By E.R. Yarham

Summary: To modern medical thinking, salt is a health menace. As in most things nutritional, medicine doesn’t have a clue. In this article from World Science Review, E.R. Yarham discusses the absolute necessity of (whole) salt for people who eat an agriculturally based diet heavy in cooked foods. “Only where men live mainly on milk and flesh—the latter consumed raw or roasted—is it possible to go without ordinary salt,” he writes. Yarham recounts the experiment of a doctor and three students who deprived themselves entirely of dietary salt. Within a week “cramp developed in the muscles, and the experimenters suffered from excessive fatigue and a general sense of exhaustion.” Yarham presents numerous historical examples of the value of salt both nutritionally and monetarily, including the famous custom of Roman soldiers being paid in salt, a practice from which the word salary evolved. Reprint 99, 1958.