In the US you can't really count on companies using iodized salt. For example, among fast food companies as of 2010 [1]:
• Burger King usually uses it
• Subway does not
• McDonald's usually does not
• Taco Bell, Kentucky Fried Chicken, and Panda Express are in the middle.
There's variability from restaurant to restaurant in a given chain because usually minor items like salt, ketchup, etc., are left up to the local franchise owner to buy from a supplier of their choice.
Which is a problem for people who exclusively eat from McDonald’s, I suppose. Most people use salt at home, though, and salt that you buy in a supermarket is generally iodised.
>Salt is an effective vehicle for distributing iodine to the public because it does not spoil and is consumed in more predictable amounts than most other commodities.
Some salts, like sea salts, do contain other minerals, although whether they're at nutritionally significant levels is of course another question. And adding iodine to sea salt wouldn't remove whatever other compounds were in it. Wikipedia has this:
Unrefined sea salt contains small amounts of magnesium and calcium halides and sulfates, traces of algal products, salt-resistant bacteria and sediment particles. The calcium and magnesium salts confer a faintly bitter overtone... Algal products contribute a mildly "fishy" or "sea-air" odour, the latter from organobromine compounds. Sediments, the proportion of which varies with the source, give the salt a dull grey appearance. Since taste and aroma compounds are often detectable by humans in minute concentrations, sea salt may have a more complex flavor than pure sodium chloride when sprinkled on top of food.
Whereas, according to [1], iodized salt has these "chemicals used to keep the salt from absorbing water and caking", which dilute the mineral content per gram: magnesium carbonate, calcium silicate, calcium phosphate, magnesium silicate, and calcium carbonate.
Most of those things are not micronutrients humans need.
Farmed salt of today is contaminated with anything that is in the sea, including microplastics. If you don't want "chemicals" and want "natural" avoid farmed salt.
That's a really good point. I'm definitely in favor of processing, just picky about the end results. Removing microplastics sounds like a great process. Improvements like this to salt farming could have huge benefits.
The causality actually goes the other way. The Morton Salt Company revolutionized salt by adding minute amounts of clay to prevent caking, which is one of the advantages that allowed them to achieve a near monopoly in salt production at the time iodine deficiency became understood. That meant that iodizing Morton's salt was basically iodizing all the salt.
However, the iodine is independent of the anti-caking additives. You can have iodized salt which still cakes up when it is humid, but why would you want to?
People will absolutely flip shit if this exact same list was titled "84 chemicals you will find in your tap water". I'm still not sure if the article is a brilliant parody.
I'll say! If anyone thinks himalayan salt is a source of valuable nutrients like mercury, lead and (radioactive) plutonium, they lack basic scientific literacy.
You do realize that ``these "chemicals used to keep the salt from absorbing water and caking", which dilute the mineral content`` are most likely contained in Himalayan salt? All their elements appear in the list.
On top of that, not even your [0] claims that most of those elements are necessary nutrients for humans.
Also, nitpick, those are elements, not minerals. I mean, some elements can also be minerals (eg, gold) but you show me a list of the elements I'm going to tell you they're elements, not minerals. In fact, they're basically all the elements - they're short most of the transuranics (except for Neptunium and Plutonium), as well as all of the Noble gasses.
If Himalayan sea salt actually contains detectable quantities of basically all the elements naturally occurring in all creation, that's goddamn fascinating (although I'd probably say "bullshit" just on that point), but I'm not sure why it makes the salt good to eat.
Salt is generally consumed in small quantities and does not spoil, making it a good carrier. You could use anything else, but it's hard to find things that won't spoil without refrigeration and that are widely consumed in small amounts.
Note: I previously worked on an iodated salt program in West Africa for the World Food Programme.
How do you get people to consume spirulina? Preference and taste get involved. Everyone eats salt. Salt was used to preserve things. Salt is used as a flavor enhancer. Salt is consumed far more ubiquitously than anything else. And, it doesn’t spoil if you dont consume it all in a couple weeks.
"How do you get people to ____" is a fundamental question in life with many approaches to answering it, ie marketing, public relations, missionary studies, theater, etc.
Yes. How can we help improve nutrient availability, generally?
From what I pointed out below, this salt processing seems to have underappreciated trade offs. But most importantly, the overarching picture of nutrient availability, not just for iodine, seems to have a bigger challenge at hand worth solving than simply using salt as a vehicle for one - which spirulina would help with in terms of protein and mercury / biotoxin removal, for example.
Spirulina is not a good source of iodine anyway. Unlike kelp, which grows in iodine-rich ocean waters (and which is a decent source of iodine), spirulina is generally grown in alkaline inland lakes (read: iodine-depleted).
And it this case it appears that spending a buck to iodize a few tons of salt is probably easier or at least easy enough that it doesn't make sense to go through the effort to switch to something else.
Are you being intentionally obtuse? You asked why salt, he answered with literally the most important reason in public health: people actually use it. It is a known delivery vector that works, period.
And, yes, no shit. How to get other people to do something is a fundamental question in life and it just so happens that in life, public health is about getting people to do stuff that's good for their and society's health.
I don't know what idealistic/philosophical point you are trying to make, but we also do things like water fluoridation. Salt happens to be a very convenient medium for iodine.
Yeah, but salt, unlike many other alternatives, was almost universally used—no challenges getting people to use it—and is ideal as a vehicle. So salt it was.
And, sure, there may have been some other equally good alternatives, but analysis paralysis helps no one. So, salt.
Plants do not produce iodine (it's an element), and they can only accumulate it from the environment. People living in environments rich in iodine, likely, do not need iodine supplementation.
Well, this assumes that the local populace will reliably eat the spirulina. The nice thing about salt, is that you only have to solve the problem of getting people to eat the salt that you've iodized. You don't have to solve the additional problem of getting them to eat salt in the first place.
If you're running some sort of anti-malnutrition campaign that involves local cultivation of spiritual then sure, why not add iodine to it? (Assuming that this is technically feasible. Don't know whether it is or not.) But if you are trying to solve the specific problem of iodine deficiency, then I'm not sure why you would start with "first, grow a bunch of spirulina..."
Adding a small bag of sodium iodate to a big bag of sodium chloride and mixing requires no skill or special equipment and any idiot, or shall I say cretin, can do it. Whereas running a bioreactor and somehow convince people of eating the gunk that comes out of it is far more complicated and expensive.
Edit: and you'd still have to add iodine to said bioreactor, you might as well add it directly to the salt.
Some people already reject iodized salt because of the taste. Most of the recipes that call for "Kosher salt" do so because it is uniodized.
People get away with iodizing salt because the recommended dose is so small, so it can be almost undetectable. If you started adding iron and zinc to salt, it would start tasting like a multivitamin.
> Unless you're fermenting or canning, iodine makes no difference to food.
It honestly hadn’t occurred to me that iodine could inhibit fermentation, and I had just recently purchased a box of iodized salt for the first time in years because of the reasons discussed in this thread. But lo, the fermentation blogs all seem to confirm this. I hope the salsa I have fermenting in my cupboard isn’t ruined.
Sea salt naturally has some iodine in it (less than it has Bromine because of both sedimentation and bio absorption). Iodine is in the same column of the periodic table as chlorine, which makes Sodium Iodide (NaI) a natural cohabitor with Sodium Chloride (NaCl) in solution. What's suggested is only 50grams (2oz) per ton or 50ppm... which is less than Bromine in sea water (65ppm). We mammals probably evolved eating a lot more fish!
Partially it was because potassium iodide (a form of iodine that is convenient) is also a salt, like sodium chloride (table salt). So "put the salt in the salt" is pretty obvious.
It was also wildly successful because at the time, salt was turning from an expensive good of varying quality produced by thousands of companies to an extremely cheap good of uniform quality produced by a near monopoly in the United States. Public health advocates were able to get just a couple of companies on board and iodize basically all the salt, which then reached basically all the people, basically solving the problem completely overnight.
(There are people that don't drink milk, there are people that don't like pepper, the dosing is so small that distributing it separately would be less successful, etc)
> In many places, like Japan, people get iodine from seafood, seaweed, vegetables grown in iodine-rich soil or animals that eat grass grown in that soil. But even wealthy nations, including the United States and in Europe, still need to supplement that by iodizing salt.
Where did Western people get iodine before it was necessary to add it to salt? Has our soil been so depleted that iodine is no longer present in the vegetables grown in it?
I know the question was specifically about Western countries, but this comment (unintentionally) makes it sound like it's only been a western problem. This was a big problem in China and is still an issue today [1] (although the numbers in that article aren't really specific to China).
It used to be pretty common for people to develop a goiter. As far as I know this is a sign of lack of iodine. So I guess most people simply didn't get enough before it got added.
I remember reading that, even in the English countryside in the past, goitre was frequent among those who 'drank pond water' and thus missed out on any soluble naturally-occurring additives. And the cause was a mystery to everyone, of course.
> Where did Western people get iodine before it was necessary to add it to salt?
Iodine is so soluble that it's quite scarce other than in the ocean. And yep, people who lived inland (and thus didn't eat seafood) in premodern times were often iodine deficient.
> Where did Western people get iodine before it was necessary to add it to salt?
Some lived near the sea and had high seafood diets, but most were just iodine deficient, which doesn't stop a population from surviving, though it leads to suboptimal outcomes in a number of dimensions.
There is this wierd pervasive mythology that before modern times people lived in an ideal state (at least in terms of nutrition), so any present deficiency from the ideal must reflect a difference between modern and premodern society. Past conditions were at least minimally adequate for survival and reproduction, or we wouldn't be here, but there's no real basis for assuming that they were in any way ideal.
Not knowing much about the biochemical effects of iodine: is it possible Western people need less iodine? Northern Europeans evolved to have lighter skin because they needed more Vitamin D from the limited sunlight. I wonder how much genetics play a part in what defines the "ideal state".
> Not knowing much about the biochemical effects of iodine: is it possible Western people need less iodine?
Since the identification of the widespread deficiency and it's effects which motivated iodization of salt was first in the West among Western people, probably not meaningfully. Unlike sunlight which is highly latitude dependent, iodine availability is much more location dependent, and the high availability places (places with access to fish, approximately—both saltwater and many freshwater locations) are also where pre-civilization human populations tended to be most concentrated.
You can make a good argument that before agriculture, people lived in a "steady state" hunter gatherer society for at least hundreds of thousands of years, to which they were extremely well adapted adapted evolutionarily.
Let's repeat that because it's important and counterintuitive: Those conditions were ideal for us because our species changed to fit the conditions.
What's happened since is a crazy rollercoaster ride of life conditions changin much faster than evolution has any chance of keeping up with, and premodern society in the sense of preindustrial can in no way be presumed to be ideal.
> for at least hundreds of thousands of years, to which they were extremely well adapted adapted evolutionarily.
Hundreds of thousands of years is not a really long time in evolutionary terms, and evolution doesn't necessarily, even given a long time, get out of a good-enough local optimum to “extremely well adapted”.
It's also debatable whether conditions in which humans evolved are really a steady state.
More to the point, humans being ideal for the conditions—what the argument from evolution suggests—is not the same as the conditions being ideal for humans.
Species don't change so that the conditions become ideal for that species, species change so that the species is (close to) ideal for dealing with that environment. This is a very important distinction. Certain plants may grow in the desert with very little water, but that doesn't mean that they don't grow faster with more water.
Didn't people in early Hunter-gatherer societies have drastically lower life-expectancy, height and IQ as compared to modern humans living in industrialized nations? Evolution may not value those traits all that much, but we certainly do.
Cursory Google search seems to indicate that some fruits, as well as potatoes (!), dairy products, fish, and eggs contain iodine. Even if you were a very poor European peasant in the middle ages, you would still get to eat potatoes, milk, and smelly not-fresh fish, so the iodine problem probably would be bad but not terrible. If you were a rich person or someone who lived on the coast, I would speculate that you'd be pretty much fine.
> Even if you were a very poor European peasant in the middle ages, you would still get to eat potatoes
No, you wouldn't, as a European of any social class, except maybe in the very late middle ages at the boundary of the Renaissance; potatoes were a New World import in the 16th century, which might just still be considered the Middle Ages in some parts of Europe.
As I understand it, the iodine in dairy typically comes from the products used to clean and sanitise the milking and storage equipment (iodophor). It's not inherent in the dairy itself, otherwise we could just eat the cow's grass to obtain iodine
Preserved fish (dried, smoked, salted, or pickled) has been a common food for millennia. It's arguable if it's "smelly", it's by definition not fresh, but it's definitely fine to eat.
It was an important source of protein in centuries past, and was traded all over Europe. It would've also been an effective way for inland residents to get iodine.
The Catholic church has a rule not to eat meat on Friday and fish was popular instead. Not sure when that started but maybe forcing a bit of more expensive fish into the diet was quite useful for dietary health.
Before refrigeration and the steam engine fish prices would rise dramatically and quality decrease quickly as you move away from the ocean. Salting was done to preserve some types of fish, but this processing would add cost. As discussed elsewhere, people inland are the ones who would lack iodine in their diets and in those locations and I would guess fish would be the more expensive than meat in those locations. It would be interesting though to see a list of market prices for meat and fish from some inland city back then.
According to my endocrinologist, about 15% of women in most western countries are Iodine deficient, and about 10% of men. The difference is mostly because women tend to dislike seafood.
In Australia the situation is a lot worse, she said, because our soils are so depleted. No just of Iodine but many other nutrients.
Wait, women dislike seafood more than men? That's the first time I'm hearing this. In landlocked Europe I'd be guessing the opposite. Is there some biological explanation?
Salt as far as I know is the only mineral (non plant) spice we use, it's only purpose is to enhance taste.
There is a common confusion between salt (sodium chloride) and sodium, many falsely believing salt is not used only for taste but it's essential for health.
Sodium is a vital element that is found in almost all plants and animals and there is no need for an extra sodium intake because our food has plenty.
Sodium and potassium balance in the body is essential for cell physiology and our health
>there is no need for an extra sodium intake because our food has plenty
Depends on the food and other environmental factors. The reason why a preference for salt evolved in the first place was because we didn't get enough salt in our food, especially warm climates, which is incidentally where we started out. Same reason why herbivores frequent salt licks, their normal diets don't contain enough sodium or other minerals.
What you said would have been true if we were carnivores.
To insist on that, in Spanish there's the expression 'tener poca sal en la mollera' which literally translates as not having enough salt in one's head [1].
One source I found says the expression is probably Latin in origin and that the pumpkin was literal back then. So dried pumpkin skins were used as purses, and salt as money, then the original sense might have been to be rich, rather than smart. But it was some random website, so take this with a grain of salt :)
They don't consider it as good an investment as anti-malarial work but it's close enough to be worth mentioning which makes salt iodization charities a much, much more efficient use of your money than most charitable causes if you're just trying to minimize human suffering.
Good to know, thanks! Always good to keep your charity portfolio diversified to hedge against errors in estimates of program effectiveness, so this cause is worth looking at in more detail.
Seems like the only reason Salt Iodization doesn't make the list of "top" charities is because it is much harder to prove benefits back to the charity level. If a charity lobbies the local supermarket to label iodized salt which people want which causes better health, it is nearly impossible to prove that it was the charity that caused the better health. Malaria nets are much easier: How many nets went out, did the nets make it to the people we intended, how many fewer people got malaria? Iodization is much more difficult to track because so much money needs to be spent at the lobbying level instead of the "buying iodine" level.
Malaria nets also score extremely well in their ranking system because those charities can accept a TON of money before diminishing returns start to kick in. Against Malaria has said "we could easily accept >$50 million in donations" where the two Iodization organizations GiveWell tracks have said they could probably only accept $2-5 million without major changes (even though both of them lost their primary funding sources in the past few years and are thus decreasing their programming).
This all doesn't mean GiveWell is wrong in their current recommendations. They are up front about disclosing the problems with their methodology, but you should keep it in mind when choosing which charities to donate to.
Seriously? Do you mean real table salt (sodium chloride) will do this or just kidding (yes, I have read, watched and played Dune, all of them)? If yes, can potassium chloride do the same?
> In fact, Kazakhstan has become an example of how even a vast and still-developing nation like this Central Asian country can achieve a remarkable public health success.
> Even moderate deficiency, especially in pregnant women and infants, lowers intelligence by 10 to 15 I.Q. points, shaving incalculable potential off a nation’s development.
> All of them — Kazakhstan, Turkmenistan, Tajikistan, Uzbekistan, Kyrghzstan — saw their economies break down with the collapse of the Soviet Union.
Yes, Kazakhstan is a developing country according to the IMF and those who have seen Borat. Using it as an example of the public health success going on in Central Asia is disingenuous however because Kazakhstan is remarkably wealthy compared to its neighbors[0]. It's GDP PPP per capita at $25,263 is only a little behind the digital darling Estonia's at $29,364. Kazakhstan's neighbors like Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan have theirs at $3,551 and $2,980 respectively.
A lay western reader not knowing is particularities of Central Asia could easily make assumptions and walk away from this article with erroneous ideas. The article, in my reading and without the context, suggests a iodine->health->wealth causality. In Kazakhstan's case oil->wealth->health would be more apt.
PPP is a laughably bad approach to measuring the economics and well-being of a nation.
If you go by PPP, you'll be falsely led to believe Iraq is on par with Iran and just a little behind Turkey. Iraq is a barely functioning, destroyed nation, in the midst of a full rebuild.
According to PPP, in 2016 Puerto Rico was just barely behind Japan. New Zealand is below Puerto Rico.
According to PPP, Equatorial Guinea is approximately on par with Finland, France, Canada, Japan, UK, Belgium.
Oman and Saudi Arabia are above Belgium. Saudi is above the Netherlands and Sweden. Is PPP aware of the actual living conditions in Saudi Arabia at the median? What the median income is in Saudi Arabia? Nope.
Like I said, it's laughable.
PPP purports to enable a better comparison stick. It fails entirely in all cases. Belgium & Denmark are below Saudi? The only proper response to that is: bullshit.
PPP is not only universally wildly inaccurate, it leaves out dozens of critical economic factors that are derived from objective economic capability rather than what the price of a hamburger is from one nation to the next.
PPP is a subjective measurement, and a particularly bad one. Who is on the ground doing the perfectly objective comparisons in every nation simultaneously, living there for a decade to really get a sense of things across the whole economic landscape? Nobody. PPP leads to mediocre guess-work, which gets you to New Zealand being below Puerto Rico.
What is your military capable of defense wise? Try basing that on subjective economic relativism, see how it works out for you in a war.
What kind of medical technology can your nation afford? What's the level of medical technology that your people have access to at the median? That collapses under PPP, because the best and latest medical equipment is expensive.
Can you buy a BMW or a $4,000 poorly made car that is guaranteed to fall apart and have far more problems than eg a Lexus? While simultaneously, who would confuse the standard of living impact of driving an extraordinarily mediocre $4,000 vehicle vs a Mercedes or BMW?
If your GDP per capita (non-PPP) is eg $35,000, then I can stack you right up against Japan or New Zealand and immediately have a good idea of what your national income potential is far more often than not, and I can tell a lot more about your nation's real capabilities at the median.
The medtech & car examples are representative concepts, they apply to pretty much everything else that defines standard of living. PPP is a dumb (its simplistic nature ignores almost everything that's actually important to the standard of living of actual humans) economic concept in the best of cases; in most cases, it's entirely worthless.
The foundational problem of PPP, is contained in that it attempts to do something remarkable and then doesn't actually do it at all.
Is it a really great idea to have an accurate comparison of the standard of living and economic capabilities (both have a high correlation to non-PPP GDP), on a relative basis, between nations? Yes! Ten times over, yes. Do the annually published PPP numbers actually do anything like that? No, not even close. PPP is a nice idea, that's all it is unless you want to expend extraordinary sums of money and labor to be on the ground, with extremely objective and well trained experts doing the comparisons in an extremely scientific manner (rather than a clown at the IMF throwing darts based on hamburger prices).
What's a better measure? This is where the laziness of common PPP numbers comes into play. The better measure is to get into the mud and get really dirty, in volumes of accurate data, tracking, observation, experience. In reality we don't even have mediocre access to accurate, detailed economic data for the majority of the 195 nations. On that single fact, PPP collapses as it is.
How accurate is the economic data that we have for eg Brazil (207 million people), and how intricate can we get while maintaining that accuracy? In this case, Brazil is reasonably representative of the global median. We have low quality vague guesses at best. Below Brazil, it just gets that much worse.
It's extremeley difficult and expensive to do a nation to nation comparison which is then adjusted subjectively to measure relative condition. So many things would inherently come into play that can't be easily measured. It would require immense on the ground effort and measurement, on a constant basis, along with ideally at least semi-accurate wider economic figures from the national/regional/local government structures inside a given nation (only a few dozen nations have anything like that).
A better measure is the straight GDP/capita. Here's the numbers for the 3 countries mentioned, to which I added the US, China and Estonia (source World Bank [1]):
Part of the problem is that once you get rich you spend a lot on diminishing returns.
How much better off is your outlook if you're currently 40 years old and expected to live to 78 instead of 76. Not much. If you could time travel you'd arrange that the resources that you would have devoted to extending your life those last two years be instead devoted to more time with your children while they were young, more time at the beach, more time preparing food and hanging out with family or having sex.
And we can talk about $4000 poorly made cars and laugh, but the difference between a $12k Toyota and a $60k BMW is marginal or even negative if you prioritize things like reliability or maintenance. They are better only if you are richer and can afford the maintenance.
The life of someone in Costa Rica is, on average, worse than someone in Canada, but not by the 4x difference in PPP adjusted GDP, and certainly not by the 5x+ difference in raw GDP numbers.
But you're right, I wouldn't use PPP to build a military. Raw numbers work better there, so you get both an upvote and a generally dissenting comment.
We're not talking about a $12,000 Toyota. That's the kind of car that is purchased at the median in Estonia, which can't be purchased at the median in Kazakhstan, which is exactly my point.
The median income in Kazhakstan is a few hundred dollars per month. A median person in Kazakhstan couldn't pay for a $12,000 Toyota in a decade.
There is an extremely large list of standard of living concepts that come into play, that collapse under PPP and are entirely ignored, which is what I was alluding to in saying that my examples were represenative concepts.
Here's another one: can you afford to travel? A person making $300 per month in Kazakhstan, do they have the same global travel capabilities of someone making $1,100 per month in Estonia? No they do not.
PPP adjusting makes sense when you compare countries in similar stages of development. As an example, Switzerland (in which I used to live) has a GDP per capita of $79,292 according to IMF. The US (where I live) has $57,436. Do people in Switzerland really live that much better than Americans? Not really - and certainly not the almost %40 better those numbers imply. Everyday stuff costs almost double in Switzerland than the US. As a PPP adjusted GDP, $59,561 for Switzerland looks about right to me.
I don’t know either country well, but a quick read suggests Switzerland offers far more to those who have little - social welfare, healthcare, education and support etc. Is it possible that this gets hidden with the PPP? I know GDP per person doesn’t show it either, but seeing the huge difference between the two immediately got me looking for what goes on there.
Isn't the trick with Switzerland that citizens have a LOT more benefits than non-citizens, but a lot of the overall population (25%) is non-citizen? (California, the most foreign-heavy US state, is about half that, IIRC, and the US overall around 7%.) I'd be wondering about potential gaps hidden in there.
Healthcare, though, is interesting in Switzerland for other reasons. Switzerland is a generally wealthy country that generally spends a lot on health care in a rather private manner, similar to the US in many ways. But the US system is a mess of corruption, bloated government and corporate programs, and inefficiencies. Switzerland is what a sensible free-market attempt to remake the US insurance markets might look like, instead of the "healthy people just shouldn't have to buy insurance" nonsense dogma of the current American right.
"The whole healthcare system is geared toward the general goals of keeping the system competitive across cantonal lines, promoting general public health and reducing costs while encouraging individual responsibility."
They seem to get the same best parts of the US system (short wait times (if you choose the right places here), up-to-date treatment options, flexibility of making your own financial priority choices around different procedures, without a bunch of our downsides.
> Do people in Switzerland really live that much better than Americans?
I actually expect the answer to be a resounding "yes", especially for people away from coasts. Switzerland doesn't even have coasts and it's pleasant to all its citizens!
Oh yes. Those poor folks in flyover country. Why, they can live in homes - the poor bastards. Maybe they are even forced to live on a lake, or God-forbid near a mountain. The horror!
You need to get out more, my man
I'm pretty sure that Switzerland has a considerable amount of homes, lakes, mountains and all that.
I also think it has much smaller occurrence of people on welfare selling and buying coke, drive-by shootings, rusty factories and young-earth theorists in schools. Much much smaller occurrence. Of all that kinds of stuff.
I mean, no. That fancy restaurant is really "almost twice" as good as your McDrive. The latter does have its uses, but it's laughable to compare. It's Swiss for god's sake.
PPP should be use wisely and proper context, just like COLA does when comparing life in a particular country (say, CA vs TX in US). Its not end all and be all, but adds another dimension to understanding "value" proposition.
>In neighboring Turkmenistan, President Saparmurat Niyazov — a despot who requires all clocks to bear his likeness and renamed the days of the week after his family — solved the problem by simply declaring plain salt illegal in 1996 and ordering shops to give each citizen 11 pounds of iodized salt a year at state expense
It appears that Turkmenistan is growing at the same rate according to your Charts, does not have the GDP of Kazakhstan and yet had a higher Iodized Salt Intake. It started at 75% Iodized Salt Consumption where as Kazakhstan started at 29% circa 2000. This is the Health Success they are referring to. Even though Kazakhstan was wealthier and flush with money, their Ionized Salt intake was lower than their poorer neighbors.
Not to take away from your point about those other nations, but GDP per capita isn't always great for this kind of thing due to the marginal utility of money.
Median income (though income isn't exactly GDP) often differs heavily from mean income. There's purchasing power parity too, but I don't know how much it would impact this stuff with salt.
What's the average income of a Kazakh? I suspect that GDP figure appears inflated because a lot of oil wealth is generated and goes to only a small portion of the society
GDP per capital is a terrible measure of average wealth. Qatar's GDP Per Capital is $59,330 per person, and alternates between oil billionares and people who live on $10 a day.
Small factoid: I visited the Tobacco and Salt Museum in Tokyo and found out that Japan was forced to develop domestic salt technology due to isolation plus climate factors (cool temperatures and heavy rainfall). It's not just a historical topic. With increased use of soda and soda derivatives in modern industry salt now has an important role to play in advanced technologies.
Just saw this on the french wikipedia page for iodised salt, not included on the english language version:
> Toxicologie : en 2012, l'Autorité européenne de sécurité des aliments (AESA)7 fait remarquer que alors que la plupart des aliments ont un taux de plomb qui a régulièrement diminué, parmi 734 catégories d'aliments consommés en Europe et analysés (145 000 analyses au total), 87 présentent encore des taux de plomb préoccupants. Le sel iodé est l'un de ces 87 aliments, il serait source - pour un consommateur moyen - de 2,4 % des apports alimentaires quotidiens en plomb. Le rapport de l'AESA ne pose pas d'hypothèse sur l'origine de ce contaminant toxique et indésirable, source de saturnisme.
So that is saying that there are some concerns, reported by 'AESA', with iodised salt containing lead.
>Toxicology: In 2012, the European Food Safety Authority (EFSA) 7 notes that while most foods have lead levels that have steadily decreased, among 734 food categories consumed in Europe and analyzed (145 000 analyzes in total), 87 still have lead levels of concern. Iodized salt is one of these 87 foods, it would be source - for an average consumer - 2.4% of daily intake of lead. The EASA report does not make assumptions about the origin of this toxic and undesirable contaminant, a source of lead poisoning.
When I was young, iq was calculated as intelligence devide by average intelligence multiplied by 100. By that logic, world's iq could never increase. So, what's new definition ?
Surprised nobody has yet mentioned Mark Kurlansky's truly excellent book Salt. It's a fascinating read, and really clues you in to just how central salt was to human life for most of our history.
What about adding lithium to water? I remember of a statistics claiming that in regions of very low natural lithium occurence, suicide rate to be significantly higher
Yup. It's interesting how many modern drinks came from medicinal origins. Original formula Coca-Cola, of course, famously had a healthy dose of cocaine. Tonic water still has a bit of quinine in it, but originally it had much more, and was consumed as prophylaxis against malaria. Then there were various "bitters" and "digestifs" that had purported health benefits. Jägermeister has a whole witches brew of herbs and roots in it. And so on.
It’s a compelling idea, but the science is spotty. There was a popular article in the nytimes suggesting this a few years ago that got people talking, and here’s a good critical response:
I'd think that lithium toxicity would be enough of a danger that it wouldn't work out. People taking lithium as a mood stabilizer need routine blood testing to ensure safe levels of the drug are in their body.
I just looked it up and found out that Morton Kosher salt is not iodized, which is what I've been using for a few years now. A health issue has lead me to avoid processed foods and eating out. I wonder if I'm at risk of being deficient?
But that's statistically speaking - GP seems to be enough outside the norm to spend a few minutes thinking about this. The question I'd ask is whether American soils used for farming are generally enough iodine-rich, or whether the problem rather goes away by people eating lots of processed foods containing iodized salts.
The American diet is high in salt, not iodine. The vast majority of salt in the American diet comes from processed foods, and that salt is not usually fortified with iodine. This has been exacerbated by medical advice to lower salt intake, which means people are using less iodized table salt at home.
Iodine intake by Americans has dropped considerably over the past few decades. So much so that many pregnant women are borderline deficient or actually deficient. There have been several recent, high-quality studies in the U.S. and U.K. showing that pregnant women especially should be taking additional iodine supplements, and that supplementation beyond table salt could result in measurable increases in average IQ even in the U.S. and U.K.
When my wife was pregnant three years ago none of the nutritional supplements I examined (e.g. USP certified products like Nature Made) contained iodine. Partly because of the research and partly because she just doesn't like to cook with much salt, I searched high-and-low for a supplement. The research recommended 80-100 micrograms (mcg). The only supplement I found with such a small amount was a Whole Foods brand product, which I bought with some apprehension given the lack of certified quality control. Too much iodine can have similar deleterious effects as too little iodine, as it likewise screws with thyroid function.
When my wife was pregnant the second time around I bought another bottle of iodine supplements, as well as the exact same Nature Made prenatal vitamins. It wasn't until a few months later did I actually read the list of ingredients on the Nature Made bottle to discover that, sometime in the intervening two years, they began adding iodine! D'oh! So of course she stopped taking the separate iodine supplements.
Presuming the Whole Foods-brand pills were truly in the 100-microgram range, then all was good. The supposed safe upper limit of iodine intake (for pregnant and non-pregnant adults) as recommended by American doctors is actually far below the average intake for many Japanese populations, for whom no known bad effects are known. That said, most of the iodine supplements on the market I saw just had ridiculous and possibly dangerous amounts of iodine. It's a good development that Nature Made (and presumably other reputable prenatal supplements) have begun adding iodine.
For the record, my son turned out to be the smartest kid in the whole, wide world. ;)
You can downvote me all you want but in 2014 even the American Academy of Pediatricians began recommending iodine supplementation, presumably based on the same research I had been reading at the time: https://www.aap.org/en-us/about-the-aap/aap-press-room/pages...
Having a high-quality, upper middle-class diet isn't a simple answer. For example, cruciferous vegetables like broccoli inhibit the uptake and use dietary of iodine. Whatever the causes of the recent regression in wealthy societies, the fact of the matter is that the more modern studies 1) actually measured iodine levels, 2) measured outcomes, and 3) used large, randomized controlled studies. It's a good thing prenatal manufacturers are adding iodine, because even smart people (or perhaps _especially_ smart people) are stubborn and think they know better.
Other good sources include seaweed, supplements, and apparently milk (because an iodine solution used to clean tanks leaches into the milk!). I like to use a piece of kelp in soups, the same way you would use a bay leaf. Or throw a handful of re-hydrated wakame in soup at the end, the way you would use parsley. This video has a lot of info on iodine sources (including what to avoid): https://nutritionfacts.org/video/avoiding-iodine-deficiency-...
The first time I went to visit my Thai friend [1], she sprinkled salt in the water she was using to rinse her vegetables. I asked 'why': she said something about the iodine disinfecting the vegetables. I pointed out that her salt did not actually have iodine in it...
I looked into the matter a little bit. The Thai king had instituted an iodized salt program. Public relations campaigns helped the Thai people appreciate all the different roles of iodine. Iodine is a good antiseptic (it shreds most single-celled organisms by combining with a protein that's not on the cell membranes of multi-celled organisms, iirc), but my friend's strategy to 'disinfect' her vegetables with slightly-salted water was probably an exercise in futility, even if her salt had iodine...
> I just looked it up and found out that Morton Kosher salt is not iodized, which is what I've been using for a few years now.
I remember some research that found Thai women of reproductive age had much better iodine levels if they ate seafood, than if they got their iodine from salt.
Additionally, foods that are grown near the ocean [2] have much better iodine levels than foods grown in regions where almost all the iodine has washed out of the soil (Michigan, etc). Ocean spray 'mists' iodine back onto the land, which increases the iodine content of the food grown thereon.
There's another interesting post on this blog about old fear-mongering about "too much iodine", because patient's thyroids weren't taking up the radioactive iodine that doctors were giving them for 'diagnostic' purposes: http://iodinehistory.blogspot.com/2015/02/i-was-right.html Too much iodine seems to suppresses the thyroid activity, so it is a concern. But this is mostly a problem for people who use supplements. I think one should consume 'enough' iodine to fully saturate their thyroid... A little more than it takes to prevent goitre [3] (when the thyroid swells to try to increase the amount of iodine it pulls out of the blood), but not too much...
Growing up I was taught (in Western Europe) to wash lettuce and other leafy veg in salted water to kill bacteria, or possibly insects or insect eggs. I always understood that it was the salt acting as a disinfectant, not any iodine additive. I'm now questioning whether this was ever necessary.
>> What else can I consume to improve my brain function except salt and low dose lithium?
Try glycine - 1 gram minimum per day. You may be able to find it as Magnesium Glycinate sold strictly as a Mg supplement. The thing is it contains 6-7 time more Glycine that Mg. so if you take 200mg of Magnesium in this form you'll get about 1.3 grams of glycine. It's a neurotransmitter and helps sleep among other things.
Why eat iodized salt? Wy not just take iodine supplement or just eat kelp? Or iodize some other foods perhaps?
By the way I could never understand why do people add salt to everything, I personally don't like it much. Also, isn't it supposed cause cardiovascular health issues?
Because people tend to use salt. You can get iodine other ways, sure.
> Wy not just take iodine supplement
"Just"? For most people, adding a supplement is more of a change than changing which salt they buy (and in much of the world, iodized salt is already the most visible, anyhow.)
> Or iodize some other foods perhaps?
Iodizing salt is easy, and has nesr-universal reach. There aren't many alternatives that share those features.
I agree with you. Iodized salt is a terrible way to get Iodine. The US RDA is 150mcg which many have found to be rather low. I started Iodine more than 5 years ago with around 1mg and also 250mg of Magnesium - this combination cured my asthma (or perhaps it's an ongoing treatment since I never stopped). Nowadays I just use Lugol's Iodine solution - several drops in a few ounces of water say twice a week. It's also great for healing wounds or skin irregularities (strange moles).
Read about Iodine and apoptosis. Iodine and heart disease. Iodine and cancer. It seems to help with a lot of things. Why? Because it's good for the mitochondria among other things.
Cool info, thanks! I didn't knew taking actual iodine solution like Lugol's is safe but now I'm going to explore this (though I am still not sure it's a good idea - isn't it better to take potassium and sodium iodides and/or iodates?).
BTW I have started taking 1125 mg (300% RDA) of magnesium a day about a month ago (still taking) and it has changed my life instantly: almost cured chronic fatigue, sleep disorders and a heart condition I have had since childhood (but as soon as I stop taking this much and try lower doses it comes back).
In the US at least on average people are getting about 1/2 the salt they where 100 years ago. We no longer preserve food with salt primarily we use refrigeration now.
I don't add any salt to my meals (I mostly cook at home and rarely eat in restaurants) because of 2 factors: 1. I don't actually want it (with some exceptions, I don't find salted foods any tastier than unsalted) 2. As a child I was taught salt is extremely bad for health.
This means, provided salt is actually necessary for health, I am certainly not getting enough.
At the same time I find my heart (which has always been quirky, since my very childhood) working notably better if I supplement Potassium Chloride (which tastes almost exactly the same as Sodium Chloride to me, I can hardly tell any difference in taste even if I compare pharmaceutical grade samples).
So the question is: do I really need to start eating common salt (sodium chloride) or can I just supplement potassium chloride on regular basis? Does the body really need sodium or is potassium a reasonable replacement (provided I drink a good amount of water every day too)?
I'd ask your doctor or nutritionist, not some rando on HN. There are lots of smart people here, but none of them knows anything about your medical history.
What I am asking about is scientific knowledge about
whether or not potassium supplement usually lowers the amount of sodium the body needs to function healthily
Simple as this.
You would understand the fact you have to rely on yourself, science and peers' experience and knowledge more than on doctors if you were an immigrant grown up in a "2.5th world" country living in a "2nd world" one very-very low on money rather than a middle-class citizen of the USA ;-) To make it easier to understand I can say I rarely meet the same doctor more than twice, they are rarely brilliant or motivated and they use to make mutually-opposite claims on life-critical matters.
"In neighboring Turkmenistan, President Saparmurat Niyazov — a despot who requires all clocks to bear his likeness and renamed the days of the week after his family [...]"
Yes, but I'm not contesting the renaming. The way its phrased led me to expect that all of the days were renamed after his family members. Perhaps an ambiguity.
Also, can you confirm that clocks must bear his likeness? I've seen a purported Turkmen deny this claim.
Funny enough for most people, I suffered the problem of drinking too much water. I could easily drink 8+ liters a day. This brought me terrible headaches and killed my productivity. I did not find the reason for a long time since in that period I was experimenting with different diets and I could not figure out the cause.
I am all for addressing deficiencies and glad to hear of such successes, but I hope we get better at making such things available, but not mandatory.
I have a serious medical condition. If they wanted to make this mandatory, I would need to campaign against it in order to protect my health and life. It bothers me to see the desire for options tarred as if that desire is mere prejudice and cannot have legitimate concerns behind it.
Yes, we should, and if you live in Canada or the US, you probably do. If your diet is mostly fast food, you may not get enough, because fast food contains lots of salt that isn't iodized. I did a little reading about it for a blog post I wrote a while ago, and learned about something called the "Goiter Belt" in the USA.
Flynn effect is a result of misunderstanding of IQ scale: "The basic misunderstanding is assuming that intelligence test scores are units of measurement like inches or liters or grams. They are not. Inches, liters and grams are ratio scales where zero means zero and 100 units are twice 50 units. Intelligence test scores estimate a construct using interval scales and have meaning only relative to other people of the same age and sex. People with high scores generally do better on a broad range of mental ability tests, but someone with an IQ score of 130 is not 30% smarter then someone with an IQ score of 100. A score of 130 puts the person in the highest 2% of the population whereas a score of 100 is at the 50th percentile. A change from an IQ score from 100 to 103 is not the same as a change from 133 to 136. This makes simple interpretation of intelligence test score changes impossible."
Source: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3950413/
208 comments
[ 2.1 ms ] story [ 134 ms ] thread```Iodine is good. Therefore adding iodine to something makes something else that is also good.```
Is that right? Why not add iodine to anything other than salt? Iodized pepper, iodized milk, iodized iodine... Why salt?
• Burger King usually uses it
• Subway does not
• McDonald's usually does not
• Taco Bell, Kentucky Fried Chicken, and Panda Express are in the middle.
There's variability from restaurant to restaurant in a given chain because usually minor items like salt, ketchup, etc., are left up to the local franchise owner to buy from a supplier of their choice.
[1] https://www.medscape.com/viewarticle/720930
Unrefined sea salt contains small amounts of magnesium and calcium halides and sulfates, traces of algal products, salt-resistant bacteria and sediment particles. The calcium and magnesium salts confer a faintly bitter overtone... Algal products contribute a mildly "fishy" or "sea-air" odour, the latter from organobromine compounds. Sediments, the proportion of which varies with the source, give the salt a dull grey appearance. Since taste and aroma compounds are often detectable by humans in minute concentrations, sea salt may have a more complex flavor than pure sodium chloride when sprinkled on top of food.
Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salt
It's the people who think thallium is an important nutrient in Himalayan salt that are of concern to me.
Whereas, according to [1], iodized salt has these "chemicals used to keep the salt from absorbing water and caking", which dilute the mineral content per gram: magnesium carbonate, calcium silicate, calcium phosphate, magnesium silicate, and calcium carbonate.
0: https://www.livestrong.com/article/534033-what-are-the-84-mi...
1: http://www.madehow.com/Volume-2/Salt.html
Total crap.
Farmed salt of today is contaminated with anything that is in the sea, including microplastics. If you don't want "chemicals" and want "natural" avoid farmed salt.
How do you propose to remove grains of plastic the size of salt crystals from the salt? And once done is it affordable or commercially viable?
http://pubs.rsc.org/en/content/articlelanding/2017/ay/c6ay02...
253 days ago
223 points
56 comments
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14073368
However, the iodine is independent of the anti-caking additives. You can have iodized salt which still cakes up when it is humid, but why would you want to?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tungsten
On top of that, not even your [0] claims that most of those elements are necessary nutrients for humans.
If Himalayan sea salt actually contains detectable quantities of basically all the elements naturally occurring in all creation, that's goddamn fascinating (although I'd probably say "bullshit" just on that point), but I'm not sure why it makes the salt good to eat.
Note: I previously worked on an iodated salt program in West Africa for the World Food Programme.
"How do you get people to ____" is a fundamental question in life with many approaches to answering it, ie marketing, public relations, missionary studies, theater, etc.
From what I pointed out below, this salt processing seems to have underappreciated trade offs. But most importantly, the overarching picture of nutrient availability, not just for iodine, seems to have a bigger challenge at hand worth solving than simply using salt as a vehicle for one - which spirulina would help with in terms of protein and mercury / biotoxin removal, for example.
The point is that you don't go looking for a new thing for people to consume to get them the nutrients they need, you fortify what they already eat.
And, yes, no shit. How to get other people to do something is a fundamental question in life and it just so happens that in life, public health is about getting people to do stuff that's good for their and society's health.
Nope, you could justify very specific pragmatic approaches, just like the parent did.
And, sure, there may have been some other equally good alternatives, but analysis paralysis helps no one. So, salt.
Depending on people deciding to eat healthy is a surefire way to fail to meet public health goals.
If you're running some sort of anti-malnutrition campaign that involves local cultivation of spiritual then sure, why not add iodine to it? (Assuming that this is technically feasible. Don't know whether it is or not.) But if you are trying to solve the specific problem of iodine deficiency, then I'm not sure why you would start with "first, grow a bunch of spirulina..."
Adding a small bag of sodium iodate to a big bag of sodium chloride and mixing requires no skill or special equipment and any idiot, or shall I say cretin, can do it. Whereas running a bioreactor and somehow convince people of eating the gunk that comes out of it is far more complicated and expensive.
Edit: and you'd still have to add iodine to said bioreactor, you might as well add it directly to the salt.
People get away with iodizing salt because the recommended dose is so small, so it can be almost undetectable. If you started adding iron and zinc to salt, it would start tasting like a multivitamin.
1. Kosher salt has larger granules which are easier to measure between your fingers.
2. Kosher salt is very different from table salt by volume so they're not directly interchangeable
3. Kosher salt has acquired a certain reputation like extra virgin olive oil so it's used even when not necessary
Unless you're fermenting or canning, iodine makes no difference to food.
It honestly hadn’t occurred to me that iodine could inhibit fermentation, and I had just recently purchased a box of iodized salt for the first time in years because of the reasons discussed in this thread. But lo, the fermentation blogs all seem to confirm this. I hope the salsa I have fermenting in my cupboard isn’t ruined.
It was also wildly successful because at the time, salt was turning from an expensive good of varying quality produced by thousands of companies to an extremely cheap good of uniform quality produced by a near monopoly in the United States. Public health advocates were able to get just a couple of companies on board and iodize basically all the salt, which then reached basically all the people, basically solving the problem completely overnight.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3509517/#__sec6...
(There are people that don't drink milk, there are people that don't like pepper, the dosing is so small that distributing it separately would be less successful, etc)
Where did Western people get iodine before it was necessary to add it to salt? Has our soil been so depleted that iodine is no longer present in the vegetables grown in it?
This is one of the many little invisible progresses that has steadily made our life expectancy increase all over the 20th century.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iodine_deficiency_in_China
https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kropfband
Iodine is so soluble that it's quite scarce other than in the ocean. And yep, people who lived inland (and thus didn't eat seafood) in premodern times were often iodine deficient.
Some lived near the sea and had high seafood diets, but most were just iodine deficient, which doesn't stop a population from surviving, though it leads to suboptimal outcomes in a number of dimensions.
There is this wierd pervasive mythology that before modern times people lived in an ideal state (at least in terms of nutrition), so any present deficiency from the ideal must reflect a difference between modern and premodern society. Past conditions were at least minimally adequate for survival and reproduction, or we wouldn't be here, but there's no real basis for assuming that they were in any way ideal.
Since the identification of the widespread deficiency and it's effects which motivated iodization of salt was first in the West among Western people, probably not meaningfully. Unlike sunlight which is highly latitude dependent, iodine availability is much more location dependent, and the high availability places (places with access to fish, approximately—both saltwater and many freshwater locations) are also where pre-civilization human populations tended to be most concentrated.
Let's repeat that because it's important and counterintuitive: Those conditions were ideal for us because our species changed to fit the conditions.
What's happened since is a crazy rollercoaster ride of life conditions changin much faster than evolution has any chance of keeping up with, and premodern society in the sense of preindustrial can in no way be presumed to be ideal.
Hundreds of thousands of years is not a really long time in evolutionary terms, and evolution doesn't necessarily, even given a long time, get out of a good-enough local optimum to “extremely well adapted”.
It's also debatable whether conditions in which humans evolved are really a steady state.
More to the point, humans being ideal for the conditions—what the argument from evolution suggests—is not the same as the conditions being ideal for humans.
I think violence, poverty and disease were the bigger factors.
All I'm claiming is that our digestive system is adapted to what we had to eat where our species evolved.
No, you wouldn't, as a European of any social class, except maybe in the very late middle ages at the boundary of the Renaissance; potatoes were a New World import in the 16th century, which might just still be considered the Middle Ages in some parts of Europe.
Potatoes are a New World crop. Medieval European peasants didn't have them.
It's possible this has some contribution, but it's not the main source.
> It's not inherent in the dairy itself
Yes, it is; in cows (and humans) mother's milk is where young who aren't eating anything else get their iodine.
> otherwise we could just eat the cow's grass to obtain iodine
Well, except for the fact that grass doesn't work well in the human digestive system, and you'd have to eat a lot of it, sure.
It was an important source of protein in centuries past, and was traded all over Europe. It would've also been an effective way for inland residents to get iodine.
In Australia the situation is a lot worse, she said, because our soils are so depleted. No just of Iodine but many other nutrients.
There is a common confusion between salt (sodium chloride) and sodium, many falsely believing salt is not used only for taste but it's essential for health.
Sodium is a vital element that is found in almost all plants and animals and there is no need for an extra sodium intake because our food has plenty.
Sodium and potassium balance in the body is essential for cell physiology and our health
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Na%2B/K%2B-ATPase
No.
>there is no need for an extra sodium intake because our food has plenty
Depends on the food and other environmental factors. The reason why a preference for salt evolved in the first place was because we didn't get enough salt in our food, especially warm climates, which is incidentally where we started out. Same reason why herbivores frequent salt licks, their normal diets don't contain enough sodium or other minerals.
What you said would have been true if we were carnivores.
I love to find these tiny pieces of trivia :)
[1] http://www.significadode.org/tener%20poca%20sal%20en%20la%20...
https://cvc.cervantes.es/literatura/clasicos/quijote/edicion...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Calabash
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1311910/
https://www.givewell.org/international/technical/programs/sa...
They don't consider it as good an investment as anti-malarial work but it's close enough to be worth mentioning which makes salt iodization charities a much, much more efficient use of your money than most charitable causes if you're just trying to minimize human suffering.
(Another good one last time I looked was deworming https://www.givewell.org/international/technical/programs/de... which scored quite highly, but again not as well as anti-malarial mosquito nets).
Malaria nets also score extremely well in their ranking system because those charities can accept a TON of money before diminishing returns start to kick in. Against Malaria has said "we could easily accept >$50 million in donations" where the two Iodization organizations GiveWell tracks have said they could probably only accept $2-5 million without major changes (even though both of them lost their primary funding sources in the past few years and are thus decreasing their programming).
This all doesn't mean GiveWell is wrong in their current recommendations. They are up front about disclosing the problems with their methodology, but you should keep it in mind when choosing which charities to donate to.
> Even moderate deficiency, especially in pregnant women and infants, lowers intelligence by 10 to 15 I.Q. points, shaving incalculable potential off a nation’s development.
> All of them — Kazakhstan, Turkmenistan, Tajikistan, Uzbekistan, Kyrghzstan — saw their economies break down with the collapse of the Soviet Union.
Yes, Kazakhstan is a developing country according to the IMF and those who have seen Borat. Using it as an example of the public health success going on in Central Asia is disingenuous however because Kazakhstan is remarkably wealthy compared to its neighbors[0]. It's GDP PPP per capita at $25,263 is only a little behind the digital darling Estonia's at $29,364. Kazakhstan's neighbors like Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan have theirs at $3,551 and $2,980 respectively.
A lay western reader not knowing is particularities of Central Asia could easily make assumptions and walk away from this article with erroneous ideas. The article, in my reading and without the context, suggests a iodine->health->wealth causality. In Kazakhstan's case oil->wealth->health would be more apt.
[0] https://www.google.com/publicdata/explore?ds=d5bncppjof8f9_&...
If you go by PPP, you'll be falsely led to believe Iraq is on par with Iran and just a little behind Turkey. Iraq is a barely functioning, destroyed nation, in the midst of a full rebuild.
According to PPP, in 2016 Puerto Rico was just barely behind Japan. New Zealand is below Puerto Rico.
According to PPP, Equatorial Guinea is approximately on par with Finland, France, Canada, Japan, UK, Belgium.
Oman and Saudi Arabia are above Belgium. Saudi is above the Netherlands and Sweden. Is PPP aware of the actual living conditions in Saudi Arabia at the median? What the median income is in Saudi Arabia? Nope.
Like I said, it's laughable.
PPP purports to enable a better comparison stick. It fails entirely in all cases. Belgium & Denmark are below Saudi? The only proper response to that is: bullshit.
PPP is not only universally wildly inaccurate, it leaves out dozens of critical economic factors that are derived from objective economic capability rather than what the price of a hamburger is from one nation to the next.
PPP is a subjective measurement, and a particularly bad one. Who is on the ground doing the perfectly objective comparisons in every nation simultaneously, living there for a decade to really get a sense of things across the whole economic landscape? Nobody. PPP leads to mediocre guess-work, which gets you to New Zealand being below Puerto Rico.
What is your military capable of defense wise? Try basing that on subjective economic relativism, see how it works out for you in a war.
What kind of medical technology can your nation afford? What's the level of medical technology that your people have access to at the median? That collapses under PPP, because the best and latest medical equipment is expensive.
Can you buy a BMW or a $4,000 poorly made car that is guaranteed to fall apart and have far more problems than eg a Lexus? While simultaneously, who would confuse the standard of living impact of driving an extraordinarily mediocre $4,000 vehicle vs a Mercedes or BMW?
If your GDP per capita (non-PPP) is eg $35,000, then I can stack you right up against Japan or New Zealand and immediately have a good idea of what your national income potential is far more often than not, and I can tell a lot more about your nation's real capabilities at the median.
The medtech & car examples are representative concepts, they apply to pretty much everything else that defines standard of living. PPP is a dumb (its simplistic nature ignores almost everything that's actually important to the standard of living of actual humans) economic concept in the best of cases; in most cases, it's entirely worthless.
Is it a really great idea to have an accurate comparison of the standard of living and economic capabilities (both have a high correlation to non-PPP GDP), on a relative basis, between nations? Yes! Ten times over, yes. Do the annually published PPP numbers actually do anything like that? No, not even close. PPP is a nice idea, that's all it is unless you want to expend extraordinary sums of money and labor to be on the ground, with extremely objective and well trained experts doing the comparisons in an extremely scientific manner (rather than a clown at the IMF throwing darts based on hamburger prices).
What's a better measure? This is where the laziness of common PPP numbers comes into play. The better measure is to get into the mud and get really dirty, in volumes of accurate data, tracking, observation, experience. In reality we don't even have mediocre access to accurate, detailed economic data for the majority of the 195 nations. On that single fact, PPP collapses as it is.
How accurate is the economic data that we have for eg Brazil (207 million people), and how intricate can we get while maintaining that accuracy? In this case, Brazil is reasonably representative of the global median. We have low quality vague guesses at best. Below Brazil, it just gets that much worse.
It's extremeley difficult and expensive to do a nation to nation comparison which is then adjusted subjectively to measure relative condition. So many things would inherently come into play that can't be easily measured. It would require immense on the ground effort and measurement, on a constant basis, along with ideally at least semi-accurate wider economic figures from the national/regional/local government structures inside a given nation (only a few dozen nations have anything like that).
US: $57.6k Estonia: $17.6k China: $8.1k Khazakhstan: $7.5k Kyrgystan: $1.1k Tajikistan: $0.8k
GP's argument stands with the straight GDP/capita, except for the comparison to Estonia, which was a side remark anyway.
[1] https://www.google.com/publicdata/explore?ds=d5bncppjof8f9_&...
How much better off is your outlook if you're currently 40 years old and expected to live to 78 instead of 76. Not much. If you could time travel you'd arrange that the resources that you would have devoted to extending your life those last two years be instead devoted to more time with your children while they were young, more time at the beach, more time preparing food and hanging out with family or having sex.
And we can talk about $4000 poorly made cars and laugh, but the difference between a $12k Toyota and a $60k BMW is marginal or even negative if you prioritize things like reliability or maintenance. They are better only if you are richer and can afford the maintenance.
The life of someone in Costa Rica is, on average, worse than someone in Canada, but not by the 4x difference in PPP adjusted GDP, and certainly not by the 5x+ difference in raw GDP numbers.
But you're right, I wouldn't use PPP to build a military. Raw numbers work better there, so you get both an upvote and a generally dissenting comment.
The median income in Kazhakstan is a few hundred dollars per month. A median person in Kazakhstan couldn't pay for a $12,000 Toyota in a decade.
There is an extremely large list of standard of living concepts that come into play, that collapse under PPP and are entirely ignored, which is what I was alluding to in saying that my examples were represenative concepts.
Here's another one: can you afford to travel? A person making $300 per month in Kazakhstan, do they have the same global travel capabilities of someone making $1,100 per month in Estonia? No they do not.
Healthcare, though, is interesting in Switzerland for other reasons. Switzerland is a generally wealthy country that generally spends a lot on health care in a rather private manner, similar to the US in many ways. But the US system is a mess of corruption, bloated government and corporate programs, and inefficiencies. Switzerland is what a sensible free-market attempt to remake the US insurance markets might look like, instead of the "healthy people just shouldn't have to buy insurance" nonsense dogma of the current American right.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Healthcare_in_Switzerland
"The whole healthcare system is geared toward the general goals of keeping the system competitive across cantonal lines, promoting general public health and reducing costs while encouraging individual responsibility."
They seem to get the same best parts of the US system (short wait times (if you choose the right places here), up-to-date treatment options, flexibility of making your own financial priority choices around different procedures, without a bunch of our downsides.
I actually expect the answer to be a resounding "yes", especially for people away from coasts. Switzerland doesn't even have coasts and it's pleasant to all its citizens!
I also think it has much smaller occurrence of people on welfare selling and buying coke, drive-by shootings, rusty factories and young-earth theorists in schools. Much much smaller occurrence. Of all that kinds of stuff.
I mean, no. That fancy restaurant is really "almost twice" as good as your McDrive. The latter does have its uses, but it's laughable to compare. It's Swiss for god's sake.
https://www.consumerreports.org/car-reliability-owner-satisf...
It appears that Turkmenistan is growing at the same rate according to your Charts, does not have the GDP of Kazakhstan and yet had a higher Iodized Salt Intake. It started at 75% Iodized Salt Consumption where as Kazakhstan started at 29% circa 2000. This is the Health Success they are referring to. Even though Kazakhstan was wealthier and flush with money, their Ionized Salt intake was lower than their poorer neighbors.
https://knoema.com/WBWDIGDF2017Sep/world-development-indicat...
Median income (though income isn't exactly GDP) often differs heavily from mean income. There's purchasing power parity too, but I don't know how much it would impact this stuff with salt.
Suggest you google "average" and "median".
https://www.jti.co.jp/Culture/museum_e/collection/salt/index...
> Toxicologie : en 2012, l'Autorité européenne de sécurité des aliments (AESA)7 fait remarquer que alors que la plupart des aliments ont un taux de plomb qui a régulièrement diminué, parmi 734 catégories d'aliments consommés en Europe et analysés (145 000 analyses au total), 87 présentent encore des taux de plomb préoccupants. Le sel iodé est l'un de ces 87 aliments, il serait source - pour un consommateur moyen - de 2,4 % des apports alimentaires quotidiens en plomb. Le rapport de l'AESA ne pose pas d'hypothèse sur l'origine de ce contaminant toxique et indésirable, source de saturnisme.
So that is saying that there are some concerns, reported by 'AESA', with iodised salt containing lead.
Couldn't find any original source for that, though, so far (looking here: http://www.efsa.europa.eu/).
>Toxicology: In 2012, the European Food Safety Authority (EFSA) 7 notes that while most foods have lead levels that have steadily decreased, among 734 food categories consumed in Europe and analyzed (145 000 analyzes in total), 87 still have lead levels of concern. Iodized salt is one of these 87 foods, it would be source - for an average consumer - 2.4% of daily intake of lead. The EASA report does not make assumptions about the origin of this toxic and undesirable contaminant, a source of lead poisoning.
Surprised nobody has yet mentioned Mark Kurlansky's truly excellent book Salt. It's a fascinating read, and really clues you in to just how central salt was to human life for most of our history.
How is it minorities of extremists keep holding back progress in health, education and transportation around the world?
http://www.rff.org/blog/2014/should-we-all-take-bit-lithium
You can buy low-dose lithium orotate supplements very inexpensively in the US however, if you want to do an n=1 experiment.
Similarly, people going for trendy sea salt are likely to be missing the recommended iodine.
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/07/21/well/eat/should-we-be-buy...
User kosher salt.
Consider getting your vitamin D levels checked every once in awhile; that's the one you might be low on.
Iodine intake by Americans has dropped considerably over the past few decades. So much so that many pregnant women are borderline deficient or actually deficient. There have been several recent, high-quality studies in the U.S. and U.K. showing that pregnant women especially should be taking additional iodine supplements, and that supplementation beyond table salt could result in measurable increases in average IQ even in the U.S. and U.K.
When my wife was pregnant three years ago none of the nutritional supplements I examined (e.g. USP certified products like Nature Made) contained iodine. Partly because of the research and partly because she just doesn't like to cook with much salt, I searched high-and-low for a supplement. The research recommended 80-100 micrograms (mcg). The only supplement I found with such a small amount was a Whole Foods brand product, which I bought with some apprehension given the lack of certified quality control. Too much iodine can have similar deleterious effects as too little iodine, as it likewise screws with thyroid function.
When my wife was pregnant the second time around I bought another bottle of iodine supplements, as well as the exact same Nature Made prenatal vitamins. It wasn't until a few months later did I actually read the list of ingredients on the Nature Made bottle to discover that, sometime in the intervening two years, they began adding iodine! D'oh! So of course she stopped taking the separate iodine supplements.
Presuming the Whole Foods-brand pills were truly in the 100-microgram range, then all was good. The supposed safe upper limit of iodine intake (for pregnant and non-pregnant adults) as recommended by American doctors is actually far below the average intake for many Japanese populations, for whom no known bad effects are known. That said, most of the iodine supplements on the market I saw just had ridiculous and possibly dangerous amounts of iodine. It's a good development that Nature Made (and presumably other reputable prenatal supplements) have begun adding iodine.
For the record, my son turned out to be the smartest kid in the whole, wide world. ;)
Having a high-quality, upper middle-class diet isn't a simple answer. For example, cruciferous vegetables like broccoli inhibit the uptake and use dietary of iodine. Whatever the causes of the recent regression in wealthy societies, the fact of the matter is that the more modern studies 1) actually measured iodine levels, 2) measured outcomes, and 3) used large, randomized controlled studies. It's a good thing prenatal manufacturers are adding iodine, because even smart people (or perhaps _especially_ smart people) are stubborn and think they know better.
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14140086 (my previous comment about this passenger)
I looked into the matter a little bit. The Thai king had instituted an iodized salt program. Public relations campaigns helped the Thai people appreciate all the different roles of iodine. Iodine is a good antiseptic (it shreds most single-celled organisms by combining with a protein that's not on the cell membranes of multi-celled organisms, iirc), but my friend's strategy to 'disinfect' her vegetables with slightly-salted water was probably an exercise in futility, even if her salt had iodine...
> I just looked it up and found out that Morton Kosher salt is not iodized, which is what I've been using for a few years now.
I remember some research that found Thai women of reproductive age had much better iodine levels if they ate seafood, than if they got their iodine from salt.
Additionally, foods that are grown near the ocean [2] have much better iodine levels than foods grown in regions where almost all the iodine has washed out of the soil (Michigan, etc). Ocean spray 'mists' iodine back onto the land, which increases the iodine content of the food grown thereon.
[2] http://iodinehistory.blogspot.com/2015/02/an-iodine-road-tri...
There's another interesting post on this blog about old fear-mongering about "too much iodine", because patient's thyroids weren't taking up the radioactive iodine that doctors were giving them for 'diagnostic' purposes: http://iodinehistory.blogspot.com/2015/02/i-was-right.html Too much iodine seems to suppresses the thyroid activity, so it is a concern. But this is mostly a problem for people who use supplements. I think one should consume 'enough' iodine to fully saturate their thyroid... A little more than it takes to prevent goitre [3] (when the thyroid swells to try to increase the amount of iodine it pulls out of the blood), but not too much...
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goitre
Try glycine - 1 gram minimum per day. You may be able to find it as Magnesium Glycinate sold strictly as a Mg supplement. The thing is it contains 6-7 time more Glycine that Mg. so if you take 200mg of Magnesium in this form you'll get about 1.3 grams of glycine. It's a neurotransmitter and helps sleep among other things.
By the way I could never understand why do people add salt to everything, I personally don't like it much. Also, isn't it supposed cause cardiovascular health issues?
Because people tend to use salt. You can get iodine other ways, sure.
> Wy not just take iodine supplement
"Just"? For most people, adding a supplement is more of a change than changing which salt they buy (and in much of the world, iodized salt is already the most visible, anyhow.)
> Or iodize some other foods perhaps?
Iodizing salt is easy, and has nesr-universal reach. There aren't many alternatives that share those features.
Read about Iodine and apoptosis. Iodine and heart disease. Iodine and cancer. It seems to help with a lot of things. Why? Because it's good for the mitochondria among other things.
BTW I have started taking 1125 mg (300% RDA) of magnesium a day about a month ago (still taking) and it has changed my life instantly: almost cured chronic fatigue, sleep disorders and a heart condition I have had since childhood (but as soon as I stop taking this much and try lower doses it comes back).
[Salt: Are you getting Enough?] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=amJ-ev8Ial8
This means, provided salt is actually necessary for health, I am certainly not getting enough.
At the same time I find my heart (which has always been quirky, since my very childhood) working notably better if I supplement Potassium Chloride (which tastes almost exactly the same as Sodium Chloride to me, I can hardly tell any difference in taste even if I compare pharmaceutical grade samples).
So the question is: do I really need to start eating common salt (sodium chloride) or can I just supplement potassium chloride on regular basis? Does the body really need sodium or is potassium a reasonable replacement (provided I drink a good amount of water every day too)?
whether or not potassium supplement usually lowers the amount of sodium the body needs to function healthily
Simple as this.
You would understand the fact you have to rely on yourself, science and peers' experience and knowledge more than on doctors if you were an immigrant grown up in a "2.5th world" country living in a "2nd world" one very-very low on money rather than a middle-class citizen of the USA ;-) To make it easier to understand I can say I rarely meet the same doctor more than twice, they are rarely brilliant or motivated and they use to make mutually-opposite claims on life-critical matters.
I'm pretty sure both claims are false.
[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Renaming_of_Turkmen_months_a...
Also, can you confirm that clocks must bear his likeness? I've seen a purported Turkmen deny this claim.
The condition is called "Hyponatremia": too low levels of sodium in blood (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyponatremia).
I make sure now to drink less water and add a bit more of salt to my food.
I have a serious medical condition. If they wanted to make this mandatory, I would need to campaign against it in order to protect my health and life. It bothers me to see the desire for options tarred as if that desire is mere prejudice and cannot have legitimate concerns behind it.
http://rocketships.ca/blog/vitamins-and-anarchy/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SAT#History
https://www.erikthered.com/tutor/historical-average-SAT-scor...
https://www.infoplease.com/us/higher-education/average-sat-s...
Flynn effect is a result of misunderstanding of IQ scale: "The basic misunderstanding is assuming that intelligence test scores are units of measurement like inches or liters or grams. They are not. Inches, liters and grams are ratio scales where zero means zero and 100 units are twice 50 units. Intelligence test scores estimate a construct using interval scales and have meaning only relative to other people of the same age and sex. People with high scores generally do better on a broad range of mental ability tests, but someone with an IQ score of 130 is not 30% smarter then someone with an IQ score of 100. A score of 130 puts the person in the highest 2% of the population whereas a score of 100 is at the 50th percentile. A change from an IQ score from 100 to 103 is not the same as a change from 133 to 136. This makes simple interpretation of intelligence test score changes impossible." Source: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3950413/
Also worth reading:
http://www.iapsych.com/iqmr/fe/LinkedDocuments/rodgers1999.p...
https://newrepublic.com/article/115787/rising-iq-scores-dont...
https://www.cato-unbound.org/2007/11/08/linda-s-gottfredson/...