Baseless health food fads, like the health-magic of the so-called superfood Himalayan Pink Salt, are often harmless and funny, and if it makes stupid people happy to believe unutterable nonsense, well, happiness is hard to find, so grab for it. But this empty-headed fad, in the long run, could prove to be a health risk. The fluoride content of some of this raw unprocessed salt is dangerously high, and anyone who uses a lot of this salt could learn first hand that things which are in small doses probably beneficial are in accumulative high doses very dangerous.
The phony health claims for pink salt would require a catalog, everything from curing cancer to and heart disease (more apt to worsen heart disease), improve sleep, cure allergies, regulate body pH, ad infinitum. Large chunks of the rock salt are said to emit supernatural ionic rays that destroy airborne bacteria, and neutralize the harmful radioactive waves of electrical devices. If you obtain a lamp made a salt rock, hollowed out for a lightbulb to be inserted (these had a major recall for catching peoples' homes on fire), it will bathe you in curative ionized health-rays.
This is all so ridiculous you wouldn't think a scientific discussion of why it's hooey would even be required, and yet there the product sits in just about every "health" food store and regular grocery in America, inciting the skepticism meter of practically no one.
The sales angle required a pretense that "Himalayan" salt is from the Himalayas. It's not. It's from a Pakistani salt mine. So the mysticalness of the Himalayas (and the allegedly pristine unpolluted environment source) is really not part of this phony product. The Pakistani mines have been called the most dangerous in the world, with deaths of salt miners a commonplace, while the pollutants from the mining process have made their way into nearby town and city water resources. Yet whenever the government tries to crack down a tiny bit on the damage done, it just increases the amount of underground criminal activity associated with the mines, insuring only an unpredictable and plausibly a dangerous product for the world market.
In much of the world this Pakistan salt is the cheapest because the miners are the most exploited and underpaid. It's also cheap because of low dirty quality. It's po' folks salt! But for us moronic westerners it is an EXPENSIVE product renamed Himalayan, its pollutants fobbed off as pretty pink nutrients, which some are and some aren't, so perhaps only half a scam concocted by vendors and importers to get more money for the cheapest of products.
Insanely evil Dr Mercola peddles it as "pure and unrefined," a boast that could be made of any pile of dirt dug out of a cemetery plot. Pure and unrefined grave soil! Pure and unrefined sess pool seepage! He even says other natural salts, the ones he's not pitching, contain harmful levels of fluoride, whereas his Himalayan contains none, when in fact it contains the most, plus such potential toxins as bromide in great quantities, and in lesser quantities arsenic, strontium, barium, cadmium, selenium, and sulphur. Yum!
It's also artificially colored to insure the rubes see it's good and pink, because as mined some of it is (with iron oxide) and most of it isn't. If you get a brand that is reliably a nice even rosy pink throughout, it's been dyed, likely such a small amount the law permits them legally to leave it unlisted on the packaging.
The legend of this salt's superiority was invented by Peter Ferreira, a self-proclaimed entirely fake "Biophysicist" who long peddled a magical recipe for long life and perfect health: saltwater. The guy's crazy as a bedbug but the nuttier a health scam, the more idiots there will be to make the scam profitable. He started the fabulous lie that it was from the Himalayas, and though it's easy now to find out it's not, it's shocking how much of the original myth-making is still being used against the naive seekers after magical realms.
Ferreira spread the fad through Europe insisting his magic salt was from Karakorum, where there are no salt mines anywhere nor ever have been, all the while importing the product from the cheapest possible source, Pakistan, preferred EXCLUSIVELY because it's the cheapest. European governments and consumer protection organizations warned against the scam but it spread like wildfire and eventually reached the USA, center of the world's easiest dupes and marks with the most money to waste on garbage that has no special properties unless to harm.
More info: sciencebasedmedicine.org
"Himalayan" pink salt is actually from Pakistan and is the least healthy salt in the market.
Salt from badly polluted and dangerous Pakistan salt mines, marketed around the world as from the mystically wholesome Himilayas.
"Himalayan" Salt Lamps Claim To Heal You With Magic Ionized Rays!
