Himalayan Salt is one of the healthiest and purest natural salts available. The salt formed 250 million years ago when the sun dried up the original prehistoric ocean. It is completely perfect and natural and equal to the structure of the earliest primitive sea. The salt is full of minerals and nutrients that are found naturally in our bodies. When the ancient sea near the Himalayas dried up from the sun s heat, the Himalaya mountain range began to rise. The layers of salt that were deposited settled deep into the ground. For millions of years, the layers of accumulated salt underwent an enormous amount of pressure and temperatures resulting in the formation of pure and uncontaminated crystal salt. The salt is mined, not processed from sea water, in the Himalayas in the foothills of Pakistan using methods that preserve the salt s purity and structural integrity. It is hand excavated, washed and dried.
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Imagine this situation if you will. You have been employed to perform a service, are finished, and are ready to receive your pay, your salary. Your supervisor, who has been more than well satisfied with your work, and finds you worthy of your salt, hands you, literally, a bag of salt.
Would you be satisfied with this kind of salary, or would you be offended and even outraged? If you were a Roman soldier, you would most likely be very satisfied. You have just received your agreed-upon salary, the normal income of a Roman soldier.
You see, the English word "salary" comes from the Latin word sal (salt), derived by way of the image suggested above. In later imperial Rome, the bag of salt itself was replaced by a monetary allowance, the purpose of which was the same: to enable the soldier to get his salt.
While it may be surprising to us, the ancients found a close connection between salt and health or well being, and between salt and peace. (Note the citation above from the Gospel according to St. Mark.) Health in Latin is salus, cognate with sal. From this we derive our words "salubrious," "salutary," "salute," and "salutation."
Salt was one of the few preservatives available to ancient man. It made fish, meat, olives, cheese, and pickled vegetables available throughout the year everywhere in the world. It is not surprising that these food items figured large in the diets of the rich who could afford them. Poor people, on the other hand, had to rely mostly on grasses, cereals, and vegetables which usually contain little salt naturally.
There are many kinds of chemical compounds that are called "salts," sodium chloride (common table salt) being just one of them. (Chemical compounds are classified as acids, bases, or salts. Acids and bases react with one another to form salts.) Even though some of us risk high blood pressure and heart trouble by using an excessive amount of salt, and some ought to avoid supplementary salt altogether, salt is essential to health. It is usually found naturally in one's diet. Otherwise salt is used mainly as a seasoning which greatly improved flavor, and is also important in the preparation of foods such as pickles, olives, and dried fish.
Strict vegetarians and plant-eating animals, however, must find a source beyond their normal diet, which lacks a necessary amount of salt. Meat-eating people and animals, on the other hand, deriving their salt requirement from the flesh of animals, have no need of a salt supplement unless they habitually eat their meat boiled.
In many parts of the world people knew nothing about seasoning food with salt before Europeans arrived among them. In African societies which produce much milk and raw or roasted meat for food, for example, sufficient salt for health is consumed by the population. Otherwise salt has been a luxury available only to the rich.
As societies moved from nomadic to agricultural status, the habitual use of salt increased and influenced the religious rites of most ancient peoples. Salt was included in sacrifices and covenants as a fitting symbol of preservation and fidelity.
"Salt," with these overtones, enters into the idioms of people everywhere. Arabs, for example, speak of "salt between us," and the Hebrews, of "eating the salt of the palace." Modern Persians declare that a disloyal or ungrateful person is "untrue to salt." And the English give high praise to a person who is declared to be "the salt of the earth."
There is great concern today about the loss of large tracts of useful land due to salinization brought about by unwise practices of man. Such land becomes unfit for the growing of field crops and pastures, impoverishing agriculture and the raising of farm animals. This is the end result of thousands of years of clearing the world's forests which under natural conditions "soak up" great quantities of water keeping the often saline water table low. When land is cleared of trees, the water table below the land rises, bring salt to the surface, eventually killing most forms of vegetation. Like man and animals, trees require a certain amount of salt to survive.
Huge mountains and pits of salt are deposited many hundreds of feet thick throughout the world that give men and animals access to the salt which is so necessary for their well-being. The Gulf of Mexico region alone contains a circle of salt structures 1,000 miles in diameter over land and under water. More than 300 salt structures lie beneath the North Sea and land areas of Germany, Denmark, and the Netherlands. Similar huge deposits exist in the Middle East.
The existence of such immense deposits of salt raises a question: How did this abundance happen to be, given that today a very large quantity of sea water releases only a very small amount of salt through evaporation? The uniformitarian explanation given is that salt was deposited in partially enclosed arms of the sea where evaporation was caused to be greater than the flow of salt water into the arm. At the same time, an underwater barrier at the entrance to the arm prevented the highly concentrated saline water from flowing out.
However, we cannot accept this account on the basis of present processes and conditions, but must picture in our mind a very different earth when these mammoth deposits of salt were laid down.
A theory more interesting than uniformitarianism proposes that until about 400 million years ago, seawater was almost fresh and was certainly much less salty than it is today.
The theory states that the massive salt deposits found today were formed in thick layers of plant material floating on shallow sea swamps. Such shallow swamps sealed off significant areas of seas, preventing normal evaporation. The decaying strata of these layers, having dropped to the bottom of the sea, eventually became salt-bearing rock. This scenario fits into the so-called "expanding earth" theory, which proposes there were originally no deep oceans, only small "interdomain" gulfs on a much smaller earth than we know today. These conditions favored the development not only of huge salt deposits, but also of huge coal and petroleum deposits which are widely found today.
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