Salt, Skin & Sex

Yet Another Cure With Benefits...

A hat tip to Sam Van and Jane 333¹ for turning me on to our body’s need for more salt. What they shared leans heavily on The Salt Fix: Why the Experts Got It All Wrong - and How Eating More Might Save Your Life by James DiNicolantonio (2017).²

In particular, Sam claimed that increasing his salt intake had improved his libido. If that was true, since salt is so cheap and ubiquitous, it offers an exceedingly simple way to improve your quality of life. Who wouldn’t want that? It seemed it was time for some personal experimentation, to confirm or refute his observation.

“The cure for anything is salt water: sweat, tears or the sea.”

-Isaac Dinesen

Introduction

Our bodies are 70% saltwater, and our blood plasma is 98% the same as seawater.³ We literally have the ocean coursing through our arteries and veins.

And blood plasma is the source for:

• Cerebrospinal fluid, which cushions, protects and lubricates the brain and spinal cord,

• Synovial fluid, which cushions, protects and lubricates joints,

• Lymph, which delivers nutrients to tissues and removes waste, and

• Probably many other types of fluids that protect and lubricate various other parts of the body.

Having blood with proper electrolyte levels is required for these other vital bodily fluids to function as intended. If your blood is unhealthy, so are all of its derivatives!

Seawater’s mass is roughly 96.5% water. 3% of its mass is salt (sodium chloride), of which 40% is sodium and 60% is chloride. Together, magnesium, sulfur, calcium and potassium account for 1/4% of seawater’s mass.⁴ Also present are tiny amounts of bromine and carbon, plus even smaller amounts of many other trace minerals.

Clearly salt is very important to us, with the combination of sodium and chloride being 12 times more abundant in sea water than the next four elements by mass. The chloride, in addition to its role as an electrolyte, is needed for the production of stomach acid. And magnesium chloride is the most easily assimilated source of magnesium, a key electrolyte with roles in several hundred different enzymatic reactions.

In the Emergency Room, electrolyte fluids (sterile water with mineral ions) are some of the most effective tools for stabilizing a patient in crisis, which are administered by IV directly into the blood. Normal saline (0.9% sodium chloride in sterile water) is the most common IV used in hospitals.⁵

A 2021 study that examined sodium intake and all-cause mortality in 181 countries worldwide came to the conclusion that higher intake was correlated with lower all-cause mortality and increased longevity. Folks in countries where salt consumption was highest were also those who lived longer (and probably better, as well).

I know that correlation doesn’t equal causation, but I also know that there will never be “scientific evidence”⁶ for any substance that is cheap, ubiquitous and not patentable: substances like DMSO, ozone, chlorine dioxide, etc. And salt.

I’m thinking that we need to add salt to the growing list of cures that lack “scientific evidence,” and which, due to that lack, are intentionally ignored by the anointed insurance-reimbursed Saviors of our Health.

Historical Importance

Salt on the American Frontier was of primary importance in more ways than most people realize.

Salt was so important that any public lands with salt springs were excluded by the Federal government from public land sales, together with significant tracts of surrounding forest. The forest reservations were to provide the fuel that would be needed to evaporate the water out of the saline water source, and thus create salt crystals.

How close you lived to a cheap source of salt was a big determinant in your standard of living on the frontier. Specie (silver or gold coinage) was scarce during the earliest days on the frontier. Cheap salt meant that there was more money available to purchase other goods essential for daily survival.⁷

Wildlife sought out scarce salt licks, creating many of the trails that were the first roads used by Natives and early European explorers (rivers formed the primary transport network).

“Even if mundane in purpose, salt licks were miraculous sights to behold. Filson wrote of the ‘amazing herds of Buffalo’ that came to the licks, and how ‘their size and number, fill the traveller with amazement and terror, especially when he beholds the prodigious roads they have made from all quarters, as if leading to some populous city; the vast space of land around these springs desolated as if by a ravaging enemy, and hills reduced to plains.’”⁸

The foregoing account definitely highlights the importance of salt to wildlife. It’s importance was sufficient to cause wildlife to create literal super highways to access scarce salt resources. Without a doubt, Mother Nature intended for us to acquire adequate amounts of dietary salt, even if it meant traveling great distances to do so.

Many modern interstate highways in states on either side of the Ohio River follow the general route of ancient traces created by vast herds of migrating buffalo. The small size of the buffalo’s feet would cause them to select routes that were high and dry, as they would easily become mired in mud. Such routes were well suited to wagon traffic at all times of the year. Those same attributes made them ideal locations for locating modern super highways.

Huge amounts of salt were required to preserve meat during the winter. A fair-sized family was said to need 100 pounds of salt or more per year.⁹ That was more than 10 pounds per person per year, with adults needing more than children and infants. The current government MAXIMUM recommendation for salt amounts to 1.85 pounds per person per year. That’s less than a fifth of what my ancestors consumed.

Probably the oldest method of meat preservation is salting: salted fish, salted pork (ham, bacon), etc. And that is because it keeps bacteria from getting inside and spoiling things before we have a chance to eat them. The more salt, the longer the shelf life.

Having enough salt inside of you does the same thing! Not being salt-starved creates a sodium reservoir with which to fight off bacterial infections. Which is important to consider, especially with the rise of antibiotic resistant infections.

Our historical need for salt to assure the safety of our food supply should be a huge clue to why it is so important for each of us to be salt-sated: it keeps bugs from making lunch out of us! It also means that, particularly in the winter when salted foods would have been a very big part of their diets, our ancestors consumed a LOT of salt. Way more than we are currently advised to consume.

Demon Salt

Around 1977, my former brother-in-law was in the Air Force, where he worked as a cable-splicer. He mainly worked on missile silos scattered across the Great Plains, Intermountain West and West Coast, so he’d be off for weeks at a time doing upgrades on different silos and the related infrastructure.

It was common for him to work in desert environments with low humidity, whether in the searing heat of summer or the freezing cold of winter. Back then, the Air Force always recommended that he take salt tablets to avoid dehydration. Nobody ever considered that anyone could be sensitive to too much salt. There was no thought that there was such a thing as consuming too much (without your body letting you know about it) or that there was any reason why it should be avoided. At least not for healthy, working-age people.

Around the same time, the medical establishment, in its infinite wisdom and with no clear science to support them, started a campaign to have people greatly reduce their salt consumption. Ostensibly this was to reduce blood pressure, and thus prevent people from blowing out their kidneys or having a stroke. But it was bad advice that lacked any scientific rigor, as detailed extensively in DiNicolantonio’s book.

My own personal experience from consuming an additional 3 to 4 grams of sea salt per day for a few weeks is that my blood pressure actually dropped to 94 over 56. I’d never seen my systolic number below 100 before, and I didn’t experience any orthostatic hypotension (dizziness upon standing) as a result of what seemed to me to be a crazy low blood pressure number.

Salt Sensitivity

I’ve heard that a fairly small percentage of people are salt sensitive, where it truly is important to limit salt intake. And I think that is even more the case when you are talking about consuming processed table salt - the white stuff you find in most restaurants or in the big blue cans of Morton Salt, which is pure sodium chloride, plus aluminum as an anti-caking agent (the latter is not something anyone should intentionally add to their diet).¹⁰ According to Dr. Carolyn Dean, when discussing a recommendation to add sea salt to the diet, “…table salt is just plain sodium chloride. You could call sodium chloride a drug because of the damage it does to the body.”¹¹

That sort of refined salt doesn’t exist in nature, so your body really doesn’t quite know what to do with it - it is too pure, too refined, plus it’s got that aluminum, which is pure poison to your body, even in the tiniest of doses. In nature, salt is mostly either evaporated seawater, which has a whole lot more dissolved in it than just sodium chloride, or it’s evaporated groundwater from an inland salt spring that is rich in plenty of different Earth minerals as well. Your body is used to those sources of salt, where it is in a form combined with other important minerals.

Nearly two decades ago, when I was attempting to be a locally-competitive senior athlete, I monitored my blood pressure, heart rate, heart rate variability and other metrics. I’d experiment with diet to see how it affected those values. What I learned was that salt and alcohol have virtually no effect on them (at least not in a fit, healthy person), and I also learned that celery is great for reducing your blood pressure (supposedly because it is rich in something called phthalide),¹² but one stalk of celery also contains 35 mg of sodium (the amount found in about 90 mg of salt).

More Salt

So I clearly am not a salt-sensitive individual, and I suspect the same goes for most people. To find out for yourself, get a cheap blood pressure cuff, learn how to use it properly, and measure your blood pressure a few times per day. After doing that for a week, start experimenting with adding more salt to your diet to see what effect it has. It’s best to increase salt incrementally, because if your adrenal glands are exhausted, you may experience a temporary increase in blood pressure. If you are sensitive, the effect on your blood pressure readings should be very obvious. The opposite is also true.

According to James Nicolantonio and the studies that he cites, we need between 3 and 6 grams of salt per day!¹³ And Dr. Carolyn Dean recommends 1/4 teaspoon (1.5 grams) of sea salt with every liter of water. With most people consuming 2.5 liters of water per day, this amounts to a recommendation of 3.75 grams of supplemental sea salt every day.¹⁴ Yet the government is telling us to keep TOTAL consumption of salt from ALL sources (not just supplemental salt) to a maximum of just 2,300 mg per day (2.3 grams). Most people have a hard time NOT getting that much!

Aside from several times per year, mainly in colder weather, when I’ll eat canned soup, or in the summer when I sweat a lot and use electrolyte drinks, I wasn’t getting anywhere close to 6 grams of salt per day.

I don’t eat a lot of processed foods typical of the Standard American Diet (which require large amounts of salt to make them palatable). Though I do use a small amount of Redmond Real Salt as a seasoning (from ancient seabeds: 98% sodium chloride, with the balance being a mix of dozens of trace minerals), though typically only with my evening meal.

Together with what naturally occurs in food, I suspect that most days I was probably getting not much more than the government-recommended maximum of 2,300 mg. And it just so happened that my skin was chronically dry. That changed fairly quickly, once I started supplementing daily with an additional 3 to 4 grams of sea salt. Living in a very arid environment, it’s still not as well hydrated as I’d like (perhaps I need more?), but it is vastly improved. It’s likely there would be a lot less demand for fancy moisturizers if everyone had an adequate salt intake.

Hiatal Hernia

Another benefit of supplementing with sea salt has to do with swallowing. I have a hiatal hernia (a stricture in my esophagus) that can cause food to get stuck there after it is swallowed. This was becoming increasingly problematic until I increased my salt intake. More often than not, food now manages more easily to get past the partial roadblock, most likely because the tissues of my esophagus are now better hydrated.

Below is a quick video by Dr. John Bergman about what causes a hiatal hernia, and how you can correct it with a simple self-manipulation technique:

Electrical Charge

If we don’t get adequate salt, our blood becomes less conductive, and it would not be possible to extract as many electrons from the air that we breathe. In addition, the alkalinity of our cells would decrease,¹⁵ which would lead to a loss of cellular voltage. If cellular voltage drops low enough it will result in a disease state. The lower the voltage, the sicker you become.

I’m told if you have a glass of pure, distilled water and put positive and negative electrodes from a power source into the water, it will not conduct electricity. In order for water to conduct an electrical current, something has to be dissolved in it: minerals that turn it into an electrolyte. The charge is actually carried by mineral ions (an ion is a negatively charged atom or molecule).

Blood is likely the primary means of energy delivery to our cells. Gerald Pollock recently posited that blood does not transport oxygen from the lungs to the cells, as has been long accepted. He proposes that what actually happens is that, in the alveoli of the lungs, excess electrons (which have a negative charge) are stripped from oxygen molecules, and are then transferred to the hemoglobin in red blood cells.¹⁶ From there, those electrons are delivered directly to individual cells.

Breathing is the one function that goes on continuously, and if breathing stops we soon die. Not from lack of oxygen, but apparently from a lack of the extra electrons that oxygen molecules contain.

The density of electrons (amount of energy) that we can carry in our blood is determined by the electrolytes in our blood. Too few electrolytes means lower electron density and less vitality.

The most common electrolytes are sodium and chloride (which together form table salt, which is 40% sodium and 60% chloride). They constitute 86% of the electrolytes present in blood serum.¹⁷ Magnesium is the next most important electrolyte at 8%, followed by sulfur¹⁸ at around 4%, and calcium and potassium at around 1% each, plus trace amounts of dozens of other minerals. Again, this is roughly the same mineral content as seawater.

Our bodies keep the mineral levels in our blood in a very tight range, so any bodywide insufficiency in essential electrolytes won’t show up in blood tests until you are getting close to being on the verge of a crisis. That’s because your body will steal those minerals from other parts of your body to maintain proper levels in your blood. Blood work in the “normal” range for electrolytes is no guarantee you have adequate amounts of minerals throughout your body. You can have serious arrhythmias that put you at increased risk for stroke, and still have blood magnesium levels within the acceptable range - and your doctor will tell you that you are doing just fine!

Most sodium is found in extracellular spaces, where it maintains a balance with potassium found inside of our cells. Those extracellular spaces are drained into the lymphatic network, which carries waste away from our cells. If our overall salt stores are low, it stands to reason that would impair lymph drainage and potentially lead to the buildup of toxins throughout the body. Having adequate salt intake is a means of assuring that the garbage gets taken out on a timely basis.

We’ve already learned that a decrease in the amount of sodium in our cells reduces pH, making it less alkaline (the charge becomes more positive). So, it follows that having insufficient mineral content in our cells (which is supplied from blood) can lower cellular voltage: the voltage that we need to power cellular processes, to create new cells, and to repair damaged cells.¹⁹ Cells without sufficient power and minerals do not function optimally, and that suboptimal functioning will eventually become apparent as the symptom of any of the gazillion diseases that allopathic medicine has invented for what is basically one issue: an energy production problem.

Libido

Food and sex are the two great pleasures in life, so when sexual dysfunction shows up at your doorstep, that is not a happy time. You can live the rest of your life without sex, but I’d argue that when that happens a big chunk of your quality of life goes away.

It’s ironic, but just before I first experienced sexual dysfunction, I had a week where I was as horny as I can ever remember being as a teenager. And it’s not like the urge completely disappeared after that. It would wax and wane: only with the waning periods becoming longer over time, and the waxing periods becoming much shorter.

I’m pretty fortunate. I made it more than six and a half decades before sexual dysfunction started to slowly creep into my life. 43% of men in my age cohort admit to some amount of sexual dysfunction. I suspect most of the remaining 57% simply:

1. Have a lot lower expectations than I do,

2. Won’t admit that things aren’t the way they used to be,

3. Believe that less libido is “normal” for their age, or

4. Had lost their mojo so long ago that a lack of sex drive has become normal for them.

In short, I suspect the percentage is higher than what is reported. I mean, who wants to admit their mojo is AWOL? If anything can create cognitive dissonance, that would be it.

I know guys in their early fifties that struggle with the problem. And even one guy in his early thirties!

And I hear stories of eighty year olds who manage to keep up a healthy sex life.

I very much wanted to be in the latter category, but that prospect was looking increasingly unlikely.

I looked for professional help from my Medicare doc and my functional medicine doctor. The latter referred me to a pelvic floor physical therapist, Mary.

What I learned from Mary was that, like most chronic diseases, sexual dysfunction can have many causes. The main issues seem to be:

1. Psychological.

2. A plumbing (blood supply) issue: something is interfering with blood flow to the penis (most often the blood is too thick and things are getting gummed up).

3. A muscular issue: a lack of muscle tone makes it hard to maintain an erection (you clearly aren’t getting enough reps, or are sitting far too much),

4. A nerve issue: something is interfering with the nerve supply to the penis (sitting is again the likely culprit).

The psychological part of it can be daunting. A lot of blaming can go on, and that can quickly send things into a fatal tailspin. That wasn’t our problem. And I’m no shrink, so enough said about that.

Lots of older people have plumbing issues, which our doctors overlook, preferring to deal with them once they’ve become a crisis: whether that is in the form of a heart attack, failing eyesight, peripheral artery disease or any number of other problems. I won’t opine on why that is: I’m just making an observation. But I suspect it has to do with any symptom relief that they offer tends to be more noticeable once the problem gets bad enough. People notice improvements to big problems. Improvements to smaller problems can be too subtle for most people to really appreciate. At least for very long.

A low salt diet causes a reduced sex drive…and increased erectile dysfunction.²⁰ So, for some people, sexual dysfunction, or at least some part of the problem, is due to mineral insufficiencies. And those minerals are sodium and chloride (and likely also the other electrolytes found in seawater, from which all life arose).

I increased my salt intake by taking up to four grams of sea salt per day. I didn’t notice an instant improvement, but after a bit more than a week, my libido had improved and continued to improve for weeks afterward. Not to the point of feeling like a horny teenager, but at least enough to be more interested in being intimate with my wife. I still have the waxing and waning sex drive, but it’s a lot closer to what I’ve thought was normal since arriving at middle age decades ago. I’m hoping the trend of improved libido will continue over time, with the waxing and waning eventually becoming more like a natural circadian rhythm.

Conclusion

The sea salt that I consume is in the form of 1 gram tablets. To increase bioavailability, I’ll hold each tablet under my tongue for a while, hoping to allow saliva time to start the digestive process. If it gets a little too salty, I’ll sip a bit of water to wash the solution down, while continuing to keep the tablet under my tongue. When it’s at least half dissolved, I’ll swallow the remainder.

Government recommendations to keep salt intake below 2,300 mg per day were never based on solid science. For the majority of people, salt restriction has no benefit and many drawbacks.

Insufficient salt leads to a variety of problems:

• It diminishes the electrical potential of your body, pretty much inviting opportunistic pathogens to become established and eventually wreak havoc in the neighborhood;

• It interferes with drainage in the lymphatic system, allowing toxins to accumulate and disrupt the local environment;

• It increases all-cause mortality and decreases longevity;

• Very simply, an insufficiency of salt can contribute to many different disease states.

Sea salt is one of the least expensive supplements in existence, making it an ideal tool for improving the health of everyone: it improves patient outcomes. The only potential side effect is that it may cause a decrease in physician incomes.

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Disclaimer: I write about my personal experiences, and what works for me may not work for you. I have no healthcare training, but I’ve been reading passionately on healthcare since being diagnosed with melanoma in early 2004. I’ve probably read close to 1,000 books on health. What I try to do here is to point out some of the more worthwhile reads from the pile of literature that is most likely to provide you with answers to your health questions.

1. How does salt restriction lead to heart dis-ease & fear based reactionary thinking? by Jane333 (Substack, 19 Jan 2024).

2. Lies are Unbekoming has produced a summary of this book.

3. Sodium intake, life expectancy, and all-cause mortality, Franz H Messerli et al, European Heart Journal, 2021 Jun 1;42(21):2103-2112. Pubmed, accessed 15 Mar 2025.

4. Seawater, Wikipedia.com, accessed 26 Mar 2025.

5. Based upon my not always reliable memory of working in a hospital storeroom more than 40 years ago. Not very scientific, I know, but it was very clearly the most common IV in inventory, at least back then.

6. Which is medical doublespeak for double-blind, placebo controlled randomized trials. Anything the medical cartel wishes to discredit, despite mountains of clear anecdotal and clinical evidence, is dismissed because efficacy has not been proved by one specific method of proof. Which is massive hypocrisy, since most medical treatments were established long before proof by such trials became the norm.

7. The Early Salt Trade of the Ohio Valley, Isaac Lippincott, Journal of Political Economy, Vol. 20, No. 10 (Dec 1912).

8. Salt and Deep History in the Ohio Country by Annabel LaBrecque (undated), found at https://commonplace.online/article/salt-and-deep-history-in-the-ohio-country/. Accessed 24 Apr 2025.

9. First Families of Phillipstown, White County, Illinois (2023) by Steve Malone, page 14.

10. Health Benefits of Celery by Dr. Jabeen Begum, WebMD.com, accessed 22 Mar 2025.

11. The Magnesium Miracle (second edition, 2017), page 187.

12. In Flood Your Body With Oxygen (2008), Ed McCabe cites unnamed researchers concluding that the body needs 3-4 grams of salt per day, plus plenty of water.

13. The Salt Fix: Why the Experts Got It All Wrong - and How Eating More Might Save Your Life by James DiNicolantonio (2017), pages 154 and 155.

14. The Magnesium Miracle (second edition, 2017) by Dr. Carolyn Dean, page 186. She specifically recommends drinking half your body weight (in pounds) in ounces of water. If you weigh 180 pounds, that would be 90 ounces, which is more than 2.5 liters.

15. The Salt Fix: Why the Experts Got It All Wrong - and How Eating More Might Save Your Life by James DiNicolantonio (2017), page 132.

16. Pollack, Gerald H., Is it oxygen, or electrons, that our respiratory system delivers?, from Medical Hypotheses, Volume 192, November 2024, 111467.
Or see Lies are Unbekoming’s post Breathing Electrons.

17. Blood serum is blood plasma, but without the clotting factors.

18. This is likely why DMSO is so magical: it is being given to sulfur-deprived individuals.

19. See any of Jerry Tennant’s Healing is Voltage books:
Healing is Voltage: The Handbook, 3rd edition (2010)
Healing is Voltage: Healing Eye Diseases (2011),
Healing is Voltage: Cancer’s On/Off Switches: Polarity (2015),
Healing is Voltage: Acupuncture Muscle Batteries (2015), and
Healing is Voltage: Scalar Energy: The Essence of Life (2021).

20. The Salt Fix: Why the Experts Got It All Wrong - and How Eating More Might Save Your Life by James DiNicolantonio (2017), pages 30, 118.