iguana do you think its a little bit ironic that, perhaps our ancestors did not use such specialized tools as salt grinders, and perhaps they did not also stare into computer screens and have lengthy discussions backed by hearsay and science about the minutia of diet
Jessica, your argument is often used as a reason why a raw paleo nutrition would be silly nowadays. The fact that our ancestors didn’t do this or that doesn’t prevent me to use my computer, ride my bike, sail on my windsurfboards, drive my car. This forum is only about raw paleo
nutrition (as its name implies), not about paleo lifestyle. Perhaps a completely paleo lifestyle would be better for us if it were still possible but that’s outside the field of this forum.
See discussion aid #1 in my signature (“I do what works best for me”). I'm not into re-enactment for re-enactment's sake. If something helps, I don't see the point of not doing something just because animals or ancestors didn't do it. Animals and ancestors can be a clue about what to do, but not the final answer.
It’s difficult to know what works best for us in the long run. For example, a lot of people feel fine with cooked modern food: coffee, beer, bread and cheeseburgers may seem to work best, but what about the long term?
The whole raw paleo nutrition concept is based on the hypothesis of an incomplete adaptation to Neolithic foods and modern cooked foods. The precautionary principle logically compels us to avoid all those potentially harmful foods, even if they don’t immediately generate apparent troubles. A cooked Neolithic diet including a lot of dairy worked fine for me during several years. Troubles only appeared after decades. There are a lot of substances such as asbestos and certain chemicals which can cause much delayed troubles.
If they found themselves consuming too much salt as a result, they could end the experiment.
How would they know that they consume too much salt?
As I pointed out, salt is naturally mixed with seaweed, seawater, saltwater fish, land mammal blood, and it's in most foods, including veggies, as Hannah pointed out. The amount of salt in plants and animals varies depending on the salt content of the local soils, so adding salt might just raise the sodium level of a food up to the natural level it would have reached in an area with higher-sodium soils. I think you even mentioned that it's OK to add salt to water and drink it. So why is it OK to add salt to water and to eat foods that contain salt, but not to add salt to foods if one is still deficient in it?
I don’t remember having written that and I never did it myself. Adding salt to food may induce over consumption of that food. It seems evident that an unsalted food may taste bland and unattractive, but salted it may become palatable. The result may likely be that you end up by eating a food you should not eat, or that you eat too much of it, or that you eat too much salt.
What evidence are you basing that on? Is that something GCB tracked? Did some Instinctos ignore GCB's advice on salt but follow all his other advice to the letter and suffer serious problems years later? If so, how many and how would he know that they didn't secretly ignore his advice on other matters?
No, nothing of those sorts. Once again, it’s obvious that some chemicals and asbestos as well as cooked, Neolithic and modern food neither kill nor make everybody ill on the spot, but may have deleterious effects in the long run, several years latter.
So where do I find this seaweeds and sea water? I don't live near the coast.
I mean you're being really extreme regarding processing here.
Whether I drink sea water or eat similar amount of salt that comes from that same sea water where the water has evaporated under the sun..
I never wrote that we shouldn’t eat sea salt from evaporated seawater.
You can push to be "in tune with your instincts", but obviously in some cases it can be dangerous, e.g. "I'm away from salty foods or waters but I won't eat salt as it will override my instincts".
I don’t see any problem in eating sea salt, sea crystals or Himalayan salt, for example.
