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TIL the Internet is deficient in iodine.

Probably from all the salt being thrown around in games. They need to keep that salt in them, not just waste it like that.

We ate a lot of paint chips as kids.

Salt bae should consume some of the salt he's been sprinkling to his overpriced food.

Don’t think they launched this in US /s

The Revisionist History podcast had a great episode about the experiment that demonstrated the improvement from adding iodine to salt.

Leaded gasoline contaminated absolutely everything with lead, obviously worse the closer you were to constant car exhaust.

But it gets in the soil, comes down in rain, washes into rivers, etc etc

American cooking shows always talk about using "kosher salt" which I assume means iodine free as iodine may come from shellfish. So unless you had a particular audience why would you use kosher salt? Or have I got that wrong?

It's about the flake size, actually. Nothing about iodine.

Here's a video explaining.

They use to pipe in steam with iodine in it into classrooms to give the nutrient to the children.

Wow. So what's kosher about it? Video didn't say. Why would the grain size determine if you could use it during Passover? (Probably need to Google that)

kosher salt is called kosher salt is because it's referring its use for Jewish religious practice of dry brining meats, known as kashering. It does not mean the salt is made kosher.

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Okay that makes sense.

More specifically, iodine deficiency causes goiters, neurocognitive impairments, and in severe deficiency, hypothyroidism resulting in cretinism.

Akron, Ohio was where a whole bunch of school girls were given iodized salt with their parents permission, with resounding results.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3509517/

I loved that episode.

It's actually quite surprising how much of out basic foodstuffs are fortified with other vitamins and minerals. Flour often has Iron, B Vitamins and other stuff added. Oils and spreads have Vitamin D added. Even tap water has some flouride.

IQ tests are kinda bullshit, so take this study with a grain of salt.

No iodine = “I’m Stupid but unaware” Takes iodine = “HEY I WAS STUPID I HAD NO IDEA”

Interesting. A neighbor of ours grew up in this area, and later developed a goiter. Wonder if she suffered from hypothyroidism herself.

I've never seen anything but iodized salt until I moved to rural North Carolina. Here, the grocery stores have more non-iodized salt than iodized. I assume it's because people here pickle and can more than other places I've lived but, given how under educated a lot people here are, I wonder if people choose non-iodized for regular use because they don't know to choose iodized.

That was the only chips we had and we were thankful to have that.

You have to remove blood from meat to make it kosher. For whatever reason large grained salt is better for that.

Can you TLDR what they did?

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Found the guy that received a low IQ score! /s

I believe it's called kosher salt because it's used to make other things (meats) kosher, not because it is kosher. All salt is kosher.

Oh Oh Oh!!!! now do sugar!!!

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Edit: Thanks for the downvotes. I think this is one reason Mexico outlawed ramen.

Habitual sugar use reduces cognitive function. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6662517/

It's just sea salt right?

The name isn't to describe the salt as kosher. The act of removing blood from meat is called "koshering". Kosher salt is salt used for koshering.

Holy shit, that's significant. I figured the effects were more modest.

Dr talked a school principal into introducing iodized salt to schoolchildren, specifically girls. There were no rules or regulations about such things then. It was a huge success but would never happen in today’s society. Gladwell wishes/imagines being able to do this with vaccines, specifically Covid vaccines.

From the revisionist history podcast, places near salt water tended to not be iodine insufficient, which is where the dr got the idea to add it to salt.

I meant what the experiment to demonstrate the improvement was.

The first sentence covers it. Dr talked to a principal of a school nearby ( I think in Cleveland) to see if he could try it. They said “ hell no”. Then he talked to a principal in Akron ( I think) and they agreed. It was not an FDA regulated double blind study. He simply talked the principal into replacing salt with iodized salt.

This is the story about every essential nutrient (including food itself), rectifying a deficiency is good, taking in excess looking for a greater beneficial effect ranges from pointless to harmful to health.

Sadly there is a huge supplements industry taking people's money due to this mistaken belief. Even more sadly such people will claim that evidence-based treatments are a scam.

I think Kosher salt is usually mined from salt deposits, but both of them are coarse edible salt

There are folks who jump on every "it must be bad for you" bandwagon.

There is a iodine bandwagon. Wife's friend was on it for years. Had to use special pink Pakistan salt or something. She got sick, turned out to be due to lack of iodine. Her husband is kind of a nut also.

How are they kinda bullshit?

Supposedly, people from iodine insufficient midwest ate potato peeling (as in baked potatoes) to provide iodine and prevent goiter. Iodized salt made that unnecessary.

He didn’t like the results.

I was just reading about this in “A Terrible thing to waste” by Harriet Washington

Don’t worry they’re ordering sea salt now to avoid the iodine

I got the joke

I too listen to Revisionist History.

It's kosher because you store it in the taberNaCle.

The IQ for the of the thing the the the

I got lost in that title

You mean wall candy?

in some ways yes, but either way the traditional IQ test (WAIS for adults, WISC for kids) didn’t even exist in 1924 so i’m curious how they figured this

Maybe they should switch to iodized salt.

Iodized sugar? Gross

No other factors influenced this? Odd.

>To figure out the effects, the researchers used the data from the Army General Classication Test (AGCT) given to people who enlisted during World War 2. That covers a wide group of men born precisely at the time iodized salt was introduced (1920-1927), which allowed comparison of low and high iodine areas.
>
>The Air Force received enlistees who scored significantly higher on the AGCT, and the number of men who scored well and went to the Air Force from low iodine areas dramatically increased after iodized salt was introduced. The estimates of intelligence increases are based on that data.

Source: https://www.businessinsider.com/iodization-effect-on-iq-2013-7

Did they take it away recently?

It was just a setup for the punchline.

Hahaha…technically it would have had to be reduced when these yahoos were children.

But it explains this current crop of Americans.

TIL that Trump and Qanon supporters are iodine deficient. Jk, they are just in cults

Imagine the fox news talking heads complaining about an attack on conservative values if we just discovered this and were trying to implement it now.

you jest but there are definitely people who protest iodizing salt the way florodizing water is protested.

Maybe you need some iodine.

you can trace the rise and drop of the crime rate with the rise and drop of lead in gasoline - there's about a 20 year offset but the graphs are perfectly matched up.

> Even tap water has some flouride.

Not in some cities (like calgary.)

Some idiots (read, uneducated citizens) decided to say that "fluorine is badddd mm'kayyyy" so they took it out.

I tried to buy a small salt shaker from the grocery store and all they have now is sea salt. So yeah, seems like it.

But I do believe most kosher salt brands don't have iodine. Thats one of the (many) reasons chefs prefer it to table salt. Iodine does have a flavor.

this is the correct answer.

also while kosher salt is not about iodine content, i'm pretty sure it's generally not iodized. i've never seen iodized kosher salt, personally, anyway.

ding! correct.

Hey-o!

So when did they stop?

Gina? i got some attiee vibes from this

Can you Americans shut up about politics for one millisecond?

My town just got rid of Fluorine. The people making the decision were mostly scientists. There's a number of reasons to do so besides 'fluorine is bad'. One of the reasons was its mostly sourced in China, and the purity is questionable at the very least, meaning they were dumping who-knows-what industrial sludge into the water.

There's no significant amount of blood left in any properly prepared meat anyway. There's myoglobin left in the tissues which is often mistaken as blood. And salt doesn't really take it out anyway - I understand that's part of some rituals, but the salt merely draws out moisture. Some blood cells might come out with it, but it doesn't really draw blood out specifically.

Regardless, it seems that "classic" rules regarding blood and kosher allow for "blood" left in the vessels of meat? But I guess it's pretty complicated and there's more than one type of "kosher" designation.

> onder if people choose non-iodized for regular use because they don't know to choose iodized.

For many it's because iodised salt has a more bitter and distasteful flavour than regular sea salt.

I've never used enough salt to notice. I'm probably one of the few people my doctor told me to eat more salt.

And today "ooohhhhh!!!! Sea Salt!!!"

*Sea Salt does not contain iodine and and is sold as a sort of premium salt.

I was shocked to find that a huge fast food franchise I worked for in high school had only non-iodized salt. Restaurants were supposed to be the main place to disseminate it to everyone, but I get the impression that either cost or taste is reducing how many places buy iodized salt.

I think they mean why did the doctor think it would do anything in the first place

no talk only bombs

No! That’s the problem!

Are all salts (Reed salt from kenya, Pink salt in Pakistan,Common salt from the seas) same or do they have special properties. Do they have varying levels of iodine?

Iodine is added to salt artificially. In nature it's in seafood and I'm not sure where else.

All salts have natural iodine, but not enough for the recommended daily allowance. The right amount is added in the factories.

For the most part, natural iodine is found in food, mainly seafoods, but it's also in plants that grow in places that weren't ablated by glaciers. These areas were known as the goiter belt.

And all the different salts, even the most expensive stuff, are functionally the same. One may taste better to you over the other due to taste bud differences formed by the foods you eat, or size of crystals, or other small things. But, in general, salt is salt.

Dr noticed that goiters were prevalent in the Midwest from WW1 soldier fitness studies (I think), noticed that further from salt water you were, the more likely you were to have goiters. Figured it had to do with salt or saltwater seafood, eventually isolated it to iodine. Had experimented with dogs before moving on to people.

Edit: it has been a while since I heard the episode, basing it on my memory. My wife contends my memory is an unreliable narrator.

Kosher salt and most “gourmet” salts are NOT iodized. You can get some decent iodized sea salts or course grind salts, but you have to look for them. They will always say iodized on the label.

Interestingly, most countries iodize their drinking water and flouridate their salt, where the U.S. does the opposite. The end result seems the same.

That might explain some of the comments I've heard from "professional" chefs who complain about iodized salt and how they only use un-iodized salt.

With family in Pakistan I never realised that pink rock salt was seen as fancy in most of the world, we just have it with fruit most of the time

Serious question, is all the salt in my processed food (like ramen) iodized?

Now non-ionized sea salt is being sold a health food. I wonder how that's impacting IQ.

True that those don't have added iodine. I guess I didn't elaborate enough when I said it's added in the factories.

Although all salt has a trace amount of iodine naturally, it's not enough for RDA. So the labeled iodized salt has iodine added in the factory.

Also, I might add... Iodine is a poison, yes. The amount of table salt needed to consume would kill you long before any I'll effects of iodine were felt.

Yeah, the markup on price is insane.

what did it do to the other 3/4?

i actually have fluridosis from having too much flourine as a child and its fucked up my teeth, but aside from that im not sure of any visible damage, maybe my chronic bone pain is one issue caused by it but i have no proof, its given me restless leg syndrome and general myalgia. ---could be unrelated.. not sure

Possibly, but apparent stupidity might be wilful ignorance or intellectual laziness. Intelligence alone doesn't guarantee any of the pleasant things that you associate it with. Even smart humans are just humans, and humans are stupid

Cancel cultures motto should be "Let's take it back 200 years"

It's not so much that everyone got smarter as we've managed to eradicate an extremely serious cause for profound mental retardation (congenital hypothyroidism).

what in the heeell is cretinism?! is this another invented jargon?

nevermind, I just looked it up and I think I have cretinism for missing on this.

> AGCT

Hasn't it been shown many times that the AGCT is a complete bullshit way to measure innate intelligence because most of the questions revolve around trivia and school knowledge--which meant that rural men and African Americans of the era were classified as borderline mentally handicapped when they were simply unschooled.

Not sure who you were responding too…

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And then leaded gas clawed all those gains back!

Yep. It's a legitimate medical thing. It's not just an insult by bougie people.

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LOL. My self-criticism mostly.

I read a book about cooking and they recommended non-iodized salt because of taste preference. It said that the iodine(?) wasn't as neglected in our diets now but it's a holdover from when it was lacking.

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Not sure, and unfortunately the paper Business Insider is citing doesn't seems to go into detail about how they're mapping these AGCT scores onto IQ. That information is probably in one of the paper's own references.

They do however mention they weren't able to find a significant correlation between AGCT scores and level of education in this particular dataset:

>While surprising, this finding is consistent with the fact that in our data we find a very weak correlation between AGCT scores and education. Specifically, the correlation between AGCT scores and graduation from high school is 14%, while the correlation between AGCT scores and having one year of college or more is just 9%.

https://www.nber.org/system/files/working_papers/w19233/w19233.pdf

I mean, the difference here is they are comparing people with considerable schooling with people who has even more schooling (high school dropouts vs college students).

I am talking about people who are entirely unschooled or nearly so (of which there were many back in the World War I era).

I guess you're in the US? Here in France, salt has iodine and most toothpaste has fluorine, but none of the other additives you list.

UK. I know our flour is fortified at the very least.

I can't find anything about iodized water or fluoridated salt with a quick look on Wikipedia.

Lots of countries iodize salt: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iodised_salt#In_public_health_initiatives

The article on fluoride therapy doesn't mention table salt: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fluoride_therapy#Water_fluoridation

Idonie deficiency can cause lots of disease in human beings irl.

Awesome answer! Thank you!

Ya ya, you and every other person who thinks it should be removed. The last 10 that I tried to question made shit up.

I too much prefer listening to chefs for my dietary recommendations rather than licensed physicians.

Doesn't freakonomics make the claim that post Roe v Wade abortion increases also line up with the decrease in crime, albeit laggingly?

Everything is a poison, only the dose matters.

FWIW I have definitely seen bags of table salt that had fluoride added.

https://dutchpatriot.wordpress.com/2009/02/16/fluoride-added-to-table-salt/

edit-Link only provided as example it happens, its a far right conspiracy blog so lol I am not endorsings its claims.

Thanks!

Someone is listening to Revisionist History!

Measurable intelligence has been steadily rising since the 50s, and arguably longer. It's hard to say how much of that is from salt.

It's weird that when I came to the US, it was my first time seeing uniodized salt..

Generally speaking, sea salts and other special salts don't have Iodine added. It will be called Iodonized salt, and is just basic plain white table salt. The product labeling should mention it.

Nah, just the mods of /r/News.

Canada has not banned fluoride in water. My city has a fluoridated water system, and as of 2017 (the last available report with census data), about 40% of the population lives in communities with fluoridated water.

Also fun fact, the reason both the Midwest and European alpine countries both had such large goiter epidemics is because glaciers had swept those regions, greatly reducing the iodine content in the soil.

We actually get iodine from milk in the UK, instead of in salt.

It was completely by accident too, farmers started giving iodine rich foods to cattle in the 1930s to help with some cattle health issues, and that caused iodine rich milk that basically cured the population!

Holy $#!+ this is amazing! Especially after hearing all of those conspiracy theories about the govt putting iodine and fluoride in the water supply.

Cool. Go up to a Hasidic Jew and ask what Kosher actually means in a modern context. They'll win a gold medal at mental gymnastics every time.

My favorite is it is absolutely forbidden to shave your beard. Razors are absolutely forbidden. But since electric razors are technically "scissors", it's fine to trim your beard down to the skin.

Tell me about it. A close friend of mine came from an Orthodox family (they rejected it). It was very interesting to hear the types of incredible arguments developed to support things like using electricity on the sabbath (it's only wrong when you create a "spark" apparently) or how some electronic devices are acceptable like a fitbit but not others. It's really an amazing demonstration of how logic can be abused through flawed premises.

This probably isn’t the only thing helped by enriching a product… breakfast cereals, bread, flour, margarine, salt, snack bars, dairy and milk and plant-based milk alternatives, juices, and baby foods are all commonly fortified foods.

I’m sure someone will stop by and say you shouldn’t eat heavily processed foods which is probably correct but not possible for a percentage of the population. Fortifying foods is a good thing…

Or the fishing line around shopping centers to allow shopping on the sabbath. Don't worry, it's a "wall."

If there ever is a rapture/apocalypse, I want a fundamentalist Jew as humanity's lawyer

Something tells me whoever seeks it out is probably already lacking, so... (Or has a health condition)

Salt fluoridation: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/24308394/

The water thing is a couple of things that I think I was confusing. Iodine is a normal part of drinking water treatment (almost all municipal drinking water is iodized to some extent), but iodizing enough for supplementary reasons is mostly used in areas where iodizing other things is impractical or more difficult. Incidentally, iodized flour is also a thing sometimes used. https://awwa.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1002/j.1551-8833.1927.tb12646.x and https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0278691515000939

>If there ever is a rapture/apocalypse, I want a fundamentalist Jew as humanity's lawyer

That is the best thing I've read all day. Well done.

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I’ve never heard that, like ever. Also the leaded gasoline thing crosses borders.

There's way too big of a backlash against things like multivitamins too though, to the point that many people think they're worthless. They absolutely are not, and getting a perfectly balanced diet is a lot harder than many people realize. Basic vitamin supplements are a bad thing, plus there extremely cheap. A multivitamin is like $10 for a few months. Just gotta take it at dinner.

I mean perfect example I got a noticable benefit from taking some basic supplements, never spending more than $15 a month on it all (likely far less). I thought it was all just a scam like you, that I was probably just fine from a decent diet. Just fine isn't the same as good though. You shouldn't have to wait until you have a deficiency so bad that it causes medical issues. Vitamin D is by far the biggest one, most people just don't get enough sunlight to make their own. Maybe manual laborers in the tropics, but that's about it.

Tho I've never heard of anyone thinking you could just take more vitamins and get healthier. That's kinda ridiculous, they're dangerous in crazy high doses but so is everything.

Also gotta take your vitamins with food, always. They're just peed out otherwise.

Edit: in case anyone thinks the ass replying to me has a point, check the peer reviewed papers I linked to. This guy is nuts and shouldn't be giving anyone medical advice.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3068797/

More below too

Sure its not a tin overdose from your hat?

It’s like bananas. If you eat a sufficient number of them, the cumulative radiation would kill you. The necessary number of bananas would kill you first though.

I mean, I'm sure you get a week's worth of iodized salt from three McDonald's fries.

I too listened to that episode recently. It was a crossover episode from the world's greatest con podcast.

Aren't we getting weaker too? Something like the grip strength of humans who were hunter gatherers far exceeded modern day?

If so it's like we're redoing our fallout built and moving stats from strangth into intelligence

i literally have diagnosed flurine poisoning from consuming too much flurine as a child. not a conspiracy its real.

“Scientists” LOL

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Would you prefer for us to overly confident? America #1

Goddamn.... How dumb were people before if what we have now is the improved average?

You have to add it. Those fancy salts do not usually have added iodine. It says so on the labels.

So if you like goiters…

It distributes on land from evaporated ocean water. Plants and grazing animals then absorb it. You can get plenty of iodine from mills. Mountains are often iodine deficient since most water runs down hill rather than gets into the soil.

I have to wonder if the introduction of lead into gasoline around the same time didn't counteract those gains in collective IQ.

How does something like this happen? Too many fluoride supplements?

Me, eating a delicious bowl of salt

I could wonder the same but now we have entire businesses devoted to making things more complicated.

I don't think that's true except possibly for very near the ocean. In the 1990s I read research about the Mongolians being very iodine deficient.

EDIT if you look up the Goiter Belt, it doesn't correlate to mountains. The Great Lakes region was especially bad, for instance.

https://pubs.acs.org/doi/10.1021/acs.est.8b05533#

Historically oceans have been seen as a primary source of iodine I precipitation but apparently there are other sources in the water cycle.

Also ocean precipitation goes far in land. Rain clouds that from into the Gulf of Mexico go well into Canada. They intercept cold fronts coming south and make T storms.

You should look again at the map and then look at topography of the US before you make that assertion about correlation.

I have.

I was suffering from hypthridism in cmnt childhood and i took idione.

Himalayan salt?

I believe so.

yeh i think just was exposed to too many different sources and they stacked.

the issue is it forms layers through ur calcium deposits as you are growing, so like the idea is that you regulary are getting an even, constant, little amount that is dispersed through ur bones and teeth as u grow, but at some stages I had massive exposures and the flurine formed thicker layers in pockets that are harder but more brittle, and so these pockets crack. my teeth kinda lose flakes of these thick white flurine layers over years like a croissant kinda flaking off

Fun fact, original bananas are extinct due to blight. The ones we have today are remakes, but don't taste the same. If you want to taste what an old one tasted like, try a banana laughy taffy.