Wednesday, October 2, 2013

Iodized Salt vs. Sea Salt

I remember reading in books as a kid about older people struggling to live with goiter.  I never thought to find out what exactly it was.  Almost a century ago, there was a huge amount of iodine deficiency.  Then, salt was iodized to remedy that problem.  This solution helped a lot of people and goiter/iodine deficiency.  

But, over the past few years, iodized salt has been replaced on many tables by non-iodized sea salt.  So, does it matter?  

This link explains the basics about iodine in an easy to read way.  
 http://ods.od.nih.gov/factsheets/Iodine-QuickFacts/
This article talks about the iodine controversy:
http://thyroid.about.com/od/newscontroversies/a/toomuchiodine.htm

Just something to think about.  In our house, we use sea salt for seasoning grilled vegetables and occasions when I want the salt to stand out in a food.  But, the rest of the time I use iodized table salt.  A few years ago, I used sea salt--mostly because it was the "new thing" and I have always chose less processed foods and ingredients over ones that were more processed.  I suppose it's a silly line of reasoning.  But, then somewhere along the line we switched back because sea salt was more expensive where we moved to.  I'm glad now that we ended up switching back.  It's important for the kids to have iodine in their diet!

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