get much more iodine in their diet than 100 years ago.
People have been struggling to get enough iodine for a hundred+ years. That’s why it’s added to salt. This isn’t a 21st century problem.
Isn't that what the whole article is about?
But the point is that Switzerland's environment is especially poor in iodine hence the specific health problems it used to have, and which were much less serious in neighbouring countries.
While the cases were high in switzerland, they were not unique.
Link to an academic article discussing how the USA is now in the dangerzone of iodine deficiency.
https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s12011-018-1606-5#....
Of course they were not unique (though perhaps extreme). I must say I don't get how the replies in this thread relate to my comments...
I was curious about your point about normal diet and have just looked it up. According to tables 1 and 2 in this article [0], it may be hard for some people to get enough (RDA) iodine from normal, not fortified foods.
0. https://ods.od.nih.gov/factsheets/Iodine-HealthProfessional/
Aromat uses iodised salt, so despite Zweifel the swiss have nothing to fear
I (while not living in Switzerland) am one of those people. I don't want to eat salt with iodine. I don't like the taste. Too metallic, like in baking powder with aluminum.
The article mentions iodine is apparently not changing the taste of salt in blind tasting. Do you have information to the contrary?
I don't. Personally I can taste the metallic taste. But then again, so can I after using baking powder. Maybe I'm more sensitive to it?
You should conduct a blind test! (If you haven't already). Conducting blind tests on my perceptual preferences has been incredibly eye opening. It's especially illuminating for cooking with spices. Trying to identify spices by taste is something i never though to do but really helped me elevate my cooking from, "i guess we'll try this", to intentionally placing and making informed decisions. I bet the same thing could be done with regular salt and iodized salt. Maybe a couple tests, straight, in water, baked in a cookie, put on an hors d'ouvres (who really knows how to spell that) or something. Could be fun!
Table salt has not only iodine added but anti-caking agents too so it might be what OP is tasting.
If you read German, the posted book review seems to me to be a trimmed-down version of this article (also written by the author) from 2022: https://www.tagesanzeiger.ch/wie-drei-heldenhafte-aerzte-die...