[Michaelangelica]

TASTE FOR SALT CAN START AT BIRTH (Health & Medical News: 30/01/2007)
News in Science - Taste for salt can start at birth - 30/01/2007

[Michaelangelica]

Free book on Saltwater Minerals
NaturalNews.com Independent news on natural health, medicine, nutrition and more
http://downloads.truthpublishing.com/Ocean_Grown.pdf

[Michaelangelica]

An experiment in reclaiming salt affected land in Western Australia
http://www.menofthetrees.com.au/SaltNambling.pdf

[Michaelangelica]

TIM LEE: Saltbush, sometimes called bluebush, was highly valued by the early settlers for its hardiness.

Once it covered vast tracts of Australia's inland and can withstand drought better than almost any other plant but it couldn't withstand years of relentless grazing pressure and prolonged drought.

Nowadays remnants of this once prolific plant are most commonly seen in roadside reserves.

ROB MEARES: It's interesting they don't tackle the younger plants very much because of the extra salt loads that the young plant has in for its protection, isn't it?

TIM LEE: For the Meares family, whose 2,500 hectare property flanks the northern bank of the Murray river near Moama, some exceptionally wet years in the early 1970s proved catastrophic.

Land clearing, decades earlier had removed the large trees and scrub, and the ancient now flooded flood plain released its deposits of salt.

Low-lying areas were soon gasping under a rising poisonous tide.

ROB MEARES: When this was first planted you couldn't drive a Ute or a tractor across it, it was that wet. So it's been a radical change.

TIM LEE: Rob Meares embarked on a radical plan, based on drainage works he had seen in Europe.

He didn't realise it then but 15 years down the track his daring drainage scheme, known as tile drains, has quite literally underpinned the property's prosperity.

ROB MEARES: Tile drainage works - you've got your main drain going down here and you can either have that as an open drain which we have, or the drains they're putting in at the moment, the newer ones - that is a large poly pipe. And from the side you put your tile drains, in this case they were 60 metres apart, going like so, and tile drains are four inch slotted polythene pipe, poly pipe.

And when the pipe goes in to the ground it's then covered with stone and the water just percolates through the stone into the poly pipe and into the drain. After the tile drains are put in the water table just drops four or five inches a day basically - just disappears overnight.

TIM LEE: As the newly drained soil slowly sweetened, the Meares planted saltbush, about 1.3 million plants starting in the early 1980s.

It was a costly investment which is now bringing rewards beyond measure.

ROB MEARES: We lowered the water table with the tile drains and the saltbush and as you can see now, it's a pretty amazing sight.

ROBBIE MEARES, BALTARRA SALTBUSH: The saltbush has been a saviour. In these dry years we've been able to keep our breeding flocks and our numbers high.

When most people have had to eventually give in when feeding costs were too high. And we've been able to carry them through and continue production.

Besides the water level dropping, just the seed regeneration in the areas of land we haven't planted down, with the wind-blown seed, we've got paddocks that nearly look like they've been planted down now, which is fantastic.

TIM LEE: And there's a growing gospel of support, really.

ROB MEARES: Yes, well we were criticised really, for what we were doing in the beginning, and years later that was a recommendation they've come up, the CSIRO and water bodies have come up with.

Landline - 25/05/2008: Just add Saltbush . Australian Broadcasting Corp

[Monomer]

Low-Salt Diet May Not Be Best for Heart

Surprising new research suggests that a diet low in salt may be worse for your heart than eating lots of salt, but don't start eating potato chips just yet.

"No one should run out and buy a salt shaker to try to improve their cardiovascular health. But we think it's reasonable to say that different people have different needs," said study author Dr. Hillel W. Cohen, an associate professor of epidemiology and population health at Albert Einstein College of Medicine of Yeshiva University.

The study, published online in the Journal of General Internal Medicine, doesn't confirm that a low-salt diet itself is bad for the heart. But it does say that people who eat the least salt suffer from the highest rates of death from cardiac disease.

"Our findings suggest that one cannot simply assume, without evidence, that lower salt diets 'can't hurt,' " Cohen said.

Cohen and his colleagues looked at a federal health survey of about 8,700 Americans between 1988 and 1994. All were over 30, and none were on special low-salt diets.

The researchers then checked to see what happened to the volunteers by the year 2000.

Even after the researchers adjusted their statistics to account for the effect of cardiac risk factors like smoking and diabetes, the 25 percent of the population who ate the least salt were 80 percent more likely to die of cardiac disease than the 25 percent who ate the most salt.

[Jay-qu]

Originally Posted by Monomer

Low-Salt Diet May Not Be Best for Heart

I heard about this a while back and have not worried about salt in my food (not to excess at least) but I like to use sea salt (celtic sea salt is the best) and I really dislike ordinary table salt.

[Michaelangelica]

Originally Posted by Jay-qu

I heard about this a while back and have not worried about salt in my food (not to excess at least) but I like to use sea salt (celtic sea salt is the best) and I really dislike ordinary table salt.

I do use salt although having high BP.
I likre salt but don't eat huge amounts.
I complained at a Chinese restaurant the other day about too much salt in the meal. I rarely put salt on much food if I am eating out.
So such research is good news for me; but one swallow does not make a summer as 'tis said

Sea salt IS THE way to go. There are so many micro nutrient in sea-water which, after all, we evolved from

[Michaelangelica]

Harvesting water with hydroscopic salt !!

The water from air machine works by forcing air through a liquid lithium chloride salt solution.

This is a hydroscopic compound. That means that it attracts water from its surrounding air.

Humidity is in the air both in arid and humid regions and this compound can harvest water in both. But the higher the air's humidity of course, the more can be squeezed out of it.

After absorbing water into this salt solution, it is extracted and filtered through table salt, which acts as a natural disinfectant.

Adding chlorine to water to achieve the same objective is possible but less preferred because of taste and things that can go wrong in the process.

As always, the less complex, the better the technology is.The final step is to filter this water through a carbon filter, which adds taste.

The company claims that this machine can still produce water in low humidity conditions. That's good news if you're in the outback somewhere and things are dry!

As far as I know these units run on grid electricity or diesel. But there are no reasons why they could not be run on renewable energy.

Water From Air - Using Salt

[koji8123]

Wasn't it in ancient times, newly discovered lands that contained salts has wars and battles faught over, since salt is a great preservative traits for food items? Such as pork and milk.

[Michaelangelica]

Interesting discussion on salt and Agriculture in Australia Here
View topic - Farmland salinity, groundwater | Permaculture discussion forum
(that may be page 2)