Fascinating Facts about Salt (Sodium Chloride, NaCl)
- 1) Up to the 20th century, salt bars were the basic currency in Abyssinia (which is now called Ethiopia)
2) Salar de Uyuni (World's largerst salt falt, 4,000 square miles) in Bolivia is said to become like a mirror when a thin layer of water lies on top of the salt flat.
3) If you drink way too much water, maybe like 2 gallons in a short amount of time, can flush all the salt out of your system and cause fatal Hyponatremia because salt is very essential to the body.
4) Eating too much salt can be dangerous and kill you as well as drinking too much water, also said that the consumption of too much salt was a way of ritual suicide in China.
5) Back in the Middle Ages, because salt was so expensive, it used to be called "white gold".
6) In the early 1800s, salt was 4 times the price as it is today.
7) In the U.S, only 6% of salt is used in food, another 17% is used for getting the ice off roads and highways during the winter.
Salt Production Statistics of the World
Top 25 Countries for Salt Production - #1 United States at 22.14%, #2 China at 17.67%, #3 India at 7.14%, #4 Canada at 6.73%, #5 Australia at 5.34%, #6 Mexico at 3.9%, #7 France at 3.33%, #8 Brazil at 3.1%, #9 Chile at 2.86%, #10 United Kingdom at 2.76%, #11 Netherlands at 2.38%, #12 Italy at 1.71%, #13 Spain at 1.52%, #14 Russia at 1.33%, #15 Iran at 1.25%, #16 Romania at 1.17%, #17 Egypt at 1.14%, #18 Ukraine at 1.1%, #19 Turkey at 1.07%, #20 Bulgaria at 0.86%, #21 Poland at 0.76%, #22 Pakistan at 0.63%, #23 Vietnam at 0.62%, #24 Japan at 0.6%, #25 Argentina at 0.57%. These statistics are from the year of 2006 in Salt Production from British Geological Survey (In Sources). In 2010, China became the #1 country for salt production as the United States fell back #2.