It's common sense nowadays that your environment affects your overall health. As a broad categorisation, the air you breathe, the light that hits your eyes and skin, Electro-Magnetic Frequencies (EMF) in your environment, and sound, all affect your body's biology (1; 2; 3; 4; 5; 6). Water and food are two other "environmental" inputs as well.
Of course, in this blog post, I'll talk mainly about the air you breathe. Let me explain that principle a bit further:
You probably know that air pollution is unhealthy for you. For instance, breathing in car exhaust or that of heavy industry has many potential health consequences (7; 8).
What many people don't know is that the air they breathe can also positively support their health. To be more precise, different minerals are found in natural water sources such as oceans, which are emitted into the air (9; 10).
Let me explain why that fact matters:
You might have visited the ocean for a day and felt both really tired and relaxed. The reason for that relaxation is probably the effect of the sun's ultraviolet light rays lowering your stress levels and making you feel good (11). Then there's the "earthing" effect of spending time connected to the earth (12).
But, what you probably didn't know is that the ocean breeze also delivers a low dose of minerals through your airways to your lungs. That delivery can continue steadily, over a period of hours, as long as you're on the beach!
That dose of minerals, such as salt (sodium and chloride), magnesium, and potentially iodine, consequently affects your health because they enter your lungs and bloodstream through your airways. The minerals also partially explain why people destress so much around water - although the effect is probably psychological as well (13).
Nowadays, different types of salt therapy are available for a wide array of different uses.
For lung conditions, for instance, or just to feel better, salt (sodium-chloride; or "NaCl") can be "aerosolised" into the air. "Aerosolised", here, means that the salt is broken down into tiny particles that are subsumed into the air.
Your lungs then take up that salt, and the salt affects airway function all the way from the nose to your bloodstream.
That statement got you curious?
Then let's take a deep dive into this topic.
In this blog post, I consider 3 different health benefits from spending time in a salt room. In the end, I talk about the Clearlight HALOONE Salt Therapy®unit for salt therapy and why other options such as a Himalaya salt lamp are either inferior or useless in comparison.
Let's begin with 3 different benefits of salt therapy though: