Sea Salt and Mercury
I've heard that sea salt is more flavorful than iodized table salt, but was wondering about its mercury content.
Due to the mercury level in oceans, nutritionists are recomending to limit sea food meats such as tuna and cod for women who are pregnant. However, do I need to be concerned about mercury when consuming sea salt ?
I'm not much familiar with the techniques used to separate out the salt.
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Food grade salt (Sodium Chloride) in most parts of the world is evaporated from sea water. It generally does not have any detectable mercury, though it does have many other trace elements, some of which are normal dietary minerals
Mined salt (rock salt) is generally used for industrial purposes and de-icing, it contains "dirt", but generally not mercury. In most cases, rock salt is salt from old sea water when it was trapped and evaporated millions of years ago, so has the similar trace elements as fresh evaporated sea water
Some 'speciality' salts, like Himalaya salt, are just rock salt deposits that are more contaminated than normal. Some of these contaminants are normal dietary minerals, most are not e.g. Iron oxide
One interesting exception is the mineral Iodine. It is usually added to food grade salt (fresh evaporated or old rock), as it does not often appear naturally, and many people in the world have diets that are deficient in it
Mercury salts exist in sea water for only a very short time before it is bio-accumulated by algae and then eventually by large order fish. Most heavy metal salts do not stay in sea water for any length of time, but are quickly absorbed by other organisms
Mercury builds up in tuna to significant levels thanks to them eating thousands of critters that in turn eat thousands of critters with tiny little bits of mercury, and it all adding up. It's not about mercury levels in the ocean, per se. It's also a heavy metal so it's not likely to be simply floating around in the water that is evaporated to retrieve the salt.
Despite that I suppose it is possible for mercury to be trapped in little bit of critters that do float around in the water, though. On researching this I have not been able to find anything in the way of proper studies, though I did find lots of alarmist blogs and one company trying to sell heavy metal test kits. I did also find this analysis which is at least slightly scientific; it finds negligible levels of mercury and cadmium in sea salt.
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