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Celtic salt vs table, sea and pink salt

What genuinely differs

Three things, and they are real. Moisture: grey salt carries roughly 13 per cent residual water against about half a per cent in table salt. Sodium by weight: pure sodium chloride is 39.3 per cent sodium, and published analysis of Celtic-type grey salt puts it nearer 34.5 per cent, the difference being moisture and other salts. And additives: table salt usually contains an anti-caking agent, this does not.

What that 12 per cent actually means

A gram of grey salt carries about 12 per cent less sodium than a gram of table salt. That is a true statement about chemistry and a fairly meaningless one about your diet, because it is easily erased by a heavier pinch. It is also well short of the 25 per cent difference Australian food law requires before anyone may describe a product as "reduced sodium" — so we do not.

The "84 minerals" claim

You will see it on almost every site in this category. It traces back to a table published in a 2003 popular book about Himalayan salt — not a peer-reviewed analysis, and not about Celtic salt at all. Most of its entries are "less than" detection-limit figures, meaning the element was not actually found. Two of the 84, technetium and promethium, are artificial isotopes that do not occur naturally in mineable quantities. And the list includes mercury, arsenic, lead and uranium — so anyone claiming all 84 is claiming those too.

The minerals that are there

Published analysis of Celtic-type grey salt gives magnesium at about half a per cent and calcium at about 0.15 per cent, with potassium and iron lower again. In a five-gram teaspoon that is roughly 25 milligrams of magnesium — arriving alongside about 1,700 milligrams of sodium. An Australian study of pink salt published in Foods in 2020 made the arithmetic explicit: you would need more than 30 grams of salt a day to get a nutritionally useful mineral contribution, which is about six times the recommended sodium intake.

So why buy it?

For the texture, the way it behaves in cooking, the absence of additives and the fact that it is made by hand in ponds rather than in a plant. Those are good reasons. "It is healthier than table salt" is not one, and the Heart Foundation is blunt about it: all salt is essentially sodium, and none of the gourmet varieties is better for your heart.