By The Sacred Chef.

Published in WellBeing Magazine

Summer is, if you boil it down to one of its essential components, all about salt. The salt on your skin from perspiration that tastes especially good when making love; the salt of the sea after a day at the beach; and of course the salt in your food. Salt accentuates tanginess, and it is refreshing tang that we often seek in our summer fare. It’s that salty, spicy lift that when combined with a splash of coldest fluid revives and relaxes us at once.

Standing outside on your patio, balcony or in your backyard, summer is also a time of celebration. When we gather together as families and friends and seek the sensual heat of the sun to toast our good health and good fortune. It falls here, in the southern hemisphere, at the same time as the calendar signifies the greatest Christian festival of them all, Christmas the nominal birthday of one Jesus Christ. This date was of course borrowed by the Christian church and replaced the earlier pagan celebration of Saturnalia. So this December time of year has been a focus of good cheer for eons. Unlike our northern hemisphere cousins this time of celebration is not climatically conducive to lashings of roast turkey and pudding, rather it cries out for salad, seafood and skin all to be salted and spiced.

Now salt has of recent modern times been given a bit of a bad name, health wise that is, and with good reason with salt being added as a flavour enhancer to just about every packaged food that you can think of, but really the bottom line is if you are eating a lot of packaged foods you are asking for trouble, and don’t really care about your health in my opinion. Preparing food is an opportunity to give creatively to those around you and to give to yourself as well, don’t you want to explore, discover and offer something wonderful in these circumstances? So with that little diatribe out of the way, lets move on to more about salt.

Salt or more exactly sodium chloride is the only rock directly consumed by humankind. It is an essential element in our diets and is an important part of digestion, as it increases the hydrochloric acid content of our digestive fluids. Sodium ion in our blood is one of four ions that we must have to survive, the others being magnesium, calcium and potassium. Sodium is a mineral that our body cannot produce itself and so must be ingested from external food sources. With salt, it is a balancing act, too much in relation to fluid levels in the body and we eventually die , too little and the same applies. So we excrete salt through our urine, faeces and sweat when the concentration becomes too great. Sodium also assists with the re-absorption of water in the kidneys, which would otherwise be excreted. Thus salt is an integral part of our biological make-up, in fact, our bodies need for salt links us to this earth, and is a clear example of the holistic connection.

Continued in Sacred Chef Secrets and Recipes by Sudha Hamilton

©Sacred Chef

Sacred Chef Secrets & Recipes by Sudha Hamilton

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