On Thu, 12 Jun 2003 08:58, Amadeus Schmidt wrote:

>Eva Hedin wrote:
>>..Mined salt can not be paleo or good because it
>> contains only natrium.
>
>Mined salt comes from oceans dried out millions
>of years ago.  Should be the purest maries
>salt available.
>
>However most sea-salt and mined salt
>("mined" by means of water) is
>"refined" and looking white.
>Which means (as usually) it is spoiled.

>Best would be to get whole pieces of real
>mined salt - this can't be "refined".

>Amadeus

After a year eating paleo and not adding any salt to my food, nor buying
any with salt added, I was getting up to 100 minor cramps a day in my left
hand (I'm right-handed).
 Not specially painful and never during vigorous
activity; just at work in the office, getting dressed, turning over the
pages of a book etc.

I was also waking at night suffering painful cramps in my hamstring
muscles (which are pretty powerful, given my weights routines in the gym).

I decided to add a little salt to my diet and within a couple of days the
cramps went down to one or two a day.  Now I spinkle salt lightly on all
red meat (2-3 meals a day) and the cramps have as good as disappeared.
The night cramps have gone too.

Loren Cordain has some useful comments on salt where he advises us to
consider the sodium (essential for all neuronal processes) separately from
the chloride.  The implication for me would be that taking potassium
chloride instead of sodium chloride would be to miss the point.

In contrast with Amadeus' advice, I have gone for processed iodized salt.
Last wi
nter, my first Paleo winter, was one in which I felt the cold far
more than I ever had before.  I went from being unusually cold resistant
for the first 53 years of my life to being unusually cold-susceptible,
even having chilblains on my toes.  Our Australian soils are iodine
deficient and so I wondered if I needed some iodine to get my thyroid
functioning more effectively.  That seems to have worked, too.  I would
not go so far as to say theat I'm back to even mid-range, but I'm well
back from the extreme of cold susceptibility.

Keith