E42: The Importance of Salt for Humans and Livestock | Darryl Bosshardt of Redmond Incorporated

Get ready for a deep dive into the world of all things salt! Darryl of Redmond Real Salt brings his expertise to our most important questions: what is wrong with modern day salt? What should you look for in a good quality salt? How much salt do our bodies need? And more! Whether looking for the best salt for maintaining livestock, cooking from scratch, food preservation, everyday use, or mineral balance, this educational conversation will equip you with the information you need to make intentional food choices.

In this episode, we cover:

Where does salt actually come from?
An explanation of salt’s importance to the body
How Redmond is answering the demand for a diversity of salt products
Why our bodies need electrolytes and how salt meets that need
The power of tuning into our cravings in meeting our nutritional needs
A look at how our ancestors consumed salt
The problem with salt on the grocery store shelves today
Questions to ask when you are looking for a quality salt

Thank you to our sponsors!

Earthley.com | Clean, natural, and affordable herbal remedies and body care that support health and wellness naturally

Nutrimill.com | High-quality small kitchen appliance products that function well, are easy to use, and promote healthy eating

About Darryl

Darryl Bosshardt is passionate about healthy living, healthy eating and life-long learning. Darryl grew up working for the family mineral business in Redmond, UT and then earned a Bachelor of Science degree at Southern Utah University followed by an MBA at Western Governor’s University.

Resources

Check out all of the Redmond products mentioned here!

Connect

Darryl Bosshardt of Redmond Incorporated | Website | Instagram | Facebook | TikTok

The Importance of Salt for Humans and Livestock Transcript

Amy Fewell Welcome to the Homesteaders of America Podcast, where we encourage simple living, hard work, natural healthcare, real food, and building an agrarian society. If you’re pioneering your way through modern noise and conveniences, and you’re an advocate for living a more sustainable and quiet life, this podcast is for you. Welcome to this week’s podcast. I’m your host, Amy Fewell, and I’m the founder of the Homesteaders of America organization and annual events. If you’re not familiar with us, we are a resource for homesteading education and online support. And we even host a couple of in-person events each year with our biggest annual event happening right outside the nation’s capital here in Virginia every October. Check us out online at HomesteadersofAmerica.com. Follow us on all of our social media platforms and subscribe to our newsletter so that you can be the first to know about all things HOA (that’s short for Homesteaders of America). Don’t forget that we have an online membership that gives you access to thousands—yes, literally thousands—of hours worth of information and videos. It also gets you discount codes, an HOA decal sticker when you sign up, and access to event tickets before anyone else. All right. Let’s dive into this week’s episode.

Amy Fewell Welcome back to this week’s episode of the Homesteaders of America Podcast. We have one of our sponsors with us, Darryl from Redmond Salt. Welcome to the podcast, Darryl.

Darryl Bosshardt Thanks, Amy. I’m delighted to be here. I love talking about salt. It’s one of the most misunderstood minerals on earth. And if you were homesteading or had no access to electricity or you were living in the apocalypse, salt keeps all of us alive. It’s so necessary and hopefully we can touch on a little bit of that today.

Amy Fewell Oh yeah, absolutely. You’ve already won everyone over just with your intro. You said apocalypse and every homesteaders like, “Yes, let’s listen to this!” Darryl, why don’t you tell us a little bit about what Redmond Salt is and how you guys came about being.

Darryl Bosshardt That’s a great question. Yeah, so Redmond is based in a little town in central Utah called Redmond, and there’s these three red mounds behind the town, and that’s kind of how it got its name. But the way I got into salt was actually my grandpa and his brother. So back in the the early 1900s, my grandfather’s grandfather came to the Salt Lake Valley and then moved south to Homestead. You know, settle a farm and under their farm, there happened to be this ancient sea bed worth of salt that was laid down during the Jurassic era. Of course, they were just farmers at the time, and they knew there were some outcroppings of salt north and south of the farm that the Native Americans had actually harvested long before the, you know, kind of the settlers moved west. And it wasn’t until the 1950s when there was a pretty good drought in Utah and the farm wasn’t doing that well, that my grandpa and his brother decided to bulldoze the alfalfa and the barley out of the way and start selling salt to other local farmers because salt is so essential for farms and for people. And that’s kind of how Redmond Salt was born.

Amy Fewell That’s amazing. So you have a direct connection to Redmond Salt being created.

Darryl Bosshardt Yeah. You know, when my dad said, “If you don’t straighten up, I’m going to send you to the salt mines,” he wasn’t just threatening. That was a true story in my house.

Amy Fewell Okay, so tell us a little bit about how salt is mined, because most people have no idea.

Darryl Bosshardt I love that question because it really opens up Pandora’s box into salt. So our bodies, our saline solution in motion, we need salt to survive. And we can go into more detail on that in a minute. But salt comes from a sea bed at some point, it’s either a current ocean like the San Francisco Bay or the Gulf of Mexico, or the Sea of Japan or the Mediterranean, or it’s from a dead sea like the Dead Sea in Israel or the Dead Sea here in Utah called the Great Salt Lake, or it comes from a prehistoric sea bed, a sea bed that dried up, you know, eons ago. So those are the three places. So if we lived, you know, thousands of years ago, we would either go down to the shore of the ocean and we would collect salt and evaporate the water off and we’d be left with the mineral rich salt that the ocean contains, very similar to this solution in our bodies. We can talk more about that in a second. Or we could, you know, go to the Great Salt Lake, which is a dead sea bed here in Utah, and you could harvest the salt crystals from this dead sea, or you could watch the animals and the animals (because they need salt, just like we do) are drawn to salt deposits. So early humans found salt by one of those three ways. And so the salt deposit here in Utah is this… When people think of salt in Utah, they often think of the Great Salt Lake, which is about two hours north of this prehistoric sea bed that Redmond Salt comes from. And so the way we harvest the salt, this deposit is about a quarter mile wide, it’s about three miles long and it’s about 5000ft deep. So this would be the surface — for those listening, I’m using my hands to kind of present this salt deposit — but the salt deposit just comes right up to the surface serendipitously under my grandfather’s farm. And so back when they first started mining, they just took a bulldozer and bulldozed the top 30ft of soil and then they hit this solid deposit of salt. And now we are underground because back in the 70s, my uncle was mining and just getting rained on and snowed on, and he’s thinking, if I just blast a hole in the salt wall, I’m going to be out of the elements. And so now we’re in tunnels and in a salt mine, the tunnels are very safe. The tunnels are 60ft wide, 30ft tall and it’s like you’re driving into the Manhattan Tunnel. It’s not like this scary dark coal mine with low ceilings, it’s like you’re in a parking garage. And so for the industrial salt, for roads or for animals, we actually use explosives and blast chunks off the wall. And for the human consumption, under the brand that we call real salt, we chew it off the wall with a carbide-tipped (which is like a Mantis tiller you might have in your backyard, but a really big one) and it just chews the salt off the wall for the culinary use versus the more industrial side where we blast.

Amy Fewell So I have to ask, since this is your grandfather’s farm or was, are there any like mineral rights? You know, we hear about that in a lot of locations. Did you guys have to go through any hoops or does it still solely belong to you guys or how does that work?

Darryl Bosshardt So years and years ago, the minerals were attached to the property. Now, that’s not always the case. You might buy a piece of property and it might not have the water rights that are under it. Maybe you have a gravel pit or something on your property and those mineral rights are separate or can be separated from the property rights, just like you would have… Maybe you buy a piece of property, but you don’t have the water rights to go with it so you can’t start a homestead because you have the property but not the water. So originally they were together, but now they can be separated. So when my grandfather initially went into mining back in the 1950s, they had purchased the property and it came with the mineral rights.

Amy Fewell Okay, very neat. Good for you guys, right? Okay, so next question. You’re were talking about the industrial use and everyday life like table salt use, but you guys do a lot with salt, so why don’t you kind of run down the list? I mean, you have table salt, you have the Re-Lyte mixes, you have seasonings. What all do you do there?

Darryl Bosshardt So the answer is quite long, as you just pointed out. Because salt is so essential for life, salt was actually the original source of trade. If you look at any of the early civilizations, they were built around access to the salt deposits because our animals need salt. You know, if you have a farm and you don’t have salt for your animals, they’re going to have birth defects and hoof rot and just a lot of diseases will set in and our bodies are saline solution in motion. Our tears are salt, our sweat is salt, our urine — trust me on this — and our urine is salt. And even if you’re drinking distilled water, we are going to sweat and cry and urinate salt because our bodies are just saline solution. In fact, in order of importance, to keep us alive, we have oxygen. That’s the first thing, right? If oxygen were immediately sucked out of the rooms that we’re in, we’re going to be in a world of hurt. And then the next important is water because our bodies are 72% water and if we are dehydrated, we get headaches, we get nauseousness, the body starts to shut down. We can go a long time without food, but we can’t go very long without water. And the next, in order of importance, is salt. Because salt’s job in the body is to regulate our intracellular fluids and our extracellular fluids, and that keeps our bodies hydrated, it keeps our electricity going in our bodies. Our hand moves with an electric current. Our eyes blink and our minds think because of electricity. In fact, outside of a spiritual discussion, the only difference in you and I being alive and having this conversation in one minute and both being dead the next minute, outside of a spiritual discussion, is the absence of an electric current.

Amy Fewell Right.

Darryl Bosshardt And so if we went into cardiac arrest or fibrillation, the EMTs would come in and they would shock us with electricity to try to reestablish that electric current. And salt establishes that electricity in our bodies. And so when you go to the hospital, the first thing they’re going to give you is an I.V. of saline solution, which is salt water, because salt keeps us alive. In fact, an I.V. of distilled water, an I.V. of tap water and I.V. of coffee or tea, which might sound good in the morning, would kill us because we have to have an I.V. of saline solution. And so because of that, salt was actually paid as a wage in the times of Rome. The term “is a man worth his salt” was because if you were getting paid a wage or a salary, — which is again tied to saline — if you were getting paid a salary or a wage in salt and you weren’t working hard enough to earn your keep, you weren’t worth your salt. So every religious book that you might ever read talks about the importance of salt. Has the, you know, “has salt lost its savor? Wherewith the earth be salted.” It was given as religious gifts, it was a source of trade, and then in the 60s and 70s and 80s, we started to hear, “Oh, salt’s bad. You got to cut the salt out of your diet. It’s going to kill us.” But it keeps us alive. And that kind of went through that same thing for a while where everybody thought, all fats bad. You got to cut out any source of fat and then people started to have problems as they cut out… And now doctors are saying, “Hey, you know, there are good fats and there are bad fats, but it’s not that all fat is bad.” In fact, you know, the real nutrition in milk is the fat. We use it to make ice cream and butter and all the other good parts of milk is in the fat and salt kind of went through that same thing. And so to go back to that question on what do we do with salt, well, we do a whole lot because salt keeps us alive. And so initially my grandpa and his brother started to sell salt just to the local farmers because animals needed it and they had chunks of salt and the animals liked it and then started to sell it for industrial purposes, like keeping roads safe here in the Intermountain West. Salt will melt ice off roads and a natural mineral salt like the salt from Utah actually melts the snow and the ice better without being as corrosive as that processed salt you might see in some areas. And so initially sold it to farmers and sold it to the state of Utah to, you know, keep the roads safe. And then we never really used it for food outside of the family. I mean, we used it, but if you remember back in the 1950s and 60s, that was when we had white flour and white sugar and everything that was supposed to be better for us were these highly processed foods and highly processed salts. So my grandma tells the story of when important company would come over to the house for dinner, she would hide the good mineral rich, real salt, and she would bring out processed table salt and put it on a counter so she wouldn’t be embarrassed about using this inferior, “dirty” or minerally salt. Which we kind of all laugh about it now, but it was kind of an ego thing, you know, didn’t want to be the person that was serving wheat flour, if white flour was the good flour to have. And in the 1970s, as the health food movement really started to gain momentum and people were realizing, hey, if I’m eating out of boxes and I’m eating out of cans and I’m eating all this processed food, it’s not very good for me or my family. And so they started to look for more natural foods and there was a nutritionist that came through Utah, probably got a tour of the Grand Canyon and maybe saw Mesa Verde and a few of the, you know, national parks. And as part of that, also came in and got a tour of the Salt Mine. And we didn’t think much of it at the time. And then we started getting all these phone calls from health food stores in California and across the West saying, “Hey, we want to buy your salt for our health food store.” And we said, “Well, we don’t really put it in a jar like that because Grandma’s kind of embarrassed about it.” And they said, “No, there was an article that was written that said ‘the healthiest, tastiest salt in America comes from the Redman Salt Deposit.'” And so my dad and uncle and grandpa got together and said, “Hey, what do we call this stuff? We got to have a name for it. It’s not processed salt, it’s not refined salt, it’s not half salt or new salt or… It’s just real salt.” And that’s kind of how the real salt brand was born. And, you know, kind of the rest is history. So we started out just selling salt for your kitchen table and then chefs came to us and said, “Hey, you know, can you make a seasoning blend? I’m tired of all the sugar and MSG and most of the seasoning salts on the market.” We thought, well, yeah, we can do that. So we took some freeze-dried organic pepper and paprika and celery and coriander and and made an organic seasoning salt with the natural salt. And then we had athletes that came and said, “Man, I love your real salt product, I use it in my kitchen, but is there any way you can make me electrolyte powder that I could put in my water bottle when I’m out on a marathon,” or “I’m a firefighter and I’m always sweating,” or “I’m out in my field all day and I’m just feeling nauseous and I’m drinking a lot of water, but I’m flushing out all the minerals.” So we created an electrolyte product and called it Re-Lyte to re-electrolyte the body. So that’s kind of how one by one we moved into those different industries. And same for the homestead group. You know, we have our salt for cows and horses and sheep and we’d have a customer say, “Man, I really like the salt, but I want to find a way to get my livestock to eat more garlic to help with maybe the fly problem.” And so, “Yeah, let’s take some some salt and add some garlic powder to it.” So that’s how one by one our products have gone from just, you know, salt for your kitchen table and salt for your cows to a salt company that has a lot of products across a lot of different industry.

Amy Fewell Yeah, it’s really salt life. You know, part of your website says “real salt life”. And you know, one of the things that I love that probably doesn’t get promoted enough on your website are these little teeny tiny salt shakers that you can put in your purse or your pocket. And I didn’t even know they existed until a friend of mine when I was pregnant with our baby before this one that we’re pregnant with, I was like, I can’t stand the taste of fake salt. And she’s like, “Well, look, they have these little salt shakers,” and, like, completely changed my life. I’m like, “This is amazing!” And it’s just the perfect size that you can take anywhere with you. But I love it. And then we use Redmond Salt Mineral Blocks and stuff for our livestock, so we’re definitely a Redmond family.

Amy Fewell There are tons of other companies in the health and wellness area out there, companies that make body products, supplements and more. The problem is a lot of them use ingredients that are straight-up not that natural. It’s easier to use emulsifying wax or preservatives or gums because products come together more easily and they last longer. But sometimes they’re cheaper to make. At Earthley, they don’t do those things. Even companies that mean well and try to be natural really aren’t. People have bought into the westernized idea of what is natural. Earthley is not that company. They think that using the true whole variable plant and banking on the power of nature is much smarter and much safer than extracting one single compound from a plant. That’s what Western medicine does, and it’s really not safe at all. Check out Earthley and all their natural body care products. We are so honored to have Earthley as a sponsor and we can’t wait for you to check them out at earthley.com.

Amy Fewell I want to go back a little bit and talk about specifically electrolytes. So as an herbalist with my other side business, this is something I recommend a lot, is the Redman Re-Lyte or just taking Redman Salt and putting a pinch of it in water with lemon or something. But can you talk a little bit more about how does salt work to be a natural electrolyte?

Darryl Bosshardt Yes, great question. So our bodies, as I mentioned before, are saline solution in motion. And salt’s primary job is to help regulate those intracellular and extracellular fluids. In the cell, there’s something called the sodium-potassium pump and the sodium-potassium pump, if you have a cell, there’s a little protocol that will allow that cell to open and close through this little pump. And what that does is that it flushes the cells. And when you think of the time in our lives when our bodies were the healthiest, our cells are growing the fastest, it’s actually when we’re in the womb, before we’re born and we’re floating in a pool of saltwater. So our bodies start in salt, and salt is so essential. I talked about electricity and at trade shows or at the conferences, I’ll give a little presentation on salt and I’ve got a dish with distilled water in it and I’ll take a wire and bring the wire into this side of the dish. And then I have the wire cut and coming out of this side of the dish into a light bulb. And if you put distilled water in this dish and you plug it in, that light bulb will not turn on because the electricity can’t move through the water if it’s distilled water. But in this demonstration, I’ll take a jar of salt and I’ll start to pour it into that distilled water. And as soon as the salt hits the water and that water dissolves that salt, it can conduct electricity and the light bulb turns on. And that’s why salt is called an electrolyte is because it’s conductive. Now, when we talk about salt in chemistry, if this was a chemistry class, the professor would say salt and wouldn’t necessarily be referring to sodium and chloride that are bound together because in chemistry, salt is an acid and a base that are bound together in an ionic bond, meaning an electric charge holds them together. What’s beautiful about the human body is salt, that we talk about food salt, which is our bodies are based on is sodium and chloride. Well, in its pure form, sodium is a very caustic, pure metal if you have pure sodium. In fact, if I had a brick of sodium here in this room and I poured just a little bit of water on that pure sodium, it is going to blow up. Just super reactive, very caustic, very alkaline metal. Chlorine is a deadly gas. Pure chlorine gas would kill us. It’s very dangerous. You know, if you have a swimming pool or a hot tub or you have kids, you’ve got to be really careful with the chlorine because it’s so deadly. In the Nazi camps, they would use chlorine gas to to kill people in chemical warfare. Chlorine is a deadly acidic gas. But if you take one chloride, or a molecule, one chlorine, and you attach it to one sodium, you get this life giving substance called sodium and chloride that causes through our veins. And when we consume sodium and chloride, the body through electrolysis will break apart that sodium and chloride and the sodium gets used in the sodium-potassium pump. The sodium and chloride together, some of that stays in solution which is why your tears are salt, our sweat is salt, and the chlorine gets broken off and gets used to make hydrochloric acid. So our bodies digest food with hydrochloric acid. Now, we don’t we don’t drink hydrochloric acid. Our bodies create it using the chloride or the chlorine from sodium and chloride and the hydrogen from the H2O, or that the water that we’re consuming. And it’s just really, you know, wherever you fall on the religious spectrum, it’s pretty amazing that our bodies can take these two deadly chemicals — pure sodium, pure chloride, you bind them together, it’s completely safe, but the body can break them apart and use them individually and that’s how our bodies function on electricity. Now, the neat thing about our bodies and the reason you can’t really overdose on salt if it’s in its right form, is our bodies are amazing. If you watch your horses, they don’t overdose. You know, horses will drink water. They’ll go eat salt. They never overdose on water. They never overdose on salt. And horses are really smart. You’ll watch them and they’ll go eat a fencepost and they’ll go eat some dirt over here and then they’ll go use their their mouth and like sort through whatever they’re eating because they’re so in tune with their bodies. Unfortunately, we humans, I think we’ve kind of lost that as we have the refrigerator and we’re thirsty and so instead of going to get some water like our horses might, we go and we grab a great big thing of soda or a great big thing of even coffee and I have nothing against coffee, but our bodies need good clean water and salt. And I think if we start to pay attention more to our cravings, oftentimes when we think we’re craving sugar or we think we’re craving a big salty bag of potato chips, what we’re really craving is salt. And so I have a little dish here of salt on my counter and if you have a natural salt and you put it in your mouth… Like right now I just put a little piece of salt in my mouth. It tastes very sweet, almost like a little candy, which suggests that I’m probably a little low on salt. I got up this morning, I worked out, I’ve had some water. Now, if I took 4 or 5 pieces, eventually it’s going to start to taste too salty. And horses are the same way. If you have a horse out in the paddock and you put a salt lick there on the fence post, they’ll come over and they will just pound that for, you know, 3 or 4 minutes. And then as soon as they’re like, oh, I’ve had enough, then they’ll go drink some water and they’re on to their next thing. And I think we humans could be a little better at listening to those cravings that our our bodies have.

Amy Fewell Yeah, I agree. When we first started using the Re-Lyte, especially during the summertime, the Re-Lyte is essential. You know, at the beginning, I could use a whole package of Re-Lyte. Like the individual packages that they come in. But after a few days, it was like, ooh, I can’t I can’t use the whole package. I may only be able to use a little bit of the package. And so your body will definitely tell you when you’ve had enough if you just listen to it and you’re not just force feeding it, you know? And so I love that you touched on that because it is something… It’s a skill, right, that we’ve lost in nutrition because of the stuff we’ve been taught and the stuff we’ve been fed through the bigger agricultural world and pharmaceutical world, and you know, to think about the different parts of plants or salts or chemicals that are taken out, even in pharmaceuticals, right? Your body is a genius, essentially, and it knows what to do with all of these things. And if it’s missing something that the pharmaceutical world or even in nutrition has taken out, then it may not respond as efficiently to that. And so I love that you kind of gave us a little science lesson there, because I think a lot of, you know, light bulbs are going to be going off with a lot of homesteaders about that.

Darryl Bosshardt Well, one of the important things when it comes to salt is, as I mentioned before, the nature of salt changed. You know, if we went back a couple of thousand years ago and saw some ancestors, they would have actually eaten more salt than we do. Because if we didn’t have a refrigerator, everything that we ate outside of season would have been preserved in salt. Because our kimchis, sauerkraut, fermented veggies, meats — salt is an amazing preservative. And now people think salt’s bad for them, yet if we went back hundreds of years ago, salt would have kept people alive. In fact, every war up and including the Civil War, was won or lost over who had access to the salt deposits. Because if you have a military and they’re running and they’re sweating and they’re trying to keep food and they don’t have a refrigerator, without salt, that military is going to start to really suffer. In fact, we’ll hear stories every few years of some of the military in Texas or California — they’re out there running with their big rucksacks on and one of them, even though they’re drinking water, will still fall over and die from dehydration. It’s called hyponatremia. Hypothermia is low body temp. Hyponatremia is low salt. And because salt has always been so essential, it kept us alive, but yet we hear salt’s bad. Well, what happened was salt changed in two ways. If we went back thousands of years ago to the coast of Brittany, France, and we were watching the salt harvesters, they would take the salt from the ocean, which has sodium and chloride, but also potassium chloride and calcium chloride and selenium and zinc and phosphorus and copper and iodine. Iodine particularly is interesting because one of the best sources of iodine are sea vegetables — kelp and dulse and salt (natural salt from the oceans and from ancient sea beds) have iodine in them because it’s there, always has been there. So if we went back thousands of years ago, we would take the seawater from the ocean, we would put it in a clay-lined pond and that seawater is going to be around 2 to 3% salt, which is why if you swim in the ocean, it stings your eyes because our bodies are about 1%, the oceans 2 to 3%, so it’s 2 to 3 times saltier than we are. But as we start to evaporate that water off the salt, eventually the salt crystals will fall out of suspension onto that clay lined pond. And as we break those crystals up, we’ll get some gray clay with the crystal salt and we’ll get a French gray salt. And that salt would have the sodium chloride, which would be the 98% of that, but you’d also have trace amounts of potassium, which is important, calcium important, magnesium important, and some other trace elements. Now, today, there’s a lot of salt companies that around the turn of the century (this is when they were inventing the refrigerator and kind of industrializing everything right around the early 1900s), salt companies realize that seawater contains potassium chloride. Well, potassium chloride is pretty valuable and so salt companies said, “What type of a membrane or liner could we use instead of that gray clay to keep the salt together? Let’s put a different liner in there and we can leach off the potassium chloride and sell that to a vitamin company and then move it to the next pond and then we’ll leach off the magnesium chloride and sell that to a different company. Then we’ll move it to the next pond and pull off the calcium chloride and we’ll sell that off.” And so through a series of evaporation ponds, salt companies can start to leach off some of these other important minerals. And our bodies, remember, we call it the sodium-potassium pump, because our bodies need potassium to process that sodium in the cells. This would be like if you and I had a citrus farm in Florida and you came up with this beautiful new technology that you could take a grapefruit and you could suck out all of the ascorbic acid and the vitamin C complex, put it in a capsule, we call it Darryl and Amy’s vitamin C, and then we still sell the orange or the grapefruit at the grocery store. And we’re geniuses, however, we probably never thought, should we really be doing that? Same if, you know, we have a homestead and we’ve got a few beautiful cows and we’re getting this great whole, raw milk, and then we find this, you know, hey, let’s skim that milk off. Let’s take all the milk fat and sell that to the butter company. And then we’re going to sell the skimmed milk at the grocery store for regular milk. Well, again, you know, as a farmer, that makes a lot of sense, but I wouldn’t do that for my own family. I wouldn’t take this beautiful whole raw milk and give or sell the cream away, which is where the nutrition is, and then leave my family with just the white skimmed milk. But yet that’s problem one with salt companies is there are a lot of companies today that if you buy salt from the grocery store and you look at the label, it might say refined salt. It might not even say refined salt, but chances are that salt has been ran through a series of evaporation ponds to leach off some of those other trace elements. That’s problem one. Not as huge a problem because there’s other good sources of potassium. You know, we can go we broccoli, we can eat a lot of nuts and seeds and bananas and other foods, potato skins, rich in potassium. Well, the problem number two started years after that, where salt is hygroscopic. Hygroscopic means it sucks water out of the air. So I’m holding a salt crystal in my hand and if I had this crystal on a dish or a plate in Florida or Hawaii or somewhere very humid, the crystal is going to suck water out of the air and it will actually pool on the plate because it’s that great of a dehumidifier. Which is why if you’re going to dry age some beef, you might hang it in a room with salt crystals because it sucks the water or the humidity out of the air. The challenge with that is if I have a shaker of salt and it’s very humid, those little salt crystals are going to suck the water out of the air. Now, our grandma knew how to deal with that. You know, she’d put rice in the salt just like you might put your cell phone and rice if it gets wet. But around the turn of the century, salt companies got together and said, “What chemical could we coat this crystal with to stop its ability to interact with moisture because we don’t want it to make it sticky in the shaker.” Now the problem is salt’s job in the body is to regulate moisture. And now we’re going to take this salt crystal that’s perfect in nature and now we’re going to coat it with a chemical that stops its ability to do what it’s supposed to be doing. This list of chemicals, things like sodium silico aluminate. This is like the aluminum that’s used in antiperspirant. Things like yellow prussiate of soda, which is sodium ferrocyanide. And these chemicals do, in fact, stop the salts ability to interact with moisture and they came up with this fun marketing campaign that some of your older listeners might be familiar with. And there’s a little girl with an umbrella and it’s raining and she’s walking down the street and the salts kind of trickling out of the back of the shaker and the tagline is “when it rains, it pours” meaning when it’s humid outside, the salt will still pour out of the shaker because it is so full of chemicals that it can’t do what it’s supposed to do in nature. And then we take this processed demineralized salt that’s clear full of chemicals, and then we put copious amounts of it on processed foods that we shouldn’t be eating in the first place and we wonder why we’re sick and tired. It’s not the salt. It’s the highly processed salt on highly processed foods that our ancestors wouldn’t have even recognized. And so when we go back to a homestead and we’re raising our own produce and we’re raising our own livestock, we actually have to go out of our way to add salt back to our diet. Just like as a farmer, you have to go out of your way to make sure your animals have access to salt, because without it, the animals will start to die. They’ll have birth defects and miscarriages and all kinds of issues in a farm if you don’t have salt for your animals. And we are animals. We need the salt just like our livestock do if we’re not eating highly processed foods. Now, if you’re eating out of boxes and cans, yeah, you’re going to get too much salt and it’s going to be highly processed. But if you’re eating a natural diet, salt, you’d have a really tough overdosing on salt. Just like in the hospital, you know, you’ll go in and if you’re having a baby or same-day surgery, one of the first things that’s going to happen is they’re going to start an I.V. and you’ll have the I.V. the entire time you’re in the hospital. Even if you have high blood pressure, even if you have water retention, even pregnancy induced high blood pressure, you will get an I.V. of saline solution and electrolytes. In the hospital, there’s two standard bags of saline. One is called 0.9% saline. The other bag is called Lactated Ringer’s. And if you’re ever in the hospital and you look at that bag of Lactaded Ringer’s, it’s sodium chloride, potassium chloride, magnesium chloride, calcium chloride, because those are the electrolytes that keep us alive.

Amy Fewell Yeah.

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Amy Fewell Isn’t that incredible that people have access to all of that through mineral salts? And most of us are still believing that salt is just salt, right? Oh, salt is salt. There’s no difference. But there’s a major difference and I hope that you guys are realizing (I am pretty sure you are) while listening to this podcast, because this is a lot of information. And the reality is that without salt, it’s very… You can’t live without it. And it’s a simple, very cheap way to maintain your lifestyle and maintain your livestock and add it into your family. And especially if, you know, you’re active or sweating or even pregnancy, you know, especially with those moms who are pregnant. I recommend this all the time. I just did it for a mom who had preeclampsia recently, and I said, “Why aren’t you drinking water with mineral salt in it?” She’s like, “Because that’ll skyrocket my blood pressure.” I’m like, “Actually, you have preeclampsia because you’re dehydrated, because you’re not having electrolytes.” And it’s almost like there’s this moment where they’re like, “What? I’ve been lied to my whole life.” And so salt truly is just a breath of fresh air. And so I’m so happy that you came on to talk to us about this today because I think a lot of people will see this isn’t just… You know, of course you’re a sponsor, but you didn’t come on here just as a sponsor. You really came on here to educate people about something that is truly lifesaving. So is there anything else you want to add to the podcast today before we hop off here?

Darryl Bosshardt I think just two things. But first off, you know, you mentioned our electrolyte sports drink. We call it Re-Lyte or re-electrolyte. It’s a powder that you can mix in a water bottle and it’s convenient. When I go hiking or biking or hunting, I always take the powder sticks with me because it’s convenient. However, if you’ve got a family event coming over, the kids are bringing a bunch of friends over, you’re going to head out and play in the park or, you know, work in the garden, you can make your own electrolyte drink for pennies. And yeah, you can buy our expensive one. No problem, we appreciate the business, but if you have a bunch of friends coming over or the kids are out playing in the backyard, you can make your own sports drink for pennies on the dollar. You know, the first sports drink was invented. It was called Gatorade to aid the Florida Gators, which is a football team. And they were sweating and they were cramping up and they felt nauseous, and so they came up with a formula to aid the Florida Gators. And so the first sign of irritability, your kids have a headache, rather than going for the Tylenol, the aspirin or the ibuprofen, the first sign of a headache, a little bit of electrolyte solution actually really helps. And you can make your own by taking one quart of good clean water, a quarter teaspoon of real salt, a squeeze of lemon and then a little of a fig syrup or maple syrup or honey. And you’ve just made the best sports drink in the world for pennies on the dollar. So that’s my tip number one is don’t buy the expensive sports drinks with the blue coloring and the flavoring. You can make your own. And yeah, you can buy ours if you’re heading out. It’s convenient, it’s easy. I’m not trying to say don’t buy it, but if you’re just having a bunch of friends over, just make your own. Save a bunch of money. The second thing is, as a homesteader, you know, if ever we ended up in a situation where we do have to live on our own, we talk about, you know, things to save. You know, we don’t want to be out of toilet paper. We don’t want to be out of some of the staples. We ought to have some of those in our food storage and saving some coffee and maybe some ammunition and the things, you know, some medicines that are going to keep us safe. Salt should be right there at the top of the list as far as, you know, calculating, hey, if I want food and supplies to last me six months, two years, whatever that number is, don’t forget the salt. Because if you don’t have your electricity and your generator goes out and you use all of your spare fuel and now you’re preserving all of your food in salt and you’re keeping all of your animals alive, something to keep in mind. And then finally, yes, we’re a salt company and we would love to have you use our products, but not everybody has access to it. And so there’s really just three questions and if you ask yourself these three questions, you’ll be able to find a great salt. And you might find Redmond and I thank you for your business if you do or you might find another good brand, which I think is great as well. So these three questions. The first one is, who’s producing it? In salt, that can get really difficult. If you go down to the farmers market and you buy some kale or some eggs or some basil, really easy to ask the person, “Where’s the salt coming from?” If you go and buy an orange, it might say “Florida Orange” or something like that. Salt is really hard because it’s so co-mingled and you don’t know the process, you don’t know the place, so if you can know who’s producing it, you can ask the second question, which is know the source. We talked earlier in the show that you can have salt from a current ocean like the San Francisco Bay or the Gulf of Mexico or the Sea of Japan or the Mediterranean. And if I was getting my salt from the Gulf of Mexico, I would not want to do that during BP. I would not want to get my salt from the Sea of Japan or even the San Francisco Bay during the nuclear meltdown that took place several years ago in Japan. And I wouldn’t want to get it out of the Mediterranean if there was a big cruise ship disaster. And so if you know who’s producing it, you can know the source. And then the final question is, what are they doing to it? Are they taking anything out? Are they putting anything in? And if you can know the source, know who’s producing it and know what they’re doing to it, you’ll end up with a great salt. And it might be Redmond and if so, great. It might be a Celtic gray. It might be, you know, a Hawaiian red. There’s a lot of good natural salts out there, but look at the labels and ask those three questions and you’ll find a great product. And this probably applies to basil and to corn and to your eggs and your pork. I think those three questions would change a lot of people’s lives and I think we’d live in a better society if we could eat a little more intentionally.

Amy Fewell Yeah, absolutely. Going back real quick to what you said about buying salt to have kind of in your prepper pantry. We actually do this through Redmond. This sell… is it 25 pound bags of salt that you sell? Yeah, they sell 25 pound bags of salt. And so I buy this every year. It’s great. I buy it for canning especially because we go through so much salt for canning and preserving and like you said, dry aging and all of this. So you guys can actually find those larger bags of salt on their website. Or maybe you have it local to you, I know some of you do. And kind of put that away for a while until you need it. Well Darryl, thank you so much for joining us on the Homesteaders of America Podcast. We have a lot of information. I’m sure people took notes and are probably thinking, I need to go back and take more notes. So we really appreciate your expertise today.

Darryl Bosshardt Thanks for having me. If you’d ever loved to, you know, if you get some questions or follow up, happy to jump on anytime. So thank you so much, Amy.

Amy Fewell Awesome. Thank you guys for joining us this week and we’ll see you next time.

Amy Fewell Hey, thanks for taking the time to listen to this week’s Homesteaders of America episode. We really enjoyed having you here. We welcome questions and you can find the transcript and all the show notes below or on our Homesteaders of America blog post that we have up for this podcast episode. Don’t forget to join us online with a membership or just to read blog posts and find out more information about our events at HomesteadersofAmerica.com. We also have a YouTube channel and follow us on all of our social media accounts to find out more about homesteading during this time in American history. All right, have a great day and happy homesteading.

E42: The Importance of Salt for Humans and Livestock | Darryl Bosshardt of Redmond Incorporated