Salt is a cherished part of our diet for a very fundamental reason. We need it. We would die without it. It is one of about forty tiny specks of incidental matter—odds and ends from the chemical world—that we must get into our bodies to give ourselves the necessary zip and balance to sustain daily life. Collectively, those specks are known as vitamins and minerals, and there is a great deal—a really quite surprising amount—that we don’t know about them, including how many of them we need, what exactly some of them do, and in what amounts they are optimally consumed.
