More Surprises in Our Fight Against Inflammation

Dear Friend,
Let's talk about something related to fighting inflammation. We rarely think about this. Salt. What does salt have to do with firefighting? Most table salt is sodium chloride (NaCl) which is around 97–99% pure. The remaining 1–3% may include:

• Additives such as iodine (to prevent an enlarged thyroid, that is, goiter)
• Anti-caking agents like calcium silicate or sodium ferrocyanide

In essence, your regular everyday table salt provides only two minerals: sodium (Na) and chloride (Cl). Both are essential electrolytes but beyond these, table salt offers virtually no other minerals of nutritional significance. When we consider what you are, roughly sixty percent water, you are a salty inner ocean with more than eight seven trace minerals. Your blood plasma mirrors the ocean more than you might guess. All your body’s cells, including the immune cells, run on trace minerals. Magnesium for muscle and nerve. Calcium and phosphorus for bone. Potassium for every heartbeat. Where do they come from? Not the pharmacy.

From Plasma to Information Transmission via Minerals

Your blood plasma is precisely regulated ocean water and the minerals suspended in it regulate electrical signaling, pH balance, and enzymatic reactions. Without them in the right concentration, nerves do not fire, muscles do not contract, and the thousands of enzymatic reactions running in your body every second simply stop.

This is where biochemistry becomes something larger.

Minerals are message transporters between cells. A sodium ion crossing a membrane is a signal being sent. A calcium pulse inside a cell is information, transmitted at the speed of a thought, carrying instruction from one part of the body to another.

We are also in an era of everything less salt. It’s not unusual to see patients who are strictly following a no-salt diet for months and even years. Where do they get the minerals from? The short answer: food. 

But there’s a problem with our food. To connect the trace mineral story as a root cause of inflammation and your own health consider this: the soil is depleted, so the food grown in it is depleted, so the body that depends on that food is depleted. It's the agricultural mirror of everything we've been saying about seed oils and ultra-processed creamers, except this time the culprit isn't a factory, it's the dirt the food grew in.

Same Fruit. Less Inside.

Since 1940, the minerals in our fruits and vegetables have quietly depleted. And the depletion is speeding up. It’s like a larger tomato, diluted. That is the uncomfortable shorthand. Your grandmother’s tomato and today’s tomato can look identical, weigh the same, and taste similar, but carry less of what your inner ocean requires. This is the deeper reason depleted soil matters. It is not only that you are losing essential nutrients. You are losing bandwidth. The ocean inside you is a communication network, and minerals are how it speaks.

Average decline measured in common fruits and vegetables since 1940.

So Where Did the Minerals Go?

The soil tells the story. The potential causes behind the decline in the nutritional quality of foods have been identified worldwide as chaotic mineral nutrient application, the preference for less nutritious cultivars/crops, the use of high-yielding varieties, and agronomic issues associated with a shift from natural farming to chemical farming. This alarm has been raised, and it is one of the biggest challenges for future generations’ health!

One Pinch. A Thousand Functions.

I’d be willing to bet that we can condense thousands of drugs into a handful of remedies that do more to restore the immune system's ability to fight inflammation than any single prescription. Start with the simplest one. Replace table salt with ocean salt. A few grains a day. That is all it takes to begin replenishing your plasma, the salty inner ocean.

And then something quietly remarkable happens.

Cramps disappear. Headaches vanish. Blood pressure starts to regulate. Cravings ease. Energy returns. The noise in the body settles.

I could go on. But I think you are beginning to understand.

A MOMENT OF REFLECTION

What Is Your Inner Ocean Missing?

If a fruit today looks identical to one from fifty years ago but carries half the iron, what does that mean for how much you should be eating?

Magnesium, calcium, potassium: if your inner ocean is short on any of these, what would your body be telling you?

What would it mean to think of soil health as a direct input to your own health, rather than a farming concern far removed from your dinner plate?

COMING IN ISSUE 08

Do you want to live to be 100 years old? We have covered salt. We have covered soil. Next issue: something harder.

Until next time, remember, you are an ocean inside. Replenish it with trace minerals and you renew yourself.

Matthew 5:13
“You are the salt of the earth. But if the salt loses its saltiness, how can it be made salty again? It is no longer good for anything, except to be thrown out and trampled underfoot.”