Helen is a qualified nutritional therapist and has been involved in health and nutrition for over 25 years. She’s an expert in health and raw foods, is a Reiki Master and has raised and educated five children.
If you are already savvy with your salt and use pink Himalayan on your food instead of standard table salt (which frankly, should only be in your house to de-ice garden paths!), give yourself a pat on the back as you throw that lucky pinch over your shoulder.
The benefits of consuming Himalayan salt are many and varied, as are the ways in which you can bring more of it into your life. You can in fact eat, breathe and sleep salt!
Eating Salt
It has long been recognized that salt is essential to life. We need it, we can’t live without it, yet for decades now, it has been demonized as a health risk.
This is why making sure you are ingesting natural salt full of vital trace minerals, is of paramount importance.
Our bodies can easily assimilate natural salt, but not the chemically cleaned table salt. Dr. Batmangheligj, author of “Your Body’s Many Cries For Water”, stresses the need to ingest unrefined salt alongside drinking plenty of water to bring about the optimum internal environment for healthy cell function.
Drinking lots of water is not enough to properly hydrate, and create healthy cells. There needs to be an electrolyte balance and adding Himalayan salt to your water consumption facilitates this.
Breathing Salt
In the carefree adventuring days of the Famous Five, it was common for doctors to recommend a week by the sea to fully recuperate after a severe illness. Mystery seeking aside, there was good reason for this.
The healing benefit of sea air comes from the negative ions contained in the salt. If you can get to the sea and breath in that air regularly, you will be clearing your airways and ridding yourself of toxins.
But for curing illness, more salt is needed.
Salt caves or rooms, are now available for you to sit in, saving you having to trek to the Himalayas and hack your own space in a mine. They are extremely beneficial in easing various conditions such as asthma, bronchitis, coughs or any respiratory illness. The caves also have amazing healing effects for skin conditions like psoriasis and eczema.
Salt rooms are made from salt blocks, and usually back – lighted to give off an ambient relaxing glow. The air inside these cave/rooms is 10 times cleaner than our modern congested town and city environments.
However, you don’t need to be ill to make use of these wonderful salt rooms because they have detoxifying effects on healthy people too and can act as a stress-buster. They also improve skin tone – reducing wrinkles – and they encourage the acceleration of fat burning, so are a great add on to a weight loss diet. Some salt caves offer a free first session – what’s not to like about that?
Salt cave therapy is available on the NHS Continuing Healthcare funding system in the UK.
Sleep with Salt
But what if you can’t get to a salt cave and want the benefits of an improved work, home and sleep environment? Himalayan salt lamps are a good way of bringing peace and calm, as they give off the all important negative ions. We are surrounded – even sometimes blasted – by an onslaught of EMF’s which drain our energy, induce stress, increase cortisol production and deaden the air we breath.
A salt lamp does not have the power of a salt cave to heal lung-related conditions but it will ease any blocked up sinuses and other congestions as well as inducing a good night’s sleep, if used in the bedroom. Sleeping in a totally dark room is best, so the lamps can be left on all day and then switched off when you are ready to sleep.
Used at the side of your computer as you work, they will absorb negative electromagnetic energy and give you a clear head. They are paradoxically soothing and calming yet gently energising.
