Rensselaer Republican, Volume 21, Number 8, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 25 October 1888 — The Need for Salt. [ARTICLE]

The Need for Salt.

Good Housekeeping. The importance of salt as an article of diet, according to a scientific writer, is overrated. A continued use of large quantities of salt produces scurvy. The popular belief that an appetite for salt is universal among the lower animals is without foundation in fact. Dogs, cats and other carnivorous animals show no fondness for it, and the same is true of fruit-eating animals. Even herbivorous animals do not eat salt regularly with their food, but only at long intervals, which suggests the thought that perhaps they take it as a vermifuge. In certain parts of the world where salt is unknown, antelopes abound in boundless numbers, and in parts of Africa where salt is.abundant, the antelopes show no fondness for it. There many instances where flocks of sheep and herds of cattle have been reared successfully without salt. In certain parts of Central Africa salt is more scarce than gold and to say that a certain man eats salt is to say that he is very rich. Yet the people living there have existed for ages and have enjoyed the best of barbarous health, without a taste of salt from infancy to Old age. Salt is not in use in Siberia as a common constituent of food, and the same was true of the North American Indians previous to the discovery of the continent by Europeans and for many years after, and is still true of the Pampas Indians of South America.