Salt Essentials - Redmonds Real Salt

Salt is the forgotten essential nutrient of life. In order of importance, we need air, water, then salt!

In fact, our bodies are made of salt water! Many people experiencing energy lulls, chronic fatigue, brain fog, and more are actually salt deficient!
 
Meet Darryl Bouchard from Redmond Real Salt - the best salt on earth! 

Darryl has a Bachelor of Science and an MBA, and he has been in the family business of salt, out in Redmond, Utah, for his entire life. So he knows everything there is to know about this subject. 

Tune into this episode and learn how salt is powering your life! 

Learn how salt can help you...

• Build a strong, healthy, fully optimized body that will keep you powerful and energized. 
• Alleviate common ailments that you may not attribute to a lack of salt. 
• Recover from illness; you get a solution of 'salt water' in an IV when you go to the hospital! 
• Improve your cognitive performance. 
• Fix energy slumps during your day. 
• And much, much more!!

This episode has some amazing information you can use immediately to improve body composition, exercise performance, and overall body health! 

Learn the historical value of salt and how it has, in fact, shaped our modern-day society in ways you never imagined. 

I'm very excited to be able to share this episode with you! Enjoy! 

Disclaimer:

This podcast is for general informational purposes only. It should not be used to self-diagnose, and it is not a substitute for a medical exam, cure, treatment, diagnosis, prescription, or recommendation. Always seek the advice of a physician or other qualified health provider with any questions you may have regarding a medical condition.

Transcript

[00:00:00] Ryan: Hey everyone. Welcome to our next episode here. I wanted to introduce you to somebody who is going to help us dive deep into the world of salt and what that really means and what it can do to improve your health. His name is Daryl Bouchard and he is from Redmond Real Salt, and he is gonna talk to us today about all things salt.

[00:00:26] Ryan: He has a Bachelor of Science and an MBA, and he has been in the family business out in Redmond, Utah for his entire life. So he knows everything there is to know about this subject. And we're gonna get a treat here today. Everything from how you produce Salt, why it's so amazing, and what Redmond Real Salt really is.

[00:00:44] Ryan: So welcome, Darrell. Thanks for being here. 

[00:00:47] Darryl: Ryan, thanks for having me on the show. As as a kid growing up, my dad would say, Hey, if you don't straighten up, I'm gonna send you to the salt mines. And he wasn't kidding. So, yeah, I grew up in the salt industries. Th in the salt business, people think salt [00:01:00] is salt and it's, what's more boring?

[00:01:02] Darryl: Or if you look up commodity in the dictionary, salt is sometimes referred to it. And so it's overlooked, but there's a real magic and beauty of salt and hopefully we can cover some of those fun things today. 

[00:01:15] Ryan: Yeah, I'm super excited, here at the practice and with all my clients as a health coach, we actually use Redmond Real Salt and have for going on 15 years now as the go-to Healthy Salt option.

[00:01:28] Ryan: And it's always an interesting conversation. So I'm very interested to hear about your intimate knowledge about this. So I'd like to start with just a little bit about, your what you've learned about salt being in the business your entire life, and what you could say about it as an industry in and of itself.

[00:01:47] Darryl: So that's a great question. Good, good. Starting good starting place. So, salt is often has this bad rap. We think about salt and, oh, we, it's, it's dangerous. We have too much of it. My doctor told me [00:02:00] to, to, to eat less. What's interesting though about salt is every civilization has started around access to the salt deposits because it was so essential for life.

[00:02:10] Darryl: In fact, the Romans Roman soldiers were paid in salt. The term salary was because they were paid in salt. Every religious text mentioned salt. It was given as a source of trade. It was part of religious ceremonies. So salt was always a critical part of life.

[00:02:28] Darryl: Every war up through and including, wars here in the US up until more recent times were, were won and lost because of access to the salt deposits even in the Civil War, the, the north took out the South Saltworks in the Carolinas, and if you have an army advancing and you don't have access to salt to preserve your food before the refrigerator, it was essential.

[00:02:51] Darryl: Not to mention the, the cramps and all of the, the just the important body functions that salt plays a role in. So [00:03:00] salt is really this forgotten nutrient for thousands of years. It sustains life, it's a source of trade. And then in the last hundred we hear that salt's bad and we've gotta eat less and it's gonna be this dangerous thing.

[00:03:12] Darryl: So somewhere between the dawn of man, when salt was essential for life and gave us everything to today, people hear, that salt's bad. But yet when you go into the hospital, the first thing that's gonna happen is they're gonna give you an IV of saline solution, which is saltwater, in fact an IV of anything

[00:03:35] Darryl: but saltwater would, would kill you if you got an IV of distilled water. Your cells would shrivel an IV of tap water, an IV of coffee. It sounds great in the morning, but that would also kill us. And so it's this beautiful 0.9% saline or salt water that keeps us alive. Our tears are salt. Our sweat is salt.

[00:03:56] Darryl: Our urine is salt. And so salt, we're [00:04:00] literally saline solution in motion. And that's why I think salt is so amazing in, in order of importance, we have oxygen and then we have water, and then we have salt and without those top three game over. And so that's why I get so excited about salt and hopefully that gives your listeners a little bit of a highlight on some of the things we might talk about today.

[00:04:24] Ryan: Yeah, I mean, that's very interesting actually. I've never heard the subject of salt laid out in its historical importance to mankind. That's actually really amazing. So, makes me even more excited about the subject 

[00:04:39] Darryl: There's an old saying that maybe, maybe your younger listeners haven't heard, but that there was a term that said is a man worth his salt?

[00:04:46] Darryl: And that, that phrase or saying is because you were paid in salt and if you weren't working hard enough to earn your keep, then you weren't worth your salt. And so that's, even, even sayings like that are all [00:05:00] tied to the importance of salt in our, in our history. 

[00:05:04] Ryan: Wow. That makes so much sense. And I've heard that saying, I'm not one of our younger audience here, so I can say I've heard that.

[00:05:11] Ryan: Well, great. Well, I usually really like to start with kind of a myth busting section of an episode to really get to what, what we're gonna talk about get rid of some of the preconceptions that might be there. So what we do talk about can be fully absorbed as we might say. So where do you think, or what information do you have on where some of these modern misconceptions about salt being so bad for you came from, or how did those develop?

[00:05:39] Darryl: Yeah. As far as like the myth busting around salt, there's two big myths. And the first one, I think if, if you were to ask a lot of your clients and said, by a show of hands who was heard that sea salt is better? And my guess is a lot of people would raise their hand and if you went back 50, 60 years ago, that might have been the case.

[00:05:59] Darryl: But [00:06:00] today the term sea salt means nothing. Because when we're talking about food salt now in, in chemistry, There's a lot of different types of salt. The salt is an acid and a base. It's found together an ionic bond. In today's discussion, whenever I say salt, I'm talking about the type of salt called sodium chloride, which is what our bodies are based on.

[00:06:21] Darryl: Now, our bodies do have a need for complex chlorides, so potassium chloride, calcium chloride, magnesium chloride. But typically when you talk about food salt or salt, that's traded for food and, and uses the seasoning, it's predominantly sodium and chloride with some, some smaller complex chlorides with that.

[00:06:40] Darryl: So again, if there's a chemistry professor or chemistry teacher listening in, just know, and we say salt. Today, we're using it in the, in the culinary or the, the human health term that's generally accepted, not the broader chemistry term of salt. So, But salt can be defined as sea salt because [00:07:00] it's coming from a seabed

[00:07:01] Darryl: at some point, it might be a, a current ocean like the San Francisco Bay, maybe the Gulf of Mexico, the Sea of Japan, the Mediterranean. It could be a dead sea like the Dead Sea in Israel, or the Dead Sea here in Utah called the Great Salt Lake. Or it could be from an ancient seabed, a seabed that was laid down usually in the Jurassic Era.

[00:07:24] Darryl: This is, 150, a hundred million years ago. And then it was trapped and. At sea level and then buried and, and then pushed up later. And so whether it's a current ocean, a dead sea, or an ancient sea, that sea is, is consistent. And so that's why that term doesn't mean much anymore. And you can have a, a sea salt that's coming from any of those locations.

[00:07:48] Darryl: It's in this highly processed, which when people hear sea salts better, they're kind of thinking it, it might be more natural. Right? And, and we'll talk a little bit about that. So that's the first kind of [00:08:00] misconception. Throw out the idea that sea salt's better. And then the second one, Is how did sea salt, or how did salt go from this important part of life that we talked about earlier?

[00:08:11] Darryl: Every source of trade, every civilization, every religious text to this, oh my gosh, my doctor told me I need to eat less salt. It's gonna kill me. Well, there was a article written, and this article is written in 1954 and the title of it was Evidence for Relationship Between Sodium Chloride Intake and Human Essential Hypertension.

[00:08:33] Darryl: And I can send you this full PDF that you can link in the show notes for somebody that's interested. In this, in this 1950 study. They, they looked at salt and they said, okay, we, we, what is this salt? How does it impact hypertension? They took these mice and fade fed them copious amounts, like more salt than you would.

[00:08:53] Darryl: It'd be like, waterboarding, somebody like just so much salt. And one of [00:09:00] salt's jobs in the body we can get into this later, is to help regulate intercellular and extracellular fluid. That's one of the jobs that salt plays. So in the cells we have this thing called the sodium potassium pump, and it opens by a protocol and it helps pull in and flush the intercellular and extracellular fluids.

[00:09:21] Darryl: And that's one of salts. It's one of the salts jobs in the body. Salt has a lot of jobs. That's one of them. And so they thought, maybe because salt does help regulate that moisture, if we give these mice super high amounts of salt, let's see if that impacts the, the blood pressure and the serum pressure.

[00:09:40] Darryl: It does for many, for many when it's in copious amounts. But the study was set up on a false pretense because in nature, animals don't gorge themselves on salt anymore than you'd, gorge yourself on water. And so that study in [00:10:00] 1954 ripples through, and that's why salt was seen as this bad thing.

[00:10:06] Darryl: Why? Because the salt, in 1954 that they were testing, not only was it copious amounts higher than what you had, that any mouse would normally ingest, injected directly into the veins. But it was also processed salt. And so it wasn't natural. Nature created salt. It was processed salt in high amounts. And sure enough, there was a problem.

[00:10:29] Darryl: And just years ago, fat went through this phase where all fat was considered bad. Mm-hmm. And now we realize that in fact our brains need really good fat as, as do our rest of our bodies. But we, but fat's not the problem. The problem is the nutrient, poor foods and the type of fats that are in fact linked to problems.

[00:10:52] Darryl: But it's not fat that's the problem anymore than it's salt. That's the problem. 

[00:10:58] Ryan: Wow. That's so interesting. [00:11:00] Very, very interesting. I'd never heard somebody talk about, Origin of that false premise. I'm really looking forward to having that in the show notes for everybody. Yeah, I'll, I'll send you a copy of that.

[00:11:10] Ryan: Nice, nice. That's great. And that makes a lot of sense cuz it does seem like it's kind of rippled through history and it comes from some sort of scientific, medical basis and that totally explains it. 

[00:11:23] Darryl: Now there's some really great studies and I, I'll send you these for the show notes as well.

[00:11:27] Darryl: From the American Journal of Medicine, American Journal of Clinical Nutrition that says that you can have, you can fall into the highest blood pressure group or the lowest, no matter the amount of cal or no matter the amount of sodium you're, you're ingesting, depending on if you're eating adequate amounts of calcium, potassium, magnesium, these other electrolytes that offset the sodium.

[00:11:50] Darryl: Now there are a few people, a small percentage of population that is salt sensitive, just like you have some that are, sensitive to whatever, right? All of our bodies are a little bit [00:12:00] different, but it's a very small percentage that are very reactive. Just like you might have somebody that's allergic to

[00:12:08] Darryl: some form of vitamin C but it's, it's very, it's a very small percentage. And then one other disclaimer is anybody on kidney failure, our a healthy kidney can process about four ounces of salt a day, A healthy kidney, which is why in the hospital you can have high blood pressure, but you're still gonna get an IV of saline solution just pumped through you while you're in the hospital.

[00:12:34] Darryl: Cuz it's not the sodium that's the problem unless you're on dialysis or kidney failure. Because our kidneys are designed to help process and regulate that, that salt level, just like it does all the other levels in our body. And so again, if you're on kidney or dialysis, ignore everything I've said and everything I will say.

[00:12:54] Darryl: Otherwise if you've heard salts bad, it might be worth a conversation with your healthcare or your [00:13:00] nutritionist. To say, okay, help me understand if salt's bad, why do I get salt intravenously in every hospital? And they'll say, well, yeah, salt's important, but it's gotta be in the right form and you have to have rights, amounts of water and it can't have all the, which I agree wholeheartedly with just like fat, there's a lot of fat you should avoid.

[00:13:20] Darryl: But that doesn't mean you should avoid all fat. So. 

[00:13:25] Ryan: Awesome. Makes a lot of sense. So, I, I'm glad you went over the saline thing a little more cause I was actually gonna ask you about that. That's so interesting. Yeah, right. You go, I never even thought you go into the hospital and that's what you automatically get.

[00:13:37] Ryan: It's part of the. Life sa saving or the, improving of, of health remedies. So that said, what makes it so, because when we work with our clients, we're always like, well, yes, that white table salt, it's like the white sugar. You just avoid it like the plague. But redmond's real salt we're, we're always recommending it and every time people take it, they [00:14:00] feel improvements in energy and overall wellbeing.

[00:14:02] Ryan: What makes Redmond real Salt so different from these other harmful sources? 

[00:14:07] Darryl: So in salt, there's really two things that can go wrong in nature. The seawater, occurs with a, a complex chloride. So in seawater it's not just pure sodium chloride with additives. In the seawater, there's iodine, potassium, magnesium chloride, calcium chloride.

[00:14:24] Darryl: Now it's mostly sodium and chloride, and the oceans are about two to 3% salts. Our, our bodies are nine. So the reason when we jump in the water in the ocean and the water burns our eyes or burns our nose if we happen to inhale some, is because that seawater, although our bodies are, seawater based, they're every year the oceans get more salty.

[00:14:50] Darryl: And so just, just microscopically. So, but over, the eons or the millennia, the oceans are two to three times more salty than we are. But there's also [00:15:00] all these other great Minerals and elements in the ocean water, just like that we have in our, in our bodies. And so up until about the turn of the century salt companies to, to produce salt, if you and I, lived, maybe on the Mediterranean, we're on the coast of Britney, France, and there's a beautiful sea there, depending on where in in Spain or France we are, might be this or that.

[00:15:23] Darryl: But we have this section of Ocean front and we go out there and we dig a big trench and we draw all that ocean water into this big pond and we lined that pond. We, we know that if we just bring the sea water in and there's sand, the, the water's just gonna disappear back into the groundwater. So what we do is we line that pond with a gray clay.

[00:15:44] Darryl: This clay creates a barrier that doesn't allow the seawater to seep into the ground. And so as it's sitting there in this pond and the hot Mediterranean airs blowing across that seawater goes from. [00:16:00] From 3% salt to 4% to 5% water has what they call a max salinity of 26%. So the most that water can hold is 26%.

[00:16:14] Darryl: So if I have a, a water bottle here and, and I put salt in there, the water will dissolve the salt until the water hits 26%. Then the salt won't dissolve anymore cuz the water's full. So you take the sea water off the ocean, it's 2%, three. 10, 15, 26, 27, boom. A percentage of that salt now falls to the bottom of that pond.

[00:16:38] Darryl: And then it goes more and more and more. So eventually now we have all of this salt crystal, cuz the water's been evaporated off. Mm-hmm. But we have that seawater or sea salt in a holistic format because it all came precipitated together. So we have little bits of iodine from the seawater, which is why kelp, seaweed and, and fish have [00:17:00] high amounts of iodine comparatively in nature because the ocean water has iodine in it.

[00:17:06] Darryl: And then you get magnesium chloride, calcium chloride. And then you and I grab our rakes and we go out into this, this pond, and now we're gonna rake up those salt crystals. Now, not only do we get the salt crystals, which is gonna be about 99, maybe 98.5% sodium and chloride with one to 2% of calcium chloride, potassium chloride, magnesium chloride, selenium, zinc, iron, phosphorus, I mean trace amounts of all of these.

[00:17:36] Darryl: Mm-hmm. But we're also gonna rake up a little bit of that gray clay, which is a mineral rich clay that has a lovely gray color. So if you've ever heard of French gray salt and it's gray, it's because that's how it's produced. If you go to Hawaii, they use a red clay. So there's this great red salt comes outta Hawaii and that red Hawaiian salt is cuz it's [00:18:00] a red clay lined pond that they're raking those salt crystals up.

[00:18:05] Darryl: The beauty of that is you have the salt in its complete form, and if that same process took place back when the dinosaurs were roam around in Utah, You know the Jurassic Park era? Mm-hmm. And you have this ancient seabed that was flooded from the Arctic Ocean down into Utah during the Jurassic Era at sea level.

[00:18:26] Darryl: Then it gets buried under volcanic activity. It gets compressed. Now, Utah, the Great Basin gets pushed up to 5,000 feet. That's where Utah is today. Then underground, those, that ancient Seabed underground that was laid down layer by layer by layer is now pushed up. And so the strata in the Redmond deposit are all running vertically instead of horizontally, which is kind of neat.

[00:18:53] Darryl: And all of those minerals were were laid down with it. The first thing that salt [00:19:00] companies realized this was about the turn of the century is they could take a different membrane or different liner. And so instead of creating the salt, like I just explained mm-hmm. You can bring the sea water into a pond with a different liner through electrolysis or a different process, and you can leach out the magnesium chloride, sell that off to industry, move it to the next pond, pull out potassium chloride, sell that off, move it to the next pond, take out the calcium chloride.

[00:19:30] Darryl: So you pull out the calcium, the potassium, magnesium chlorides, move the water over and let it finish. And now you can sell that. So a lot of salt companies today, they earn a lot of their revenue off those other chlorides that they can, they can pull off as the salt, as the sea salt is going through this series of evaporation ponds.

[00:19:53] Darryl: So that can impact the flavor because you are changing a little bit. It's if, if we had a, an orange farm [00:20:00] and you and I discovered this process where we could take an orange and we could extract ascorbic acid from the orange and we could sell that off, and now we still sell the orange, there's still gonna be some value to the orange, and it's gonna taste probably similar, but it's not gonna be quite the same as it was before we extracted either all or a portion of the ascorbic acid or the vitamin C part of that vitamin C complex from the orange, right?

[00:20:27] Darryl: So that's the first problem with salt is salt companies, many will, will do this process. And I don't think it was malicious. I think it was just economics. Somebody genius thought, Hey, why don't we take this and, and pull out these other elements. They're valuable and we can sell those too. All right, so that's the first challenge.

[00:20:47] Darryl: The second challenge with salt is salt is hydroscopic. That means essentially it's a chemistry term, meaning dehumidifier. So if you put this salt crystal [00:21:00] in a humid room, if you took it into the, like a sauna, a, a wet sauna with you and you put that on a plate, water is gonna start to form and, and feed down and run off the salt crystal, cuz it, it will suck water out of the air.

[00:21:14] Darryl: If you took it to Florida and sat it on a, on a on a table in a rainy day, that crystal will get wet and it'll be wet underneath. So, which is fine because salt's job is to regulate inner cellular and extracellular fluids, so it makes sense that it would draw moisture. Now about this same time or a little bit later, some salt companies said, Hey, it's kind of annoying that salt tends to clump in the jar.

[00:21:43] Darryl: I wonder what kind of chemical process we could treat each of those crystals with to stop its ability to attract water. Because if we could do that, then the salt shaker won't get clumpy on a rainy day. And [00:22:00] so they came up with the whole list of chemicals. There's probably 20 or 30 they can choose from.

[00:22:05] Darryl: And these chemicals, they can coat the salt crystal and effectively stop its ability to interact with moisture. Now these chemicals would be things like yellow prussiate of soda. If you look up what that is, it's sodium ferricyanide, and yeah, sodium. We know ferris is iron, right, and cyanide is poison. But you can coat that crystal with sodium-ferricyanide.

[00:22:32] Darryl: It's, it's called anti-caking E 5 35. So if you ever see that on a label, be aware that E 5 35 is sodium-ferri- cyanide. Another common one would be sodium -silico-illuminate. And you can, look at the shaker and it'll say sodium silco illuminate, very similar to the aluminum that's added to antiperspirant to stop the armpits interacting with moisture like the body's [00:23:00] designed to.

[00:23:00] Darryl: And so, mm-hmm. Again, if, if you were to take two licks of an anti per sprint before breakfast, you're gonna wonder, maybe you're gonna have some water retention and blood pressure issues, but it's not. And, and so I think it's, it's those two things that are often overlooked. So, The, the removal of trace minerals that the body needs.

[00:23:21] Darryl: We can talk about, the other electrolytes that our bodies need. Mm-hmm. So it's removal of those, but then adding these other chemicals that stops the salt's ability to interact with moisture, which is salt's job in the body. And then we take that salt, which salt is a very inexpensive preservative.

[00:23:41] Darryl: If we went back before the refrigerator, everything we would've eaten, we probably would've eaten more salt because all the meats, kimchi, sauerkraut, pickles, fermented veggies mm-hmm. Would've all had salt. And so food manufacturers today will take this processed demineralized [00:24:00] salt, they will add copious amounts to food that you can hardly even call food.

[00:24:05] Darryl: Mm-hmm. And in cans and in boxes and a lot of the stuff you probably encourage your clients to avoid. Yeah. Because not only is the salt. Not ideal that's added, but the food they're putting it on is even worse. Mm-hmm. And, and that's I think why, why SALT has gotten a bad rap and why many people should avoid.

[00:24:26] Darryl: Food's high in salt because food's high in salt. Unless you're making it yourself, it's gonna have bad salt on bad food. Which is a, which is a bad combination. 

[00:24:36] Ryan: Yes, exactly. Wow. Yeah. I have a whole new understanding now of demineralized salt. I mean, I've even talked about, That fairly frequently, but I never understood the process behind it and how much is actually stripped out to create that demineralization state.

[00:24:55] Ryan: So that's, that's amazing. 

[00:24:57] Darryl: And what important note on that? Sometimes I'll have people come and [00:25:00] say, Hey, I heard salt is bleached. Is cuz there have been some nutritionist and some health food folks that have said, oh, you need to avoid the bleached salt. Mm-hmm. So I, obviously, I've been in the salt industry a long time.

[00:25:11] Darryl: I do not know anybody that takes Clorox bleach and dumps it into salt. The term, the term bleached in, I can bleach. What I don't have is a lot of hair left, but you can bleach your hair by putting in lemon juice or peroxide and going into the sun. Mm-hmm. So bleaching to means, means to make white.

[00:25:31] Darryl: And so in that definition, salt, which should look very unique, almost like a snowflake. Every salt crystal can be unique. The natural salt stipulate the Himalayan. The Redmond, the Andy and pink, the him the Celtic Gray, the Hawaiian red, those all have some natural color. But if you wash and rinse and pull out some of those other complex chlorides, you can take that salt and get it increasingly white, just [00:26:00] like you might take flour.

[00:26:01] Darryl: By the time you pull out the germ, you pull out the husk, right. You, then it, it does make it more white. But I don't know any salt company. It's actually bleaching or dumping, dumping a chemical, bleach into the salt. So when I hear people say bleached, I just wanna make sure they realize that it's not, it's bleached, but not bleached.

[00:26:21] Ryan: Yeah, no, that's a good clarification. I've often wondered, cause I knew demineralization was a process and it wasn't good. But I didn't realize. What the misnomer, basically that bleaching of salt was that. That's great. Nice. Okay. Whole education. This should be like, this should be part of the education of people.

[00:26:41] Ryan: There's these type of what we were really eating and what salt really is. I mean, there's other subjects too, but this is pretty, pretty interesting, thank you for all of that. And then one thing and that we always tell our clients about Redmond's real salt is that it has less likeliness of [00:27:00] being contaminated because it is from an ancient seabed. And now that's just my understanding, you being the expert and having all this knowledge that I wasn't even aware existed. What would you say to that? Is that true or, 

[00:27:13] Darryl: Unfortunately, we humans have not been the best stewards of this planet that we call Earth. And every year you hear stories about, the microbeads people flushing pharmaceuticals down their toilets and ending up in the water supply.

[00:27:27] Darryl: You see fish now in the middle of nowhere that are caught that have, they open 'em up and they see little bits and pieces of plastics. Fortunately a lot of governments now, Are outlawing these microbeads. It used to be, back 20 years ago you could find toothpaste and hand lotions and soaps and smelly shampoos that would have, you'd buy it and it would have these little teeny pink and purple and hot blue and little beads that would maybe feel good, or maybe they would be exfoliating.

[00:27:58] Darryl: Mm-hmm. Without even thinking that now [00:28:00] we're dumping billions of pounds of these microbeads into the ocean in addition to all of the plastics that end up in the ocean, cuz it, blew off a ship or somebody, whatever. And now, So, yes, unfortunately our oceans aren't as, as clean as they used to be.

[00:28:17] Darryl: And, and you will see some articles that'll come out and they'll talk about, Hey, we, we studied all of these sea salts and we found some, some fibers and microbeads in, in these salts. And so I do think it is a factor. Water is the universal solvent. Although if you have a a, an Olympic size swimming pool and you have a pee only section in the pool, it doesn't take that long for it to be

[00:28:42] Darryl: all over in the pool because water is the universal solvent. And so when we had Exxon Valdez years ago in Alaska, it wasn't that many years until they found remnants said that clear down the South American coast mm-hmm. When the Japanese disaster took place, they, you could watch those radiation [00:29:00] lines, working its way across the ocean and even closer to home, BP a few years ago Now, fortunately technology's coming a long ways and they're getting better at those cleanups and, and I'm certainly, I enjoy driving my vehicles and I enjoy, going on trips and, and so I'm, don't pretend that we can live without any impact on the planet, but I do think when you are looking for your food, I think a good question is, what is the source?

[00:29:30] Darryl: Mm-hmm. Because whether you're buying, kale chips or some potatoes from a local farmer, or you're buying eggs, or you're buying steak or fish, I think a fair question is what's the source? If I'm eating salmon, where's the, is it coming from a farm? Is it coming from right next to the Exxon Valdi spill?

[00:29:48] Darryl: Is it coming from, from the Japan coast? And particularly if it does come from that coast, does it come during the, the disaster if it's coming from the Mediterranean, was it when the cruise ship went [00:30:00] down? And so I do think knowing the source is a good question. And that's not to say that, you could have a, an ancient seabed process and depending on how that salt's being produced, There's gonna be some challenges there as well.

[00:30:15] Darryl: So I just think there's a, in fact, I mean, I have three questions that I say everybody should ask, whether you're buying salt or you're buying steak, or you're buying salmon mm-hmm. Or even a mountain bike. I think there's three good questions that will lead us to, to great products. Mm-hmm. And everything's a trade off, but I think we vote with the world that we wanna live in with how we spend our dollars.

[00:30:39] Darryl: And I think anyway, that might, I kind of got onto a tangent there, but Yeah, I do think it's a factor. I think, yeah, we, I think oceans can be a factor. I do think we, humans haven't always been, great stewards, whether it's of our farmland, our, our fish and our oceans, or, the cows that are in our backyard that we [00:31:00] might either milk or bring to slaughter, so, mm-hmm.

[00:31:04] Ryan: Okay. Awesome. No, I love that. That makes a lot of sense. And obviously these ancient beds weren't exposed to a lot of the toxins that you just went over, so they're much more likely to be pure and less contaminated. But, but so we don't leave everybody hanging, including myself. What are these three questions that you're talking about there?

[00:31:21] Darryl: Okay, so the, the first question, I think with food it gets increasingly difficult for traceability. Even at, I love the farmer's market here in the little town that I, I I live in this little town in Utah called Heber. And if you get down to the farmer's market in the summertime, there's people there that are marketing

[00:31:41] Darryl: items from their garden or from their farm. Mm-hmm. You also have some people that have boughten cases of food from a big box store, and they're bringing it in and they're selling it at the farmer's market, which I think is fine too. But I think the, an important question is who's producing it? Whether you're buying eggs [00:32:00] or you're buying salmon, or you're buying kale, or you're buying salt, I think who is producing it is a fair question.

[00:32:07] Darryl: And oftentimes when you walk into a a big box store, there's a jar of salt and it might say from France or from the Himalayas, or from the Peru or from Utah, but you don't really know where that salt's coming from unless you know who's producing it. So the first question is, who's actually the person or the team that's behind this, this product?

[00:32:31] Darryl: The second one. Is know the source, and if you know who's producing it, then you can find the source. And so if you meet the guy at the farmer's market, oh yeah, this is, grass fed, free range, beef. Okay, where is it coming from? Oh, well, it's coming from the landfill. I think no where it comes from is important.

[00:32:50] Darryl: Mm-hmm. And that might be in salt. Is it a current ocean? Is it an ancient seabed? If it's a current ocean, what's the situation of that body of water? If it's an ancient [00:33:00] seabed, how far away is it? What? And then the third question is, what's the process? Because even after you know who's producing it and you know where it's coming from.

[00:33:10] Darryl: Then the next question is, what's the process in terms of salt? Are they putting anything in? And are they taking anything out? Mm-hmm. If it's, if it's salmon is this, where yeah, you can say it's Atlantic salmon, but it come from a, a feeding pen. Was it fed, hormones? Was it fed pellets?

[00:33:27] Darryl: Was it out eating, other little salmon when it's out in this, in the ocean? And I think those three questions, whether it's salt and, and obviously I'm biased and I hope you ask those three questions and you pick Redmond. Yeah. But I also know there's a lot of great salts in the world and, and you might end up with another great salt that you love, but I think those three questions will give us better products and a better world to live in.

[00:33:55] Ryan: Wow. 

[00:33:56] Ryan: I love it. Yeah, absolutely. Those three questions do [00:34:00] sum up the consumer concerns and like you say, we, we vote with our dollars and our purchases. So knowing that, and then. Buying accordingly can create that, that better world. So love it. Love it. Awesome. So great. And just from my end, Redmond's real Salt has all my votes on the right Salt to buy.

[00:34:21] Ryan: That's what I always tell people. So, and for myself, so, okay, great. So we've really gone a lot about salt and some background on it and everything. I'd like to dive in a little bit about. How important it is for the body and also the product that we've recently fallen in love with the re-lyte, Redmond re-lyte, the electrolyte package that you have that you can use and mix.

[00:34:46] Ryan: Can you speak a little bit about why this is so important and why you guys are making that now and how it helps the body so much? 

[00:34:52] Darryl: Yeah, so for starting out with just salt and the body in general, there's one of, there's, there's a couple of really great books. We don't have time to [00:35:00] go into all of those today, but one of the, my favorites is one called Salt Your Way to Health.

[00:35:07] Darryl: It was written by an MD in the Midwest. His name was Dr. David Brownstein, and he listed all of these essential functions that salt plays in the body. Great little book. There's another book that's called

[00:35:20] Darryl: Oh so another book, it was written by Dr. James d Nichol Antonio, and and a great book on the importance of Salt in a Healthy diet. Great author. He's got some, some podcasts as well, but Dr. James d Nichol, Antonio. 

[00:35:36] Darryl: So salt in general, so when it, no discussion on salt would really be complete without a discussion on all the sports drinks and electrolyte drinks that people hear about. Oh, salt's important for me and so I'm gonna go buy this purple hot pink sports drink that's full of sugar because I know I need these electrolytes.

[00:35:55] Darryl: And the, and you're right, like our bodies, I, I'm an avid mountain biker. When [00:36:00] the trails are too bad to ride, I'll occasionally go on a road bike, but mountain biking I think is where it's at. Right? And so as you're, as you're sweating, we're just pumping a lot of salt salts essential to help cleanse the body.

[00:36:12] Darryl: It helps regulate the fluids. Again, it talked about how our sweats, salt, our tears are salt, our urine salt. And so we do need to replace these lost salts, especially when we're switching to a, to a more keto diet or a fasting diet, or we are moving away from all these processed foods that have the processed salt.

[00:36:32] Darryl: If you're eating a more natural diet, you actually have to go outta your way to add good clean salt to your body. Otherwise you can drink all the water in the world and you're just flushing out your electrolytes, which are essential and so what I used to do is I would tell people to, to make their own sports drink.

[00:36:50] Darryl: And so I would say you can do it at pennies on the dollar compared to the, the stuff you'd buy in the grocery store. Mm-hmm. And just take a quart of good clean water, [00:37:00] add a quarter teaspoon of, of our real salt to it, add a squeeze of lemon, and for pennies on the dollar, you can make an excellent sports drink.

[00:37:08] Darryl: And it, and I still stand by that. I think it's one of the best little sports drinks you can make right now. One of the challenges with our diets today is if we went back hundreds of years ago to our ancestors or longer mm-hmm. Researchers say that diets included a lot more potassium and magnesium years ago than we get today. Now

[00:37:31] Darryl: maybe that's cuz some of the food sources are demineralized. Maybe it's because of the way that people are choosing to eat and they're not eating as many, maybe some green vegetables or maybe meats that are rich in and these other electrolytes, blood. Mm-hmm. Whether you're, eating a steak, it's rich in, sodium, but it's not all sodium.

[00:37:50] Darryl: You've got all these other potassium chloride, magnesium, calcium chloride. That are in blood fluid and in meat. And so when we started looking at electrolyte [00:38:00] replacement and we were gonna make our own. Jar of, of electrolytes rather than just using the salt in general because we know people are a little bit, generally speaking, lower on potassium than they should be lower on magnesium than they should be lower on calcium.

[00:38:16] Darryl: They should be, we've gone ahead and added some of those other electrolytes into the re-lyte formula. Mm-hmm. And so it's not just the real salt, but it also has some of these other key electrolytes that our bodies need. In fact, we talked a little bit about a saline solution at first, and there's two standard IVs you'll see in the hospital.

[00:38:39] Darryl: The first one is what they call standard saline, which is 0.9% sodium chloride. Now the other one that you often see is something called lactated ringers. And if you look at the, the bag of solution on a bag of lactated ringers, You will see it has sodium chloride, but it also has [00:39:00] potassium chloride and magnesium chloride because these other electrolytes are essential to offset the sodium.

[00:39:06] Darryl: So if you were in the hospital for a long period of time, you're gonna get more than just the bag of saline. You'll either move to lactated ringers or they will have a, an electrolyte or other mineral bag that's, that's going with the, the bag of just 0.9% saline because of the sodium potassium pump. Now it is a smaller amount.

[00:39:27] Darryl: We are sodium and chloride based. Mm-hmm. And so you don't want to just grab an IV a potassium chloride, actually that would kill you. Mm-hmm. But you do need these other electrolytes in addition to sodium. And in the article from the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition that I'll send you for the show notes.

[00:39:42] Darryl: Mm-hmm. It does say that. It says it's, it's not a modification or a focus on any of these single nutrients, but it's, it's a focus on all the essential nutrients that's essential for, for longevity and good health. 

[00:39:56] Darryl: That sodium, potassium pump is, is [00:40:00] essential. And also if you look at the, if you look at the intercellular and extracellular fluids, yeah, it's, it's quite different. But you've got the extracellular fluid, and this is in terms of milli Millie equivalence, but you've got, yeah, in the extracellular fluid, the ratio is 140.

[00:40:21] Darryl: The intercellular fluid is what does that say? 12. Wow. But then if you look at the extracellular fluids, it's almost reversed. Because our bodies, because the inside the cell and outside the cell are almost opposite each other. And so, and you can see in, in that ratio, you see the chloride, which is really important.

[00:40:42] Darryl: That's kinda like the forgotten nutrient. But you see the calcium and the magnesium and the potassium as a percentage of the sodium is extremely small. Yes. Not as much the potassium, but the mag magnesium and calcium are, are fairly small in that, in the difference or in the ratio [00:41:00] compared to the sodium potassium, which are the two critical one.

[00:41:03] Darryl: Yeah. And that's why a lot of, like somebody goes in for high blood pressure or they go in to see their doctor one of the things that they'll typically talk about is, well, if somebody's, even if they're gonna put 'em on like a, a low salt diet, they'll say, Hey, really focus on increasing your potassium levels, because even and more so they realize that it's, again, it's not the sodium that's the problem, it's usually the high amounts of processed sodium on processed foods with not enough potassium to offset it.

[00:41:35] Darryl: And, and the sugar levels, which are interesting. There's some great articles now that are coming out that this was an open heart magazine and I'll send this one too, but the title says The wrong white crystals, not salt, but sugar is the cause of hypertension and cardio. Cardiometabolic disease.

[00:41:54] Darryl: And so I think that would just kind of fit right in with, your coaching practice on [00:42:00] on fasting and keto. And we can talk a little bit about the keto flu, but one of the challenges or interesting things with salt and glycogen is, when somebody is got all this glycogen that's, cycling around in their body, not only is it, causing some problems, but one gram of glycogen holds two to three times that weight in water.

[00:42:21] Darryl: And so when somebody starts to flush glycogen because they're fasting, they're dropping high amounts of water, well that's not distilled water. When you're dropping all that water weight because you've, you're dumping all that glycogen, you're dumping sodium, calcium, potassium, magnesium chloride, because those are all the things that are in our cellular fluids.

[00:42:42] Darryl: You don't, you don't urinate distilled water. Yeah. You can drink distilled water, but you will not urinate. It's gonna be flushing those salts. And especially when somebody starts to fast, those, those fluid levels drop. But that's also flushing all of the salt, all those electrolytes that are keeping our bodies in motion.[00:43:00] 

[00:43:00] Darryl: And so it's really important as you probably, counsel your clients. If, if you are. Doing that fasting or intermittent fasting, that water and salt are super important because you're gonna be dumping a lot of that, that toxic solution from all the, maybe the chemicals that our bodies are storing.

[00:43:18] Darryl: Mm-hmm. But with that, you're gonna be dumping a lot of the salts that are essential for helping clean the cells. So that's really about the level I could really get into on, on the importance of those other electrolytes, especially in terms of diet and fasting is, is when that flush takes place, that's when people get feeling so yucky because they're dumping all of that water and all of that salt.

[00:43:44] Darryl: And even if they start drinking water mm-hmm. They're just gonna complicate the process because they're just working their selves toward hyponatremia, which is what happens when you drink a lot of water without salt, is you'll eventually flush the salts outta your body. [00:44:00] And without the electrolytes, you stop conducting electricity.

[00:44:04] Darryl: And so you get headaches, you get nauseous, you get sick because your body is craving water and salt to keep it alive. Remember oxygen and then water, and then salt. 

[00:44:15] Ryan: I love that. Yeah. Oxygen, water, salt. Yep. We're gonna add that in here. So, okay, good. I And exercise. No, that was great. And exercise.

[00:44:23] Ryan: Yeah, that's always key, right? So that is great explanation. I wasn't looking, I'm not a chemist myself, so I wasn't looking for any deeper of a dive than that. That was great. Yeah, and I actually have a little anti keto flu kit or information that I give my clients that include lots of Redmond, real salt or re-lyte, and then some really high quality sources of potassium and different foods and whatnot.

[00:44:46] Ryan: And it's, even for someone who's somewhat metabolically resistant to getting into ketosis, that done diligently usually, mitigates or gets rid of completely this keto flu that a lot of people experience when they, they just dunno [00:45:00] the electrolyte game basically. Yeah. So. Awesome. Great. I really like that.

[00:45:05] Ryan: And then I wanted to make sure we covered some other things on here that you sent over that I thought were really good questions. Cause Oh, yes. So, and you went into this a little bit but this, this subject of salt substitutes and iodized salt and, the, the processes that are done in here, what, what are you referring to in that and how does that work?

[00:45:29] Darryl: So salt substitutes are kind of interesting because of this 1954 study that we mentioned. People think salt's bad. And so, and salt companies thought, Hey, salt's bad, and so let's create a product that isn't, that is less bad. Which is silly because the salt itself in nature is actually life giving. So the, the first problem is, I don't think anybody, I mean, almost nobody should be on a salt substitute.

[00:45:56] Darryl: Now what's interesting is if you buy, if you go to the grocery store and [00:46:00] buy any salt substitute, there's a warning on the back. And that warning will say, for normal, healthy people, please consult your general practitioner before use. Now, you would never see that warning on a clean salt product. It's just the, the processed salt or this, the salt substitute has the warning, and the reason for that warning is to cut the sodium levels because they assume they're bad.

[00:46:27] Darryl: So what they do is they, they cut that usually 50% with potassium chloride. Now, We do know that potassium's important, but in the wrong ratios, potassium chloride, that's, that's actually the, in a, in a state that does lethal injections. The, the, the last injection is an injection of potassium chloride, because we do potassium's important potassium chloride in the right form is important, but it also can really throw the heart outta balance.

[00:46:57] Darryl: And so I would say rather [00:47:00] than looking for a salt substitute, go back to the physician and say, okay, now is it that salt's the problem because this study here would suggest that that's not the case anymore. If salt were the problem, you wouldn't be giving me an IV of sodium chloride in the hospital.

[00:47:15] Darryl: You'd given me an an iv, a potassium chloride, and the doctor would say we're not doing that. Right. Because an IV of potassium chloride outside of an aneurysm or some weird thing that's really flushed your electrolytes, you would not get an IV of potassium chloride or it'd kill you. And so salt substitutes I think are just kind of, it's kind of silly.

[00:47:35] Darryl: So that's, that's that. Now iodine, I think is a really important discussion. Maybe a full episode on its own, but most people today are iodine deficient. Now the reason that iodine and salt are associated, if you went back, before World War I, you would've never associated salt with iodine.

[00:47:56] Darryl: Mm-hmm. Although salt, natural salt has trace [00:48:00] amounts of iodine. In fact, this, salt here has about 10% of your recommended daily allowance of your, of your within a quarter teaspoon. But the reason that we associate iodine in salt is because of World War I. So in World War I, the US instituted the draft.

[00:48:16] Darryl: And when the draft was instituted, they noticed that these men that were getting drafted out of the Midwest had a high percentage of goiter. Goiter is a swelling of the thyroid linked to an iodine deficiency. Now think about the Midwest in World War I. They're not eating a lot of seaweed, not eating a lot of fish, world War I, that timeframe.

[00:48:38] Darryl: Everybody's eating a lot of canned foods, white flour, refined sugar. The, the soils are starting to get demineralized because we're growing the same thing in the same field for, years and years and years. Mm-hmm. And because of that, this problem shows up in the Midwest. And so the military sat down with the government, with other government officials and said, Hey, we can't.

[00:48:59] Darryl: [00:49:00] Draft men in the military, if they've got a goiter, we have got to solve this problem, how do we do it? Mm-hmm. I hope that somebody said, Hey, let's have a campaign on the importance of eating natural salmon that has rich amounts of iodine. Or let's have a campaign about adding a little bit of, of doles, which is a purple seaweed into our diets because it's rich in iodine.

[00:49:22] Darryl: Or let's have a campaign about how when milk is done right, mozzarella cheese has a little bit more iodine than some other of the foods that are out there. They probably, I'm hoping that it was the discussion what resulted was. They tried to add iodine to flour. They said everybody is eating flour. There's all this processed flour.

[00:49:43] Darryl: Let's add iodine to flour, and it will force people to eat more iodine because they're gonna eat flour anyway. Mm-hmm. It didn't work. It wasn't stable and it didn't, it didn't work. I don't know if they ever tried to add it to a water supply like they do with fluoride. In some [00:50:00] municipalities, what they landed on was salt, and they could take potassium iodide, they could stabilize it, they could add it to salt, and then they created a law that said, if, if a salt company does not add iodine to their salt at this amount, about 45% per quarter teaspoon.

[00:50:17] Darryl: Mm-hmm. You have to put a warning on the salt that says this salt does not supply iodine a necessary nutrient. The reason that every salt says that is because of the World War I draft. Wow. Now it did solve the problem because if you're feeding somebody copious amounts of iodine, it can actually, it does, you do assimilate some of it.

[00:50:38] Darryl: Mm-hmm. Now, what they've found is less than 10% of the iodine that's added to iodine, salt is bioavailable. Right. It's just bound up and it's not bioavailable. So is it better than nothing? Yes, absolutely. Is it a great source of iodine? Absolutely not. And probably a lot of your clients are iodine efficient [00:51:00] because of our food supplies today.

[00:51:01] Darryl: And so iodine efficiency links to, reproductive health it can be linked to breast tumors in both men and women. Mm-hmm. It can be linked to energy levels, it can be linked to mood and all kinds of hormone issues. So iodine, absolutely essential. Most people should be seeking out foods in iodine, whether that's seaweed, fish, whatever, or

[00:51:25] Darryl: if that's not their thing, probably should be looking for a great quality iodine supplement because it is such a necessary nutrient. But, but salt, even though there's 10% of your recommended daily allowance in a quarter teaspoon salt was never meant to be a source of protein. Never meant to be a source of iodine, never meant to be a source of selenium.

[00:51:46] Darryl: Now there's trace amounts there, but please, have your iodine levels checked. Talk to your nutritionist, talk to your, your medical provider and, and look at iodine, but don't get it from a processed [00:52:00] salt because it's a really poor way to get iodine. 

[00:52:03] Ryan: Nice. I like it. Agreed. Yes. We have some amazing iodine supplements that, recently have become more in demand.

[00:52:11] Ryan: It's interesting. Mineral deficiency has increased in our clients, especially over the last few years. So having the availability of. Healthy salt, like Redmond real salt is really important. And then supplements for those who need to kickstart. So, awesome. Makes a lot of sense. Okay, great.

[00:52:31] Ryan: Well I feel like I've just gotten a whole 1 0 1 on salt here. I'm at a whole new education level regarding it and very interesting information that is, is actionable in that someone can just go in and take this information and start improving their health by adding healthy salts. And I'm very interested in having all these these things that you referred to and the show notes.

[00:52:54] Ryan: Cause I do think it's valid that someone could go to their healthcare practitioner or go to [00:53:00] their doctor or whoever they're working with and provide these, and there's a much more receptive community out there to studies and things are changing and people are learning. So I, people are able to download those and, and improve their health by knowing, knowing before they go, so to speak and asking their three questions.

[00:53:19] Ryan: Right. 

[00:53:20] Darryl: Well, and, and I think one of the things that I like to lead people with is, is listening to their bodies. Sometimes we think that when we're craving sugar, we really need to go out and get a big sugary drink. What I encourage people to do, and I'm sure you do as well, when you feel like you're having a sugar craving, try a little salt first, whether that's a little piece of salt under your tongue, or maybe grab some of the re-lyte that you can get there in your office.

[00:53:45] Darryl: Mm-hmm. Because oftentimes our bodies think because of the way we've eaten maybe the last 20 years that, that we're craving sugar. But oftentimes what we're really craving is clean salt and and that's a [00:54:00] good place to start. Now there are probably times when maybe your energy levels are, and you do need, you need to get some energy in your cells.

[00:54:07] Darryl: But oftentimes water and salt is pretty satisfying if you're trying to fast, that can curb those hunger pains. And if you think you're craving a big sugary drink, try a little bit of salt and water or try some of the re-lyte. And I think you'll be surprised when you listen to your body, how, how receptive it is to good clean water, salt and these other electrolyte.

[00:54:31] Ryan: Love it. Yes. Now I just have to say, cause this is totally applicable to what you're talking about. For years in our, in our office and with our clients, we've done what we call salt shots. So we have literally little about the amount of a shot or, a couple of water, and then we add our redmonds real salt.

[00:54:48] Ryan: And, and that's your, your afternoon pickup, 

[00:54:51] Darryl: I do this, I do the same in my office here, but I, I have some of the coarse crystals and I'll just Oh, nice. But it's almost like a little piece of candy, when, [00:55:00] when you're low on salt, just putting a little piece of salt under your tongue, it, it's sweet and savory and pretty satisfying.

[00:55:07] Ryan: We'll have to add that to our repertoire. Okay, great. So, thank you so much, Darrell. This has been amazing information. I definitely value everything you've told us, and I know the clients will get a lot out of it in those listening. So, I know that you guys as a company have quite a presence on social media and there's a lot of ways to get a hold of

[00:55:28] Ryan: you and get more information if someone wants to. What are the places that you like to have people go to to either reach out or, or get more information about what we've just talked about? 

[00:55:38] Ryan: So, for the salt products, it's really easy to remember just real salt as opposed to fake salt or processed salt.

[00:55:46] Ryan: It's just www.realsalt.com. And then Redmond for kind of our family of products, it would include the, the re-lyte, and we've got some, cosmetics products that would be at Redmond, just r [00:56:00] e d m o n d, redmond.life, not.com, but redmond.life. And then for somebody. Wants to, to, to geek out on salt.

[00:56:12] Ryan: There's the couple books that I mentioned. I can send you those for the show notes. Right. And there's a, there's another really fun book. It's called Salt A World History, and it kind of goes over salt throughout all time. Kind of talks about the Romans, the Persians, the wars, kind of everything you didn't know you wanted to know about Salt is in this book.

[00:56:31] Ryan: And I'll, I'll send you that book as well. 

[00:56:34] Ryan: Awesome. Great. And yes, everything we've gone over, all these links will be in the show notes so everybody can access them easily. So. Great. Thanks so much Daryll really appreciate you taking some time with us today and sharing all this amazing information. 

[00:56:48] Darryl: It was so fun, Ryan.

[00:56:49] Darryl: Thanks for having me on.

[00:56:51] Ryan: Absolutely.