Well, today my son purchased a pet hermit crab. Two actually. We took the little critter home and set up a home for him. In doing so I went online to discover what is the best way to keep them. First I learn that salt water is necessary as is fresh water. The little crabs need both salt water and fresh water so that they can regulate how much salt is in their life by going alternatively to fresh and salt water. That in itself seems a like a good blog post on the amazing ability of even small animals. But that's not the topic of this posting.
What I learned next was ... surprising. To make this salt water... you can't use salt. Apparently the iodine in our table salt is toxic to crabs. Yet... iodine is a necessary element for their existence. Somehow this doesn't quite make sense.
Here is an excerpt from the hermit crab association website:
A note for newbies: Table salt must not be used to prepare salt water for your crabs. It contains synthetic (man-made) iodine which is toxic to hermit crabs. I would also advise not to use food-grade sea salt because it has been refined and not enough is known at this time as to whether or not it is safe. Natural iodine found in sea water and seaweed are essential to the overall health of your crabs and is necessary for successful molts.
So lets get this straight.... crabs need iodine in their diet, but the iodine that is added to refined table salt is toxic, and the refined sea salt might also be toxic due to the refining process. Hmm... so in other words, when man in his "wisdom" decided to refine foods, he discovered that he had removed necessary elements, so he creates them synthetically from scratch and adds it back, and the result is toxic to the animals that live in the original form of what we tried to improve on. There is some true wisdom here if we look closely.
What people have missed throughout this revolution of "improved" foods is three points:
It is the act of refining that destroys the food's value
Refining is the process of breaking whole foods down into individual components and providing those components individually. That simple fact is the root problem in foods today. Refined foods are not whole foods, it is parts of a whole food. Just like seawater contains salt and water, but also lots of other things. Taking distilled water and adding salt does not make an ocean, and does not support life to the animals that need saltwater. It is the process of refining salt and water that removes virtually all the other components that make true natural salt water.
Synthetic is not the same as naturally occurring
When a food component is built synthetically it is a chemistry creation. Perfectly pure compounds are created chemically. These compounds are similar to naturally occurring compounds, but they are not the same. Ask any wine connoisseur if good wine could be created in a laboratory and they would laugh. Good wine is a lot more than the chemicals that make up the liquid of the wine. In the same manner, "foods" created in a laboratory are simply not the same as the same thing occurring in nature through natural processes. In the case of the hermit crab, it is in fact the man made iodine that is toxic where natural iodine is essential. Another example of this is vitamin supplements. on one hand we know that foods high in certain vitamins prevent certain diseases. On the other hand studies have shown that taking synthetically created vitamins do not alter the quality nor quantity of life. It seems apparent that the synthetic vitamins do not have the same effect as naturally occurring.
It is balance within the whole that brings value, not individual components
Just as salt water is a combination of many elements, it is that combination, the balance of everything, that makes it beneficial or not. If the concentration of an element or two is changed, the result can be toxic, or at least not healthy. That is a lesson in all foods. An interesting example of this is that every time man discovers a food that seems to aid in some disease or condition, the medical community attempts to isolate the compound responsible and concentrate that one compound in a pill. In virtually all cases this does not have the same effect, even at much higher doses, as the natural food. I think this points to the need for balance. It is not the compound that does the good as much as the combination of compounds in the whole food. This is a very important that medical lesson has yet to learn.
The same lesson applies to fertilizer. The pseudo-science of NPK is soon to be exposed for what it is. the very notion that a living thing such as a plant only removes 3 elements from the soil and therefore you only need to replace 3 elements to keep the soil sustained forever is.. to put it mildly, quite ludicrous. Soil is a myriad of elements and compounds and life, all of which must be in perfect balance in order for plants to thrive. Adding 3 elements to soil asked to produce tremendous crops year after year simply throws the balance off within the soil and eventually lays the soil barren, unable to sustain life. Again, it is the balance between everything in nature that makes life work, not individual components.
So here I stare at these little hermit crabs in our simulated environment and realize that they have taught us a great and valuable lesson: don't mess with nature! Sadly, the salt that most people consume today is not life sustaining, and must be limited in the diet because it is toxic, perhaps to man as well as sea animals. Why would we consume an artificial product that is deadly to the animals that live in the naturally occurring one?
Personally we have been using true sea salt for some time in our diet. Not refined sea salt, true sea salt, evaporated sea water. The particular brand we have settled on if the same salt we provide to our animals, Redmond Salt. As far as I know, this is the most natural food grade salt you can buy in the stores. It contains much more than salt, and no synthetic chemicals. It is not refined, only packaged. Its as close as you can get to the natural balance of the sea.
Well, there's some sort of BS or mis-information on that hermit crab website, because iodine is iodine. It's an element, with only one stable isotope even (I 127). By definition, every atom of iodine is the same as every other one. The only "synthetic" iodine in existence would be the radioactive isotopes created by decay chains in a reactor or bomb residue. (Even the unstable isotopes still have the exact same chemical reactions as stable iodine, because chemistry is dictated by charge configurations in the electron cloud. Adding or subtracting neutrons does not change that in the slightest.)
ReplyDeleteIodine is added to table salt as an iodide, probably sodium or potassium iodide. (The pure element would be worse than useless.) Now, I can imagine that maybe this throws off the Na/K balance or something, and upsets the hermit crab. But to blame the problem on "toxic" iodine is just silly, and does nothing to advance the understanding of the problem.
First let me admit that I am no chemist, however I do have a few thoughts on the subject in more depth. Please keep in mind that my goal is not to advance the understanding of the problem, but rather to awaken an awareness of the problem.
ReplyDeleteThe website quoted is hte Hermit Crab association, but the same information is found on a majority of other websites. The bottom line is that table salt with iodine added is deadly to hermit crabs who live in the ocean, so table salt with iodine is somehow different from the naturally occuring form of salt water. The question as to WHY is subject to debate.
Here is another interesting discussion related to this. This is a website discussing in detail how the ocean is made up and how to simulate the ocean for salt water fish.
http://www.reefkeeping.com/issues/2005-11/rhf/index.php#20
of particular interest is the part about iodine :
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Iodine gets an amazingly disproportionate amount of discussion with respect to marine aquaria, and much of its discussion is probably incorrect. Iodine in the ocean takes a wide variety of forms, both organic and inorganic, and the iodine cycles between these various compounds are very complex and are still an area of active research. The nature of inorganic iodine in the oceans has been generally known for decades. The two predominate forms are iodate (IO3-) and iodide (I-). Together these two iodine species usually add up to about 0.06 ppm total iodine, but the reported values vary over about a factor of two. In surface seawater, iodate usually is the dominant form, with typical values in the 0.04 to 0.06 ppm iodine. Likewise, iodide is usually present at lower concentrations, typically 0.01 to 0.02 ppm iodine.
Organic forms of iodine are any in which the iodine atom is covalently attached to a carbon atom, such as methyl iodide, CH3I. The concentrations of the organic forms (of which there are many different molecules) are only now becoming recognized by oceanographers. In some coastal areas, organic forms can comprise up to 40% of the total iodine, and many previous reports of organoiodine compounds being negligible may be incorrect.
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I tend to beleive that the root of the problem is in the chemcial purity of "synthetic iodine" and the lack of the various forms listed here. Anything made synthetically is usually chemcically pure, but almost nothing in nature is. Therein lies the main difference between synthetic and natually occuring. Perhaps the same chemical form of iodine in table salt IS present in salt water, but that is only one of many forms of iodine in seawater. So... when referring to "iodine" in general to encompass its many forms, they are not the same.
Perhaps this is a play on words to the studied chemist, but to the layman describing it thusly makes more sense. The fact still remains that the iodine in table salt is deadly to sea animals (crabs at least), but the natural iodine in seawater is a necessary part of life, so they are not the same thing in laymens terms.
What does all this have to do with farming?
Again, I am not a chemist, but perhaps thats a good thing. Isnt it the popular narrow view of chemistry that gave birth to NPK and a whole variety of other myths that are the foundation for barren farmlands today and the primary source of pollution in our nation? Perhaps chemistry as applied today is not yet advanced enough to understand the delicate balance of nature? What I am pointing out in all this is that the "science today behind food nutrition is not necessarily good. Adding one form of iodine to talbe salt because the body needs iodine is NOT the same as eating foods with the complex balance of iodine compounds and other elements. It is the very belief that we can break a complex product down, then add in a few of the pieces and consider it "as good or better than before" is a dangerous belief. It discounts that which we do not yet understand.
Food for thought.
"Kosher" salt has no iodine added, and any aquarium supply store will have a product referred to as "ocean in a can," which is used for all salt to brackish water pets. As for chemistry today, the more chemists take apart atoms and discover elements, the farther they get from true nature. Soils always have and always will have better nutrient value when properly fortified through the utilization of manures and composting. It's been done that way since the first farmer began growing his own food. If it isn't broken, it doesn't need repaired, and by all means, keep it simple.
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