 All right, all those trendy gourmet salts like Himalayan salt, pink salt are great to use occasionally for fun in the kitchen, but these sea salts and other pink salts don't have the health benefits that folks give them credit for. Even or not, all salt, even salt from underground, was eventually from the sea. That's where salt came from. So even though it might be a deep mountain deposit like a salt from Utah or from the Himalayan's that has all these interesting compounds, the problem is sea salt lacks an essential ingredient called iodine. Iodine is really important. Back in the early 1900s, there was such an iodine deficiency, particularly in the Midwest, that by estimates 10 million people died of goiter and hypothyroidism. And because of this, the federal government, along with 20 other governments in the world, mandated iodine be placed in salt. Why in salt? Because in general, people use salt and it was an easy way to make up for the fact that people's iodine levels were terribly low. I grew up in the Midwest in an area called the Goiter Belt. And the Goiter Belt was so named because the Midwest had very little iodine in their diet. And thyroid's got bigger and bigger and bigger trying to make thyroid hormone. You have to have iodine to make thyroid hormone. So that's where the idea came from. And ever since iodine was mandated in salt, that problem pretty much disappeared. Now fast forward to when gourmet salts became trendy. In my patient population, we noticed that those people who were using these gourmet salts had thyroid functions that were, let's just say, a little iffy. And on questioning, it was clear that they weren't using iodized salt. So I would ask them to please add iodized sea salt to their program or take an iodine supplement, which is easy to obtain. And lo and behold, in three months when we checked their thyroid function, it was fixed. And some of my patients, once it was fixed, stopped using that and went back to their gourmet salts three months later. Down went their thyroid functions, up went their thyroid stimulating hormone. And lo and behold, they had stopped using the iodine or the iodized salt. So this is something that I've seen dramatically change over the last 20 years. And so please, please, please just go get some iodized sea salt. Now the fun thing is they're easy to obtain. Even Morton's makes iodized sea salt. But have yourselves some fun. I have actually five different sea salts in my cabinet. Right now, my favorite is from Sardinia. I've used one from Baja California. There's one from Greece. There's one from Italy. There's one from France. Have fun. They all taste a little bit different. They all have iodine in them. You can even find green sea salts where algae has been added to sea salt and you'll get the benefit. If you really want to keep fiddling with your gourmet salts, that's fine. Then get yourself a iodine-containing tablet and that'll solve the problem as well. But the easiest fix is just get yourself iodized sea salt. Now there are critics online that say iodine is absolutely dangerous and it's horrible for Hashimoto's. That's the craziest thing I've ever heard. Iodine is essential to make thyroid hormone. Period. Hashimoto's is an autoimmune disease caused by leaky gut. And all the iodine in the world is not going to make Hashimoto's better or worse. For that matter, the absence of iodine is not going to make Hashimoto's worse or better. Hashimoto's is an immune attack on your thyroid and it's fixable by fixing leaky gut, not by increasing your iodine or taking your iodine away. And finally on that same subject, believe it or not taking a thyroid hormone replacement has nothing to do with fixing your Hashimoto's. For that matter, it has nothing to do with preventing Hashimoto's. Nothing at all. Now salt gets a bad rap because of the sodium content. Now quite frankly, I rarely if ever see anybody with a high sodium chloride on their blood work, but I do see lots of people with low sodium and chloride. And quite frankly, we are drinking too much water in an effort to get those 8 to 10 glasses of water a day into us and it dilutes out our sodium and chloride. So when I have those patients and I see a lot of them, I ask them to add more salt to their diet, to not be afraid of it. Or to use an electrolyte supplement like element for example. And lo and behold, when we check them in three months, everything is normalized. So don't be afraid of all that salt. Okay so how do you know if you're getting too much salt in your diet? And is having salt at every meal a bad thing for you? Well doctors were trained that sodium is a major cause of high blood pressure and sodium is a major cause of congestive heart failure. And there are some interesting studies correlating a low sodium diet with lowering blood pressure. The dash diet is the most famous of those. But it can be carried too far. As a general rule, what I ask my patients, particularly those with high blood pressure or congestive heart failure, is if you want to cook with salt, don't add it at the table. Or don't cook with salt and then feel free to add it at the table. Now most people take the second option of adding it at the table. And it's actually worked out very well for my patients. Now let's take a look at a Harvard article about salt. They actually recommended 500 milligrams of sodium for health a day. First of all, trying to just limit yourself to 500 milligrams of sodium is nearly impossible. In fact, even when we're in a hospital designing and controlling for sodium with our dietitians, our dietitians can rarely get a palatable diet with less than 1,500 milligrams of sodium. So the idea that we should strive for a 500 milligram sodium diet is quite frankly almost undoable and quite frankly people won't eat it. Now there is a benefit of having a 500 gram sodium diet in that the food is so unpalatable that people lose weight. And it's the weight loss from that unpalatability that actually lowers the blood pressure, not the lack of salt. We forget how important salt was to our diet. We crave salt because we have in a way a bad design. We're an aquarium, we're a salt water aquarium that loses salt. Our cells actually operate at the sodium chloride level of the ocean and we sweat. So we constantly are losing a vital ingredient that makes our cells run properly. And most people don't realize that the vast majority of people who die during a marathon run actually die not from exertion but from low sodium levels because they're actually drinking lots of water and not replacing the sodium. Finally, if you live in a hot climate and it's summer, you are going to lose significant amounts of salt through your skin and you really have to aggressively replace those electrolytes during the summer. Come and visit me in Palm Springs during the summer and watch how much sodium you're going to need. The Harvard study 500 milligrams is unattainable for a normal human being to get that low. It's inedible. And if you do that, you'll lose weight. So maybe there's something to say about a 500 gram sodium diet. Great weight loss trick. Try it. You'll see. Iodized salt. But please, in general, get iodized sea salt. It's readily available. You can find it online. A lot of the trendy at grocery stores have it. Put it in your cooking. Don't add it at the table. Don't add it in your cooking. Add it at the table. And there's so many of these iodized salts out there now. Have some fun with it, like I do. More amazing episodes just like this one. Watch now. This may come as a shocker, but a cup of peas actually has more carbs and sugar than a cup of pasta.